When the first 'Hellboy' series came out, in the same batch of fan mail I got a letter from somebody from the Church of Satan, and I got a letter from a minister, and they both liked it. And I thought, 'What am I doing that I'm making both these guys happy?'
Mike Mignola's 'Hellboy' comics have a drizzly, musty gothic ambience - the same fetid air that H. P. Lovecraft circulated in his fiction.
'100 Bullets' is probably my favorite thing, ever. It's pretty close with early 'Hellboy' stuff.
What I'm dealing with in 'Hellboy' is a lot different, bigger in a certain way. It's very Shakespearean. It's demons and witches and stuff like that. But it has a similar core to a dude who's trapped in horrible circumstances who's just trying to be a good guy.
When I started the 'Hellboy' series way back when, I wasn't really thinking consciously about the humor, but Hellboy does have my personality, and that's an important part of my personality.
My Hellboy is modeled on my father in some ways: a guy who's been in the Korean War, and he's traveled, and he's done a lot of stuff, and he's kind of got a been there, done that attitude. He's also been in the world. Del Toro's change was to have Hellboy bottled up in a room and mooning over the girl he can't have.
'Hellboy 1' was such a huge, huge overperformer on Blu-ray and ancillary markets. It was one of the first movies on Blu-ray; it has multiple editions. All the ancillary markets overperformed everywhere. And the second one did good on all ancillary markets, which now do not exist.
Hellboy is the first movie where both ends of the spectrum are combined.
I like monsters, and when the monster is a superhero, it's a byproduct. Like Hellboy, the Hulk, Man-Thing, Swamp Thing, Sandman, Constantine, Demon, Dr. Strange, Spectre, Deadman. Those are the superheroes I followed as a kid religiously.
