Wired.com: How did you guys come up with such bizarre stuff?
Mike Mignola: It's my job to take del Toro's idea, which nobody else can make heads or tails of unless he's drawn it in his sketchbook, and decipher it. Even though I don't speak Spanish, we speak the language of monsters and we have very similar tastes in artists so I can usually understand what he's going for.
Wired.com: Each character goes through a sort of evolution as different artists put their spin on it?
Mignola: Stuff would start with either me or del Toro and would literally be kicked upstairs to Wayne and Francisco, who would do more blown-out, much more complicated, renderings.
Wired.com: For example?
Mignola: I had one sketch of this little hunched guy with cave over his shoulder that has a mummy in it that I called the Mummy Vendor. Just typical me, screwing around. Del Toro went, "Ooh I like that," so then Francisco turned it into something much more elaborate.
Wired.com: Does the look for Hellboy II reflect more of del Toro's visual style than the first movie?
Mignola: We came up with the core idea for Hellboy II together but del Toro did the screenplay. He's taken the characters from the first movie, which was basically him adapting my material, and now he's thrown them completely over into the del Toro universe.
Wired.com: So we're getting more of the Pan's Labyrinth vibe in Hellboy II. What did you think of that picture?
Mignola: Brilliant. Del Toro created all these bizarre insect creatures and wanted to do more, although he didn't want to have the traditional fairies that we've seen before. He had written a short story for a Hellboy book about these tooth fairies and he was really chomping at the bit to get them into Hellboy II.
Wired.com: You initially weren't too crazy about the Troll Market sequence filled with all these misshapen mutant peddlers.
Mignola: The Troll Market was a nightmare, the biggest struggle on this film. I got on his nerves because I'd hum the music from the Star Wars cantina scene every time he talked about it. But at the end of the day, del Toro got what he wanted and when I saw it on the set in Budapest, the Troll Market was amazing.
Wired.com: So you two had different approaches to the Troll scene?
Mignola: My original idea was to do the Troll Market as a tent city of homeless people under the Brooklyn Bridge where you start to notice, "Hey this guy has scales," or "That one's got a cloven hoof." Del Toro thinks so huge, he wanted to go underground and show the whole fairy world, which is a lot more expensive. I'd be going, "We don't need a big parade of a roomful of monsters." I'm a less-is-more guy and del Toro is a more-is-not-enough guy.
Wired.com: No superhero movie is complete without a villain. How did you picture the rebel fairy prince?
Mignola: It was hard to understand the motivation of Rasputin in the first film. In Hellboy II, we wanted someone more understandable and sympathetic. I compare it to the cavalry wiping out American Indians. You've got the fatalistic old Indian chief who says, "We've had our time so quietly follow me down into the shadows." That's the old elf king in this film. And then we've got the prince as the Geronimo kind of guy saying: "Or, we could kill them all!"
Wired.com: The way these creatures evolve on the page illustrates this collaborative dynamic, but ultimately it sounds like Hellboy II is del Toro's baby?
Mignola: I'd push back a little to show when I had my doubts, but then I'd go: "Del Toro knows what he's doing. I'll get out of his way."
