Mike Mignola talks about Baltimore, Hellboy 3, Lobster Johnson

MTV have spoken to Mike Mignola about many wonderful things

While the success of the “Hellboy” franchise hasn’t made series creator, Mike Mignola, a household name…yet…that doesn’t mean the highly influential writer/artist has had any downtime in terms of upcoming Hollywood projects. Quite the contrary, Mignola has his hands — and slate — full between his current creator-owned properties in development, as well as his ongoing comic book work.

And for those of us out there who look forward to pretty much anything with Mignola’s name on it, the folks at SciFi.com managed to catch up with him for updates on his numerous projects, kicking off with a status report on “Baltimore,” which as has been reported will be produced by David Goyer.

“It is banging around,” said Mignola in the SciFi.com interview. “[Writer] Chris [Golden] and I have co-written a screenplay, and it’s sort of in development, and we’re kind of going in to do another rewrite on the screenplay.”

Mignola also commented on the screenwriting process, something in which he’d never been a part of.

“It’s an interesting process,” he explained. “This is much different than adapting ‘Hellboy’ to the film, because del Toro adapted ‘Hellboy’ to the film. It’s a very different process adapting your own work to the film. So I’m having conversations on ‘Baltimore’ that, fortunately, I never had on ‘Hellboy,’ because del Toro had those conversations. Del Toro fought with the studio. And, unfortunately, with ‘Baltimore,’ I’m in those meetings. [It] makes you want to stay and draw comics.”

However, what most fans want to know is when can we expect “Hellboy III.”

“Guillermo has been talking about Hellboy III, I think, ever since the first film and certainly on the second film, anything that he came up with that didn’t fit into the second film, all that stuff’s obviously going to go into the third film, including Lobster Johnson’s supposed to be in the third film,” hinted Mignola. “If he puts everything into the third film that he says he’s going to put in the third film, the third film’s going to be about 67 hours long. The truth is, by the end of Hellboy II, the character’s veered so far away from the character in the comic that I have no idea what Hellboy III would be. It’s completely, 100 percent now in del Toro territory. It doesn’t relate to what I do at all, so I’d be very curious to see what Hellboy III would be.”

So while we wait, how about any new “Hellboy” animated features?

“We wrote a third one, but that thing kind of came to a screeching halt,” said Mignola. “The third animated film was actually a retelling of Hellboy’s origin and connecting him to my World War II era pulp character, Lobster Johnson. So it’s one that the fans were super-excited about. It, of course, was the best of the scripts that we wrote, and, of course, it’s in a drawer someplace.”

I hope we get to see Lobster Johnson on the big screen. The action figure of him adorns my work desk and he is just cool. Hellboy 2 was excellent as well and Baltimore intrigues me. I wrote a bit about that a while ago. Click on the tag for that below to read more on that one.
HOME / FORUM.