In case you missed the big news yesterday, Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden’s novel Hellboy: The Bones of Giants is being adapted to a four-issue comics miniseries for its twentieth anniversary. Joining the original writers on this adaptation is artist Matt Smith, colorist Chris O’Halloran, and letterer by Clem Robins. Thanks to the folks at Dark Horse Comics, we were able to chat with Christopher Golden and Matt Smith about the upcoming adaptation and even share a first look at the its interiors.
Christopher Golden: The first conversation about it must have been twenty-one years ago now, so my memory is foggy. We’d done The Lost Army, which came from an idea I’d had. Either I asked if we could do another one or Mike said, “Hey, if we ever do another of these. . .” But either way, he came up with the concept. He might have been thinking of it for a miniseries or something, but I know it started for him with the scene that opens the novel: lightning flashing down from the sky on snow-covered mountains, and an old man going to investigate and finding that the lightning is striking Thor’s hammer, Mjollnir, over and over. . . And the hammer is still in Thor’s grip, only Thor is a corpse. Scholars gather around, the government tries to remove Mjollnir, but it’s when the B.P.R.D. sends Hellboy and Abe and Hellboy goes to pick it up that everything changes. Lightning hits Hellboy’s right hand and Mjollnir, and suddenly Mjollnir is fused to Hellboy’s hand and Thor’s spirit is sharing space in Hellboy’s brain.
I know a lot of the plot of the novel came from Mike, and I know there are a lot of elements that were from me, but who said what and when is lost to the mists of time. We worked closely together on that one. Mostly I remember just really enjoying writing that story, and talking to Mike about Norse mythology and the parts of it that I was determined to find a place for in the book. Ratatosk the squirrel is one of my favorite concepts from Norse myth. The idea that there’s this talking squirrel who runs up and down the branches of Yggdrasil, the World Tree, delivering messages amongst the denizens of the Nine Worlds―I love him. I want to write a whole comics story just about him. The finale was a joy for similar reasons, as were the flashbacks to Ragnarok, and Hellboy fighting Svartalves in the Stockholm underground. Just so much fun.
CG: The Bones of Giants has always been considered in continuity, so the time that’s passed didn’t really affect the story itself. It was a pleasure to revisit, of course. There were so many bits that I didn’t remember at all until going back into it. The crazy thing is that of course, I hadn’t looked at it since 2001, and Matt Smith had read the novel numerous times over the years, so he was much more familiar with the material than I was after all that time. At some point Mike had a conversation with Matt about what kinds of “Hellboy” stories he wanted to draw, and Matt said something about how if he could do any “Hellboy” story, it would be an adaptation of The Bones of Giants. We literally did this comic so that Matt could draw these scenes he’d been wanting to draw forever. You can see that passion in every page.
Continued belowMatt, I imagine this must’ve been daunting, since Mike Mignola has drawn so many key elements of the story already in his illustrations for the novel. What has it been like for you to take moments from a book that have lived in your head for years and try to put that to the page?
CG: Matt was literally the only artist who would have been right for this, aside from Mike himself. This story’s in his fan DNA just as it was in mine. I can only imagine what it’s like for an artist to step into a story Mike has already visually brought to life as an illustrated novel, but Matt is incredibly talented and passionate, and stories of Norse gods, vikings, Hellboy. . . that’s his jam.
What’s your process on a project like this? How do you break down a two-hundred-page novel to an eighty-page comic?
MS: Chris had the frost giant’s share of the work on this, obviously. Reading the script, I was impressed with how he got all the necessary elements of what needed to be there story-wise, and yet leave enough room for those HELL YES moments I loved from the book. I can’t imagine it was easy to pull off this balancing act so nicely. My only job was to not screw up, to the best of my abilities, the work Chris had done. My process is always the same: read a script, get excited, get daunted, get excited again, and then get to work.
CG: The length was the real challenge, yes. I could have filled a 200-page graphic novel. There were scenes I had to cut entirely, and other things I had to streamline. With only eighty pages to work with, my focus was on finding a balance between telling the story and still giving Matt the big set pieces and exciting Norse mythology-infused scenes that made him want to do this story in the first place. I think we found the balance, and the end result is just gorgeous and filled with the walking corpses of frost giants and battles with nasty dark elves and heroic dwarves on the streets of Stockholm and in snow-covered mountains. Not to mention visits from a valkyrie and my buddy Ratatosk. Plus, we get some of my favorite little bits with Abe Sapien. Though honestly, a lot of what we had to lose was the stuff from Abe’s perspective, and the interesting relationship he forms with Pernilla Aickman.
“Hellboy: The Bones of Giants” kind of opens the door now for other stories to make the leap from prose to comics. We’ve spoken before about the possibility of Anastasia Bransfield, a character from Hellboy: The Lost Army and Hellboy: The Dragon Pool, making the leap to comics. She’s been mentioned in passing in the comics, but never made a proper appearance. Now more than ever it feels like we could finally meet her on the comics page.
Continued belowCG: Mike and I have talked many times over the years about what I think of as “the Anastasia years.” Starting in 1979, Hellboy fell in love with her and bummed around the world for a while sort of as her plus-one, since Anastasia is an archaeologist. He quit the B.P.R.D. for a while, kind of trying to figure out who he was as an adult and what it meant to be in love and be in a relationship. In the two novels in which she appeared, Anastasia is his ex, so we never really got to see her as his girlfriend. There’ll come a time, I’m sure, when we’ll tell those stories.
Of course, you’re not the only Hellboy prose writer now working on the comics. “Young Hellboy: The Hidden Land” writer Thomas E. Sneigoski has previously worked on the novels Hellboy: The God Machine and Lobster Johnson: The Satan Factory.
Tom doing “Young Hellboy” came directly from those conversations, and Craig Rousseau was the artist we wanted on that from the jump. He was at the convention, too—Tom, Mike, and I have all known Craig for years, and he was the perfect guy for that. Mike had already decided we were doing ‘The Bones of Giants’ with Matt Smith, who was also there that weekend, and is fantastically talented. Interestingly, ‘The Secret of Chesbro House’ came up much later, but ironically ended up being published first.
And there are still a couple of major developments from that weekend that are coming down the road, and I can’t wait. Mike is always such an inspiration. His imagination is always *on,* like a radio station. It doesn’t stop broadcasting just because you’re on a different channel for a while. There are very few things I enjoy more than brainstorming crazy story ideas, but sometimes even more fun is just listening to Mike talk about the six wild stories he invented in his mind the previous day. He always talks about retiring, but he can’t shut his imagination off, and we all benefit from that. Though it also saddens me, because for every pure Mignola story that makes it out into the world, there are a thousand that will never be told because he’s thought of something that excites him more before he can even write the last one down. Tom and I are always honored to be creating stories with Mike, and right now I think I can speak for both of us when I say we’re having more fun than ever!
“Hellboy: The Bones of Giants” #1 comes out November 3, 2021. Don’t miss it.