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Gabriel Bá on Mike Mignola and the Influence of “Hellboy” on His Career

By | August 19th, 2013
Posted in Columns | 2 Comments

It’s not every day you get to share something like this, but for Hellboy’s 20th Anniversary – since Mike Mignola’s legendary character was first revealed – we have one more exciting thing to share. Gabriel Bá and his brother Fabio Moon are two of the best storytellers in comics, and they count Mignola amongst their greatest influences. As part of our feature today, Bá shares the story of how Mignola came to affect them in surprising, exciting ways, and it’s a perfect way to cap our coverage of the greatness that is the Big Red Guy. Thanks to Gabriel for sharing this, and enjoy.

I hope I had the time to tell with accuracy the influence I have from Mike Mignola’s work. I’ll try to be quick here.

Like any other kid reading comics in the eighties, his art really caught my eye on “Cosmic Odyssey,” I guess. His characters were chunky and ape-like, more angular. There was this elegance and balance that I didn’t have skills to notice, but it sunk into my unconscious. After that, everything with his name on it would end up on my hands. There were not that many, which actually help separating his work from everything else I was reading.

“Fafhrd and Grey Mouser” and his adaptation of “Bran Stoker’s Dracula” were the first works in English that I got, having recently discovered a store in São Paulo that would sell imported comics. By this time, in the early nineties, I already knew I wanted to make comics.

And then I got Hellboy.

A look at the Mignola influenced The Sunflower and the Moon
In 1997, my brother and I went to SDCC for the first time and was amazed to see all my favorite artists were there, with booths, signing comics, selling pages. Of course, one I could not miss the chance to meet was Mike Mignola. I asked for a sketch (got a Hellboy) and asked questions that would change my art forever: “what do you use to ink your pages?” “I use these,” he said, showing me these pens. “I do everything with these (aside from painting the black areas).”

I had been struggling to ink with a brush and get the final result I wanted with no success and that answer really set me free. The look I was looking for, the art I loved to admire on the pages of Hellboy, were inked with a pen.

We came back very excited from our first trip to SDCC (as does everybody, really) and we told our first long story on our fanzine. It was called “The Sunflower and the Moon”. We serialized it in chapters of 12 that would come out every two weeks. To be able to draw these 12 pages, I decided to use a style that was simple and easy to do. I looked at Migonla’s work on Hellboy and thought: “this is it! Simple and easy to do. Right.”

A look at the Mignola influenced The Sunflower and the Moon
As any artist who is beginning his career has his influences and often copies from them, I did my share of copying, learning how to use those lines, how to create that mood, how to use those Kirby Crackles. There was a bit of Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli and Jeff Smith, but a lot of Mike Mignola. Of course there were very few scenes really swapped, but they helped me tell the story I wanted at that time. I realize now that when you only copy the art you like, on a sketchbook or something, you don’t really learn as much as when you have a story to tell to fuel the artwork, motivate the characters, flow throughout the panels. Without the story, the drawings would be only fan art.

As the time passed and we had more stories told and I developed my own style, it didn’t look swapped any longer, but the “genes” were in there. Not only the inking style or the strong use of blacks, but the storytelling, the rhythm, the way Mignola divides the page in panels.

I can’t tell how excited and honored my brother and I felt for working with Mignola on BPRD: 1947 and, specially, in BPRD: VAMPIRE. This last series is our love letter to him, to his craft, to all that we have learned from him throughout the years.


//TAGS | Mignolaversity

David Harper

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