His name is synonymous with Hellboy, but for five issues this spring Mike Mignola will be stepping away from Hellboy to visit with one of the greatest monsters in history: Frankenstein. In FRANKENSTEIN UNDERGROUND, a five issue mini-series from Dark Horse, the monster finds himself at an ancient temple in Mexico and endears to make a friend before things go (inevitably) wrong. Mignola chatted with us about his version of the monster and its relationship to the original novel, as well as his general creative process when writing for artist Ben Stenbeck. Plus, we couldn’t resist asking about HELLBOY IN HELL, just a little. And beer.
Famous Monsters. FRANKENSTEIN UNDERGROUND is a new spinoff from the Hellboy graphic novel HOUSE OF THE LIVIND DEAD. What do you think it is about Mary Shelley’s creation that has made people develop so many iterations of him? People are always writing and talking about him. What do you find fascinating about Frankenstein’s monster?
Mike Mignola. She did come up with what has turned out to be one of the great stand-alone icons of this genre. There’s nothing else like it. No one else has ever come up with that thing. There’s Dracula and there’s Frankenstein. They’re so much their own thing. Frankenstein is that tragic antihero. I guess you can call him an antihero, but he is the star of his book. And he has a wonderful underdog story. It’s a tragic misunderstood thing, which I love. For me, even though I’ve read the novel, the Frankenstein monster will always be the Karloff monster, which I think distills the tragedy of that character so beautifully.
FM. I was going to ask you what your favorite representation was, but I take it it’s Karloff’s, which is very common.
MM. There’s nothing even close, except—have you watched the series PENNY DREADFUL?
FM. Yes! [See FM #279!]
MM. When they trotted out their Frankenstein monster—not the first one, but the second one, the real Marry Shelley Frankenstein… if I had seen PENNY DREADFUL before I had started this Frankenstein book, I don’t know that I would have even done Frankenstein. I thought that was such a beautiful version of the character. I don’t know I would have wanted to come anywhere near this guy after seeing that one particular speech he makes. But I had to find my version of the character. There’s such a gigantic gap between the Karloff version and the Mary Shelley version. Even though I was going to be faithful to the Mary Shelley origins, there are a lot of years between the origin of the character and 1956, when my story takes place. So I could kind of beat him down over the years so he was a little bit closer to the Karloff monster, but his roots are in the Shelley creature. Actually, the issue I’m scripting today has a couple of specific flashbacks to the novel, so the monster—at least in flashback—will be able to make a couple of speeches.
FM. That’s very cool, because sometimes I think… like, how many people who interpret Frankenstein have actually read the novel more than once? I mean, everyone sort of has to read it when they’re in school, but it’s so nice when someone who’s interpreting the character actually knows to reference the novel and not just greater pop culture.
MM. And the novel’s a grind; I can’t fault people for not reading it. The movie’s a lot more fun. But I did feel like if I was going to call this character the Frankenstein monster, I needed to be faithful to how she got it started. And I love the stuff in the novel. Again, reading it is a bit of a slog, but once you distill it down to these major moments, it’s too good not to reference. But I also didn’t want to do a book that was so specific to the novel that you can’t embrace the fact that this character has grown beyond that. People can bring so much of their own interpretation to Frankenstein, as long as you have bolts somewhere on him and this basic tragic, hounded character. You bring a lot of prior knowledge to this creature. A lot of my work is already done. I don’t need to spend an issue explaining who this guy is or where he comes from.
FM. It’s interesting to me that you chose Frankenstein to get his own series. You have so many series that start as one thing… you get B.P.R.D., then you have the ABE SAPIEN spinoff, while B.P.R.D. itself was a spinoff of HELLBOY. Do you decide ahead of time which characters are going to get their own series, or is it something that happens organically?
MM. When I did the HOUSE OF THE LIVING DEAD book where I introduced this Frankenstein character—once I realized, because the original idea was that it was just a Frankenstein-like thing—once I actually called him “the Frankenstein monster” on the back cover of the book, you sort of go oh, that’s cool, we have the Frankenstein monster now. And at some point the title FRANKENSTEIN UNDERGROUND popped into my head. I just thought oh, it’s Frankenstein, I’ll chuck him underground into a sort of Edgar Rice Burroughs PELLUCIDAR world. And that’s as much thought as went into it originally: that’s what that book would be, that would be fun, I can see what stuff I could do with it. Then you put it on the shelf. It wasn’t like I said, oh, I need to do this book, who’s going to draw it? It was just oh, that’s cool, that could be a book, and you put it on a shelf next to a bunch of other things. You invent all these characters and situations in other books, and then you go hey, this could go someplace, we reference these guys, but we don’t really see much about those guys—I bet they could have their own book. To some extent it’s almost like an exercise. “Well, what would that book be?” Then when an artist like Ben Stenbeck wants to leave the book he’s on and you desperately want to keep him, you go well, what else would you like to do? You start pulling things off your shelf, going, we could do this, or we could do this, and the idea Ben sparked to was FRANKENSTEIN UNDERGROUND. So you go okay, gonna dust this off and figure out what it really is. I don’t remember what the question was now, but does that answer it? [laughs]
FM. Yeah, sometime’s it’s just work-related logic. Not always “Ohmygod, inspiration!”
MM. Well, I know guys who just make up books and then look around and go, who can I get to draw this? I guess I’ve done that. The HELLBOY AND THE B.P.R.D. series that just got off the ground, I’ve wanted to do that book for a long time, but we didn’t have an artist. And it wasn’t that we needed it by a particular date. If we find the right artist, that’s when we’ll do that book. There’s no ticking clock on any of these stories.
FM. And you, as a writer, when you do a book like this, how much visual input do you have? In terms of both new and old characters. I mean, beyond Frankenstein in this first issue, you have the Marquis Adoet de Fabre. He looks like a chess piece. How much input do you have into something like that? Do you step back?
MM. Well, the Fabre character was actually in B.P.R.D., so Guy Davis designed that character. I wrote part of that book, so to some extent there was a description. I remember coming up with the hunchbacked sidekick—the wooden crown nailed to his head was probably my idea. But beyond that, Guy Davis created those things, so when Ben got to do it, I was like Ben, here’s what these characters look like. For this version of the Frankenstein monster, I had done a drawing of the character, probably just for fun, when Richard [Corben] and I did HOUSE OF THE LIVING DEAD. I sent Richard that drawing, and he did his interpretation it. When Ben came on board, I said well, Richard put his own spin on it, but for the guy to have his own book and so we can relate better to the character, lean him back a little more human. Richard’s was pretty grotesque. There’s one other monster in the book that Ben and I bounced ideas back and forth on. There are certain things that have been referenced in one panel of HELLBOY here or there. Ben’s great with research, so if I say it’s Paris in 1889, Ben’s going to do the homework and find out what 1889 Paris looks like, which is nice. I don’t spend a lot of time designing characters.
FM. How about thumbnailing? Do you do that for dialogue reasons?
MM. When I plot a book, I have to thumbnail it for myself. I have to see how a page is going to work out, to see if it’s possible to get all this stuff on a particular page. What I did for Ben—I don’t usually do this—it became easier to send Ben my own thumbnails. In some cases in my thumbnails I’ll show that this figure’s here and this figure’s there, almost stick figure type stuff. But most of the pages I sent him were just empty panel shapes. I don’t think I’ve ever done that with anybody else, but for the rhythm of this book, it was easier to send a little outline for the page than to actually say, “This panel is the large panel, but next to it…” I think there’s a lot of stuff, especially in the later issues of the series, where the rhythm of the story feels a bit closer to the way that I do a page. I’ve actually got to check with Ben and ask if he wants to do that again, because I don’t know if I’m stepping on his toes. Ben and I have been working together for a long time now, so we can have those conversations. I’ve worked with him long enough that I think I know how to write for him, so this was a bit of an experiment, giving him my actual page layouts.
