2023 was a big year for Mike Mignola’s Hellboy Universe. So many comics that came out last year had seismic moments that reverberate out and can be felt in other stories. “Panya: The Mummy’s Curse,” by writer Chris Roberson and artist Christopher Mitten with colorist Michelle Madsen and letterer Clem Robins, was one of these stories, and after I finished reading it, I immediately had to talk to Roberson about it. Thankfully, he obliged. We didn’t release it straight away though, as this is an extremely spoiler filled conversation only intended for those that have already read the comic. The collection for “Panya: The Mummy’s Curse” came out last Wednesday, so if you haven’t picked it up already, please do so before continuing.
So telling more stories with Panya strikes me as a particular kind of challenge. There’s so much that you don’t want to undermine, and you don’t want to just flatly reveal answers to mysteries. So what was the initial impulse that drove you to write “Panya: The Mummy’s Curse”?
Chris Roberson: Ever since it was revealed in “B.P.R.D.: Killing Ground” that Panya was a little girl during the reign of Akhenaten, I’d wondered how that experience had shaped her worldview. I’ve always been fascinated by Ancient Egypt in general and the “heretic pharaoh” Akhenaten in particular, and kept coming back to the idea that Panya would have grown up during this brief moment in Egyptian history when all of the traditional deities had been rejected in exchange for Akhenaten’s personal brand of monotheism. She was raised in a cult, essentially, but then as an adult would go on to be introduced not only to the traditional religious beliefs of Egyptian culture but also come into contact with the various supernatural and occult forces at work in the world of Hellboy.
I get the feeling this is something that’s been cooking for a while. As far back as 2018’s “Witchfinder: The Gates of Heaven,” it felt like you were planting the seeds for a Panya-focused story.
Art by D’Israeli; colors by Michelle Madesen; letters by Clem Robins
Chris: That scene might well have been the seed that led to ‘The Mummy’s Curse,’ but if so I wasn’t planting it consciously. We had already talked about using Panya in “Witchfinder” to help point Sir Edward Grey in the direction of some of the larger cosmic mysteries (as well as getting the Lipu dagger in his hand for him to use in “Abe Sapien: The Drowning”), but when I remembered that earlier mention of Akhenaten it seemed the perfect opportunity to connect the myth of the “Aten” to the power of Vril. And I think that’s what got me wondering whether that played into the reasons for Panya’s longevity, and what she might have witnessed as a little girl. But plenty of characters in the world of Hellboy had been exposed to Vril without being turned into effectively immortal mummies, so there had to have been something else at play in her backstory. And in addition to that I really liked the idea of examining the cosmology of Hellboy’s world through the lens of ancient Egyptian mythology, and how it would be seen by someone coming from that cultural context.
Written by John Arcudi and Mike Mignola; art by Guy Davis; colors by Dave Stewart; letters by Clem Robins
The layout has been altered from the original for demonstrative purposes
The Akhenaten detail is something I’ve wanted to see explored for a very long time. It’s such a strange period of Egyptian history that when it was first mentioned, it felt like a neon sign flashing, “There’s a story here!” (There’s a great video on the subject by Religion For Breakfast.) And it’s such a perfect fit for the Hellboy Universe. Honestly, it feels like a fictional history created specifically for this universe rather than actual history. And I feel like you perfectly recognized those harmonious elements and maximized them in “Panya: The Mummy’s Curse.” How did all the pieces develop? Like the Aten being Vril, the Cult of Aten being a kind of mirror to the Hyperborean Cult of the Black Goddess, the fall of Akhenaten’s new capital mirroring the fall of Gorinium?
Chris: I was obsessed with Ancient Egypt as a kid, and when I was seven years old I somehow convinced my parents to leave my younger siblings with our grandparents and take me on a 500-mile road trip to see the King Tut exhibit in New Orleans. For several years in elementary school one of the walls of my bedroom was entirely devoted to books and maps and issues of National Geographic focusing on Ancient Egypt.
But along the way I became just as obsessed with the story of the capital city that he built at the site now known as Tell el-Amarna, but which he called Akhetaten, or City of the Horizon of the Aten; a city built in the middle of nowhere at the behest of one man, and then likely completely abandoned not long after he died and the court moved back to Thebes. And then a few years ago there was some new archaeological evidence that suggested that the whole place had primarily been constructed by the slave labor of children, worked to death, and then buried nearby in mass graves.
So keying off that one mention of Akhenaten in Panya’s backstory, I knew that there was a lot of potential for exploring what all of that would have meant in the world of Hellboy. It couldn’t just be a guy with temporal lobe seizures, because where was the fun in that? But the imagery of the Aten from the Amarna period, a sun sending down beams of light with hands at the end, seemed to map nicely to Vril imagery that we’ve seen before. Then there was an entire generation of children in mass graves just outside of the city, which was suggestive.
Yes, another overlap with the events in Gorinium where children were sacrificed for the Cult of the Black Goddess.
And ultimately I knew that I wanted to get Panya stuck in a struggle between Vril on the one side and the black flame or Shakti on the other, which she would view through the lens of the great cat of the sun god Ra on one side and the chaos serpent Apophis from the outer darkness on the other. And everything else followed from there.
Your intimacy with the subject matter really shows in ‘The Mummy’s Curse,’ but it doesn’t overwhelm. It could have been very easy to just throw all this at the reader, however what I really love is how often you stepped back and let the art communicate. The cat and serpent dynamic is an excellent example of that. It creates a symbolic language to talk about these grand ideas of Vril and Shakti, and the result is something that the reader feels conceptually. And by making a key theme of the book the search for the truth behind the stories, you’re inviting the reader to look at the truth behind these symbols.
Continued belowChris: Well, a big part of that is working with Christopher Mitten and not wanting to obscure any more of his art with narrative captions than is absolutely necessary. And knowing that we’re seeing this through Panya’s perspective and so we’re putting these larger cosmic mysteries into terms that she would use at the various stages of her life. But there’s also the general rule of thumb with all of the big cosmic stuff in Hellboy’s world that we rarely if ever spell out in definitive terms what is really going on, and the only explanations that are provided are the opinions of individual characters who have their own biases and may or may not actually know what they’re talking about.
I particularly liked your choice of the cat as a symbol because it makes the antagonism Panya’s father and Akhenaten have toward Olabisi in “B.P.R.D.” take on an extra dimension. You added to those moments without subtracting anything. And rather than removing the questions from those scenes, you deepened them and added extra questions. I feel like time and time again you made very smart choices about how your new material would augment existing material.
Chris: That was actually a fortunate bit of serendipity that came out of the research I did while working on the outline. I’d already landed on the idea of associating the black flame with Apophis because of the serpent imagery that has been associated with it over the years. But in the course of my research I came across a myth about the daughter of Ra taking the form of a great cat to assist in a battle with Apophis (his daughter who was also his eye, because Egyptian mythology…), and it fit too perfectly not to use that as a point of connection with Olabisi.
But it wasn’t until later that it occurred to me that in that same flashback in which Panya relates the dream about her childhood, right after she talks about her father turning into Akhenaten’s ghost she breaks off before saying what her pet cat Olabisi then turned into, and in a way we’re finally providing a possible solution to what she was about to say.
Once you established the feline and serpent relationship, you quickly started playing with it, making it less black and white. The chaos beasts in issue #3 read as feline at first glance, but they move like snakes, their tails are snakes, they are dark colors. . . It’s a great visual to teach the reader how to understand the story—look beyond the first impression. It reinforces how we can understand other parts of the story too, like the religion of Aten. The Aten is Vril, which we associate with good, so on the surface a religion centering the Aten should theoretically be good—but it is very much the opposite. And this aspect of the story reflects Panya’s quest to find the truths hidden behind stories. How early did you tap into this aspect of the story, of hidden truths, and of things appearing to be one thing and turning out to be something else? How did these ideas develop as you wrote the story?
Chris: That largely stemmed from realizing that Panya would have been raised deeply entrenched in one worldview (the monotheistic Aten worship of Akhenaten) only to be told as a young adult that everything that she had ever been taught was wrong and there was an entirely different worldview that she would have to adopt. We introduced the notion that Panya would have been a little skeptical to begin with as a child, and that skepticism only deepens as she gets older. But she continues to have all of these first hand encounters with mysterious and supernatural forces, and struggles to find a way to contextualize them. She tries to talk about her experiences with others, but doesn’t have much luck getting anyone to listen (aside from cats and inanimate statues), so she’s pretty much left to her own devices to figure out what’s really been going on.
It’s only when she encounters the Babylonian monster hunters Namrud and Semi in issue #3 that she’s able to compare notes with anyone else who has had similar experiences, and learns that there are even more strange mysteries at work in her world than even she knew.
Continued belowI have to say, I really liked the #3 cliffhanger and issue #4 opening, which reinforces the idea of things not being what they seem at first glance. Especially since issue #4 is the story’s final statement on this theme; why not give readers a cliffhanger that draws attention to their own misreading of a moment?
The layout has been altered from the original for demonstrative purposes
Chris: Some of that is just a misdirect, to leave both Panya and the reader thinking that she was under threat at the end of one issue only to reveal that she has encountered a harmless undead messenger of sorts. But it also a nod towards the misdirect of sorts in the subtitle of the series, ‘The Mummy’s Curse,’ to suggest that Panya has finally encountered a “mummy” who presumably comes with some kind of curse attached. But the titular mummy is Panya herself, of course, and the curse is the fact that Panya is gifted this rare vision of the way the world really is, about the deep past and the distant future, but it’s a vision that ultimately she doesn’t share with anyone else.
And that truly is a tragedy. At least once in each issue, you remind readers in some way that Panya likes telling stories and likes hearing stories.
But this feeds in well with “B.P.R.D.,” because in that series she clearly knows things she isn’t telling anyone else. She could’ve given Liz a much better idea of what her power is, but she never does. And we can understand that now as Panya trying to spare Liz from suffering with that “curse.”
I feel like “Panya: The Mummy’s Curse” and “Rise of the Black Flame” both share this quality where the two stories give us a better understanding of Liz while not being about Liz at all. Instead of being told the origin of her powers and the nature of them, readers experience it through these stories and are left to make the connections themselves. How much was Liz on your mind as you put this miniseries together?
Art by Mike Mignola; colors by Dave Stewart
Chris: The interactions Panya has had with other characters were very much in the forefront of my mind as we were putting this story together, and none more so than Liz. And definitely, many of the stories that I’ve been involved in have one way or another been an exploration of the struggle between Vril and the black flame that is at the heart of Liz’s own story.
My thinking was that as a young girl Panya very well could have been on the path to have a similar connection to Vril that Liz had, but her experiences in the dream temple with the black flame derailed that. On the other hand, had she had the experience in the dream temple first she might have turned out something like the young girls from “Rise of the Black Flame” were intended to be. But because she had the misfortune to be touched by both, and have that tension carry on inside of her, she turned out the way that she did.
She’s definitely been adrift from others for much of her life. She was probably her most settled when she was working at the temple in issue #2, and yet she felt so isolated there. Her best friends were cats, and she seemed to get along better with visitors to the temple than she did with the other people that worked there. Very pointedly, while she listens to the stories of others, no one listens to hers.
While there is definitely a tension between the Vril and black flame within her, there’s clearly other tensions too. I feel like she only momentarily found her people when she came across Namrud and Semi.
Chris: I feel like there’s a version of Panya’s story where instead of saying her farewells after one night swapping stories around the campfire, she chose to travel with Namrud and Semi on an extended basis. And that version of Panya feels like she would have had a much better chance at a kind of contentment in the long run, just by having people around that she could confide in and who would listen to and understand her.
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As for Namrud and Semi themselves, from the original proposal through the outline phase and all the way to the point where I was just beginning to do the page breakdowns for issue #3 it was simply a “Babylonian monster hunter” that Panya would have encountered in her travels. I know that I’d decided that they would have an implied connection to the Right Hand Path, but they didn’t crystallize into individuals until it came time to start writing the script, when I realized it would be better if there were two of them. And as so often happens when introducing new characters into the world of Hellboy, I immediately wanted to know more about the two of them. One of my favorite things about playing around in the different historical eras of that world is the notion that there have always been people who have known about the various supernatural menaces and protected the unsuspecting public from dangers, and exploring how that would have looked in different times and places.
We’ve seen glimpses of so many in different eras. Do you have more you’d like to explore there or do you think characters like these work best at a distance, hinting at a larger world? I know back when I was writing Hell Notes, I quickly became aware that the Hellboy Universe has so many unexplored avenues and that’s part of what makes the world feel so big.
Chris: I think that you’re absolutely right about the unexplored corners of that world making it feel so big, and I feel strongly that we should never fill in the entire map or answer every question. But it’s a big world with a LONG history, and it’s always fun when exploring some unexplored spot on the map to discover that there’s a whole new territory that we hadn’t previously considered.
My approach tends to be, when we introduce new supporting characters in some previously unexplored bit of history, that each of them should be interesting enough in their own right that they could be the main characters of their own stories, even if we never see them again. And then further down the line if we do end up coming up with a story in that particular time and place, then there’s the potential that we could bring them back as the protagonist. A recent example are Simon Bruttenholm and Honora Grant, who were originally just conceived as supporting characters in the “Witchfinder” era (and reverse engineered precursors to the British Paranormal Society characters that had been part of Hellboy’s origin from the beginning). But when I hit upon the idea of doing an Edwardian folk horror story, I realized that a slightly older Simon and Honora would make great leads for it, and we could have the chance to get to know the two of them a little better.
One of my favorite moments of world building involved Panya talking to a statue of Ereshkigal. The statue is unnamed in the story, but the context of the conversation links the Sumerian goddess with the Black Goddess. “Ereshigal” (without the K) is a reference that goes all the way back to “Hellboy: Seed of Destruction.” It’s pretty clearly the Black Goddess’s name, yet it’s never been stated directly. This moment with Panya is probably the most explicit connection we’ve seen. There’s a level of trust you have to have with your readers. And as a fan, I have to say this sort of thing is so much fun, because it’s absolutely the kind of thing that gets discussed and dissected in fan communities.
Chris: It doesn’t hurt that we can rely on eagle-eyed readers like you to spot that kind of thing!
Nearly all of these scripts are appended with pages and pages of embedded image reference, and for that specific panel the description and image reference made that connection a little more explicit. I’ll quote the relevant bit here (the statue in this panel isn’t meant to be the same one referenced here, but following the same basic lines):
Continued below“I think we’ve used this as a point of reference for the Black Goddess in the past, but this is the “Burney Relief,” also known as the Queen of Night relief, which may be a depiction of Ereshkigal. Its exact point of origin isn’t known, but is believed to be from Southern Mesopotamia, so I feel like we’re on solid ground sticking it in a ruined Sumerian temple out in the desert.”
The big remaining question at the end of ‘The Mummy’s Curse’ though, is are there going to be any more Panya stories? Is the door open for more stories in this period of Panya’s life?
Or perhaps during her time among the Heliopic Brotherhood of Ra?
Chris: In the scripts we indicated that at least ten years pass between the end of issue #2 and the beginning of issue #3, and then she spends quite a long time over the course of issue #3 seeking out the Hyperborean city. And we’ve seen that her search took her pretty far afield, too, so she wasn’t just limited to an Egyptian setting. So absolutely, I think there is room in there for further adventures of the monster-fighting, mystery-seeking Panya in her time pre-mummification. There aren’t any plans in place at the moment, but just as with Sarah Jewel and Marie-Thérèse LaFleur or Simon Bruttenholm and Honora Grant and all of those other characters, it’s just a question of the right story idea coming along.
By the same token, Panya spent years as a “guest” of the Heliopic Brotherhood of Ra, and seems to have had schemes and intrigues of her own all the while. And I definitely feel like there’s more there to explore, too, should inspiration strike at some point.
