This May, Mike Mignola will pull back the curtain on some of the most mysterious elements of the Hellboy Universe in “Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea.” Joining him as artist on the four-issue miniseries is Jesse Lonergan and, luckily, we got to have a chat with him about this upcoming title.
Jesse Lonergan: I think Mike Mignola and the other artists who have worked on stuff in the Hellboy Universe have created such a strong and iconic visual aesthetic that it was a bit intimidating coming into the project. Add to that it’s a time-traveling series with parts set in Paris and London in 1885 as well as ancient Hyperborea, and it was definitely a challenge. I just started small and expanded outward from there—take the temples and domes and figure out what a gladiatorial arena would look like, and build on what’s already been done one piece at a time.
In previous stories, Hyperborea has almost always been through the lens of someone talking about ancient history. There’s some distance there; it’s impersonal. The thing that immediately struck me about your work in “Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea” is how deeply personal it is.
JL: Mike came to me with this story, and it had these characters that had immediate resonance for me. I felt like I understood Truesdale and had an image of her immediately, and to some extent she was defined by her era, but the gladiator, Anum Yassa, was a little bit more difficult because she had to be this larger-than-life almost mythic warrior, but also had to have this softer human side that would come out in the quieter scenes that Mike wrote for her. It’s a delicate balance.
JL: I enjoy playing with how a comic book page can work, so having parallel lives set in drastically different environments is a challenge, but it’s the kind of challenge I like. It gives a real opportunity to use the medium to merge two worlds, so that instead of it feeling like two stories it feels like one, the events of one era affecting the other, forward and backward in time through the juxtaposition and composition of the panels and pages.
“Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea” also deals with the Heliopic Brotherhood of Ra. This secret society is something we’ve seen quite a lot of over the years, but here we’re seeing a very different side of it. The HBR is almost exclusively male (with an exception for Tefnut Trionus, who they believe to be the reincarnation of the HBR’s founder, Eugene Remy), and yet this story is very much grounded in the perspective of its female characters. What’s it been like exploring the familiar from a new angle?
JL: One of the things that I like about this story is that it is at once this supernatural epic, but it also has these very small, almost mundane, scenes where there are just two people in a room. And it’s through those quiet sequences where we get at the HBR, which makes it easier to have a new perspective on the group.
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In the announcement on io9, Mike Mignola mentioned how he loves your pacing, and he wanted to write this in a way that didn’t tie your hands in this regard. So when the two of you were developing Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea, what was your process in shaping a page?
JL: Mike showed a lot of trust and gave me a lot of freedom. Basically, he gave me scripts that were very definite in terms of the story and action, but very loose in terms of how the pages were to be broken down. Some pages listed individual panels, but others didn’t. I think the script for page 5 of the first issue simply said, “The arena fight continues.” So he really left me a lot of room to figure out the pages for myself, and that gave me a lot of confidence to just sit down and have fun with a page. He would provide me with a rough idea of what the dialogue would be, and if there were any important lines he would include those, but then he wrote finished dialogue and text based on the inked pages.
Before we leave you, I have to know, what are your favorite stories in the Hellboy Universe and did any of those inform your work in “Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea?”
JL: In working on “Miss Truesdale,” the stuff I referenced the most was “Hellboy: The Island” and “Frankenstein Underground,” which was drawn by Ben Stenbeck. A lot of the visual base for “Miss Truesdale” was in those stories. In terms of my personal favorites, I’d probably go with “Hellboy: The Wolves of Saint August” and “Hellboy in Hell.” I think the influence of those is probably less immediate, but I really looked at how panels, pages, and sequences in both of those were composed. To get comfortable drawing the characters in “Miss Truesdale” I actually did my own take on the big fight scene in ‘The Wolves of Saint August,’ with a lizard dragon beast replacing the wolf, and the gladiator replacing Hellboy.
“Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea” #1 will be in comic book stores May 17, 2023. I also recommend checking out his Patreon where he serializes his creator-owned comics and talks about his process.
with colors by Dave Stewart
