Feature: Hellboy: The Bones of Giants #3 (inks) Interviews 

Mignolaversity: Adapting Giants – Part 2: The Covers of Giants

By | December 8th, 2021
Posted in Interviews | % Comments

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Welcome to Mignolaversity, Multiversity Comics’ dedicated column for all things Mike Mignola. We’re celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola’s Hellboy: The Bones of Giants novel and its new adaptation to comics with artist Matt Smith. As each new issue of the comic comes out, we’ll explore different aspects of the series. This month we’re looking at Matt Smith’s covers for “Hellboy: The Bones of Giants,” including an exclusive look at the cover for the upcoming collection in 2022.

And in case you missed our past interviews, here they are:

I imagine designing covers for a miniseries must be tough. No one cover exists in isolation, they are always part of a set, and so they should feel connected in some way. Speaking more broadly, in the case of “Hellboy: The Bones of Giants,” it’s also part of a series, so they have to look like “Hellboy” covers while remaining distinct from other arcs coming out close to the same time. So how do you approach this particular problem of finding the core cover idea that unites a miniseries, while also making it distinct?

Matt Smith: The funny thing is how late in the process the idea for the look of these covers came up. I had already drummed up a handful of sketches for the first few covers that were more along the lines of what I call the “Drew Struzan”, that classic movie poster style with heroes in varying scales up front and some large menace often looming in the background, story elements peppered around.

Most of what I was trying to do wasn’t really gelling. There were parts where I liked the drawing, but as a whole each cover sketch and also all of them together as a series weren’t really doing it. It didn’t help that I had just done a variant cover for “Hellboy: The Secret of Chesbro House” #2 which felt very similar to what I was trying here.

Smith’s variant cover for “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: The Secret of Chesbro House” #2

We were moving ahead with the first cover sketch, making the rounds with Katii [O’Brien] and Jenny [Blenk] in editorial, Mike and Chris. It got to a point where Mike was helping out with great suggestions to make it more interesting when I decided to take a look through past “Hellboy” and “B.P.R.D.” covers before reworking the sketch and resubmitting it. I saw Mike’s cover to “B.P.R.D.: Hollow Earth” #2, which I’d always liked a good deal, and thought that a similar framing device could be a cool way to approach the covers.

Mignola’s cover for “B.P.R.D.: Hollow Earth” #2

I sketched up a few roughs of how the first few covers might work, the main idea being that there’d be Hellboy and maybe a couple of story elements in the frame and the background would be something like a pattern of objects—bones, elves, branches, etc. Hopefully those backgrounds reflect the story in each issue without giving too much away, looking neat, but also able to sit behind the text. I was a bit concerned about switching gears on the group after we had made some headway with the original sketches, but it seemed like this approach could be distinctive to the series as well as having the bonus of looking cool as chapter break images in the collected edition. I’d like to say the chapter break idea was there from the get-go, but it only occurred to me after I submitted the new round of sketches to the group.

It’s also kind of a nice nod to Christopher Golden that the covers draw their inspiration from a cover used on the first Hellboy Universe comic that he wrote.

And clearly everyone liked the idea too. I can see already in these thumbnails, since the underlying framework is the same, you’re looking to Hellboy’s pose to give him a unique silhouette on each cover.

Continued below

MS: That was the hope. It was a little tricky for the first issue as normally I’d want to present Hellboy in grim resolve on a cover, ready for whatever’s coming. Hellboy is not in control of the hammer as the story opens, though. It’s been thrust upon him and he’s got to figure out what that all means. It was another decision on how the covers could work together as opposed to thinking about it as a stand-alone image.

That resolve emerges in the cover for #3, as Hellboy is adapting to his circumstances though.

So let’s talk about colors. This is another element that really gives each cover its own identity. Did you end up going back and forth much on these? And how much of what you did on the covers was informed by Chris O’Halloran’s interior colors?

Alternate colors for “Hellboy: The Bones of Giants” #1

MS: I knew I wanted each one to have its own dominant color and that #2 would be a blue and #3 would be mostly green, but #1 and #4 were up in the air. I ended up trying a few different versions for #1 before settling on the final “natural” bone color.

Final colors for “Hellboy: The Bones of Giants” #1
Final colors for “Hellboy: The Bones of Giants” #2
Final colors for “Hellboy: The Bones of Giants” #3

Chris and I had come from working on “Folklords” together and developed a pretty cool working relationship I think (though you’d have to get his side of the story—ha!) and while we kept in contact the entire time, we never felt the need to be strict in matching up the cover and interior colors. There are some minor differences in details but I’d rather have it that way—in the sense we both chose the colors we felt were best for the job at hand.

Mignola’s cover for
“Hellboy: The Wild Hunt” #4

I have to admire your dedication to detail, especially on issue #2. It reminds me a bit of the guys Mignola drew on “Hellboy: The Wild Hunt” #4. He said of the experience, “These guys were too much fun … If I’d had to draw several pages of them swarming all over hellboy, they might have gotten to be a lot less fun.” The interiors were, of course, drawn by the amazing Duncan Fegredo, who said, “Mike had already drawn the cover, so I felt I should up the ante and had them absolutely cover Hellboy and Alice. Time consuming, but fun.”

I can’t help but feel like you’re following in the spirit of Fegredo here, leaning into the challenge and finding the fun in it. I mean, this isn’t just a horde of identical guys—each one has their own distinct personality.

MS: ‘The Wild Hunt’ is easily one of my favorite Hellboy arcs. The two Hellboy pages I own are from it—heavily inspiring work. With the idea of each ‘Bones’ cover having a pattern of shapes behind Hellboy, it required having a good handful of elves and those are a lot of fun to draw—all teeth and knives. I just see the word STAB running through their minds on a loop. Maybe a bit like a swarm of bees when the nest needs defending, but this is more offensive than defensive and it’s not just their programming—they take joy in it.

I’m looking at the fourth cover here. This one wasn’t part of your initial batch of sketches when you first tapped into the idea that united the covers. Did you come to this one later? #1 and #4 very much seem a to bookend the series nicely, with one echoing the other, though #4 is certainly more “Golden.”

“Hellboy: The Bones of Giants” #4 cover concepts

MS: Exactly—when I first changed gears on approaching these covers, I had very rough ideas for the first three to present. Bones, elves, and branches. For the fourth cover I had vague ideas about the Utgard, but couldn’t seem to fix on a design that was interesting for that. The next thought was an Asgardian audience seeing Hellboy now wield the hammer with conviction for this final battle. I tried to suggest the bookend by using the same lightning strike idea from the first cover but in a different way. Hellboy is now calling it down. Haha, yes, there is a bit of a tribute to the writer here.

Continued below

Final colors for “Hellboy: The Bones of Giants” #4

There is one more cover we need to discuss, one our readers haven’t seen yet, the cover for the “Hellboy: The Bones of Giants” hardcover collection coming out next year. But before we get to that, let’s dive into some earlier versions first.

Early “Hellboy: The Bones of Giants” concept for one of the single issues

MS: When it came time to sketch out the collected edition cover, I circled back to some of the ideas I had in the initial sketches and pulled a few elements directly from those. It’s always nice when you can take from unused work that wasn’t necessarily bad, but just wasn’t working for what you were trying to do at the time.

I see these are using the same trade dress treatment as the Hellboy OGNs (‘House of the Living Dead,’ ‘The Midnight Circus,’ and ‘Into the Silent Sea’). Was that a request from the collection designer, Patrick Satterfield, or was this approach to the cover something you pushed for?

MS: I initially thought I wanted the title treatment to sit low in the design so we could have all this stuff looming above Hellboy clear from text. To show this to the group, I lifted the type out of the Midnight Circus cover and pasted over the sketch. It’s changed a bit since these sketches, simplified and stronger for it I think.

“Hellboy: The Bones of Giants” collection cover

And somehow it still has the spirit of the “chapter break” covers, with Hellboy exactly in the center, his surroundings limited almost exclusively to a singular color scheme—in this case, ice blues.

MS: I can see that. That’s probably a case of rolling straight into it from the other covers. The main thing I wanted to come across on this one is that Hellboy is in this world—or worlds. Geographically he’s up in modern Scandinavia, but he’s also in the world of Norse mythology. It’s attached to his hand and in his head, some of it memories of a distant past, but also physically re-entering the world in a number of forms.

We’ll have the next installment of Adapting Giants soon. Look for it the new year after “Hellboy: The Bones of Giants” #3 comes out on January 5.

Written by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola
Illustrated by Matt Smith
Colored by Chris O’Halloran
Lettered by Clem Robins

Hellboy, still inhabited by the ghost of the Norse god Thor, has his first confrontation with the newly resurrected Frost King Thrym! But not having recovered his full strength yet, Thrym slips away and leaves Hellboy to follow a grisly path toward their next encounter.

Based on the novel by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden, this comics adaptation brings readers into Hellboy’s fight against the Frost Giants with stunning art by Matt Smith and colors by Chris O’Halloran.


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Mark Tweedale

Mark writes Haunted Trails, The Harrow County Observer, The Damned Speakeasy, and a bunch of stuff for Mignolaversity. An animator and an eternal Tintin fan, he spends his free time reading comics, listening to film scores, watching far too many video essays, and consuming the finest dark chocolates. You can find him on BlueSky.

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