As a catch up for all new visitors to Beyond the Bunker, we’ll be representing the original Practitioners series 1-55 (Simon Bisley – Chris Bachalo and featuring the most influential comic creatives in history). Thoroughly incomplete but featuring legends like Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Frank Miller and Alan Moore already more will be hitting the site next year. For now though, sit back every Tuesday for a run-down of the men and women who created the comic industry we know today. (Or check the full list in the menus above). This week: Hellboy creator Mike Mignola.
Alien : Salvation (Darkhorse Comics 2001)
Mignola was born in 1960 in Berkley California and not as some might assume in a Caravan on the side of a grey stone track in an Eastern European forest valley in the rain, presided over by witch fiends and troll-likes. Working his way up from his intro into comic illustration in 1980 he brought to life Red Sonja on one page (despite his assertion to this day that he’s never been any good at drawing women), Daredevil, Powerman and IronFist, Incredible Hulk, Alpha Flight and the Rocket Raccoon Limited series (which I’ll literally snap your arm off to get ahold of). Mignola seemingly only ever touching the fringe, edgy characters of the Marvel universe, where, for any long term reader, the great ideas are formed away from the bright, commercial centre. This undeniably is exactly where he belongs.
Mignola is not a mainstream artist but dragged the mainstream towards him with some indelible, brash and clear artwork, broken by black line and mat colours. Mignola’s work is best viewed from a distance… and really close up. Any image he creates works as well as a poster as a piece of comic design or storytelling tool.
He is an artists artist. His abstract linework imbuing life with effortless light detailing. A carved out eye brought to life with a commaed black circle. His Alien glides in black shadow, his Hellboy looking twice as powerful than any carved superhero with his bent coathanger shoulders, his trench coat hanging off him. His composition allowing mind-blowing Kablammo whack outs with rock hard mitts and tender fear and indefinable nightmares in forms and shapes that are perfectly laid about a panel but form a broader latticework across the page. His viewpoint in art is life, curved and shaped and seen through the bottom of a broken bottle and a late night nightmare.
His ‘household name’ moment came with Hellboy, son of the almighty damned one, broken horned, bright red with FF’s Thing scowl, stone hand and Judge Dredd jaw he imbued him with savagery and a bitterly Human soul in the face of fairytales and horrors. Constantly in conflict with the bumps in the night he should be leading, Hellboy represents any person who refuses to follow a path laid out for him by others. Fascinated by international lore, fairytale, myths and legends; Mignola pushes Hellboy from dark path to broken bell tower where he meets a menagerie of dark gods, witches, gargoyles and pig boys who he inevitably fails to reason with and ends up battering with his great stone hand.
A better philosophy on life for the average guy there may never have been.
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