Welcome to Mignolaversity, Mutliversity Comics’ column for all things Mike Mignola. Today we’re chatting to artist Alison Sampson about her Hellboy Universe debut, “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: 1957—Fearful Symmetry.” Like the other ‘1957’ stories, this one stands alone, but it also contains links to other stories for long-term fans (including one going all the way back to 1994). So, let’s dive into it!
Alison, before we get to “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: 1957—Fearful Symmetry,” I wanted to ask you about your work on Trina Robbins’ “Won’t Back Down” anthology. This was a project that Christopher Golden and Bridgit Connell also participated in with their Outerverse short story. The project was done in support of Planned Parenthood, so there’s already a clear concept driving the anthology. How did you approach your own addition to the anthology?
Alison Sampson: Hi Mark. Thank you for asking. This is a story that I am writing for Sayra Begum and Sofie Dodgeson, called ‘Summerly Street.’ It isn’t based on events someone told me about thirty years ago, about how they did something, when choice wasn’t possible in the UK. It doesn’t involve any real people and it might not need to be recorded for posterity because that person apparently never told anyone else. Our approach is deliberately understated, because sometimes small actions have big effects; it is often the way in nursing. Sayra’s quite stylized art carries the extraordinary in the ordinary very well (which is somewhat polar to Hellboy, which is more the ordinary in the extraordinary). Our Hellboy story is certainly extraordinary, but there is some fun in grounding it—a little bit of reality exposes the events as yet more strange.
‘Fearful Symmetry’ is a story with a bit of history to it. The tale was first teased all the way back in 1994’s “Hellboy: The Wolves of Saint August,” when Hellboy compared the massacres of Griart to massacres he encountered in India in 1957. Did you look to ‘The Wolves of Saint August’ to find points of comparison or did you try to make ‘Fearful Symmetry’ stand apart as its own story?
Alison: The latter. It is a new story, at least as far as I understand it. Tonally the script felt different (I did look up the story you mentioned) and so our story has its sense of mystery coming from a completely different place. There are similarities in the story, but an entirely different (er) antagonist, and that drives everything: the action, the events, the outcomes.
‘Fearful Symmetry’ also takes a character from Chris Roberson’s prose short story “The Other Side of Summer” in Hellboy: An Assortment of Horrors. How did you approach adapting Ginny Payne from prose to the comics page?
Alison: To be honest, and I hate to admit this, I did not know Chris had written Ginny into a short story. I was so in love with the character I found in the script (remembering Chris told me there what he wanted me to know) that she was all I wanted to draw. And to be honest I’d like to draw more of her. I think she’s a fantastic foil for Hellboy and a great standalone character in her own right.
There have only been a few times that readers have seen Hellboy in Asia, and though India has been mentioned a occasionally, I believe ‘Fearful Symmetry’ marks the first time we’ve actually had a story set in the country. Going into the story, how do you prepare for a task like this? Were there any key aspects of India that you felt you had to pay particular attention to in your work?
Alison: A lot of Hellboy stories have a strong sense of place, even if that place is imagined, so I wanted to establish somewhere for this story. It is based in rural Madhya Pradesh, and that gave quite a lot to work with in terms of cultural references and jungly context. This isn’t the first time I’ve drawn a story set in India, and like in my “Hit-Girl in India” story, I try and concentrate on the people and places being more than the assumptions we might make about them.
Continued belowGiven that the title ‘Fearful Symmetry’ is clearly an allusion to William Blake’s poem “The Tyger,” and that a tiger is prominently featured on the cover, I think it’s fair to say that tigers are involved in this story. That said, these are not ordinary tigers. Can you tell us a little about your design process for them?
Alison: I don’t really want to give too much away here, and even me telling you why feels like spoilers for the story. Suffice to say, how they are designed is significant, the cover is not a giveaway, and the design process comes strongly out of the identity of the tiger(s), including how they act and how they look. My previous tiger-drawing experience (in “Sleeping Beauties”) was only tangentially useful, and there is a callback to ‘The Wolves of Saint August.’ Apologies on being mysterious, but some stories are best read as presented and this is one of them. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
“Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: 1957—Fearful Symmetry” comes out June 28, 2023. Don’t miss it.
with colors by Dave Stewart
Written by Mike Mignola and Chris Roberson
Illustrated by Alison Sampson
Colored by Lee Loughridge
Lettered by Clem RobinsWhen Hellboy is called to India to investigate a rash of mysterious animal attacks, he is reunited with a familiar face. Together they search for the strange beast terrorizing a small village, but the mystery—and the myth behind it—runs deeper than they thought.
