Remember “The Burning Hands“? Remember how good that was? Well, prepare for more.
When last we heard about Lobster Johnson, it was for a two-part story illustrated by Sebastian Fiumara. But since that’s by far not enough Lobster Johnson for anyone, we have some good news: he’s back with a new five-part mini-series from the creative team of Mignola, John Arcudi and Tonci Zonjic.
Update, 4/3/2013: Dark Horse EIC and “Abe Sapien” Scott Allie has alerted us that this is incorrect. It’s actually a two-part story illustrated by Sebastian Fiumara with covers by Tonci Zonjic, which makes this the book we originally wrote about in January. As Scott explains,
Sebastian was working on this before the Abe Sapien ongoing got going, but the schedule has worked out for him to jump back and forth. He really blew us away with some of these LoJo pages–this made us want to keep him busy as long as we could.
Revealed at CBR and entitled “A Scent of a Lotus”, the book puts us back with Cindy Tynan as she continues to explore the 1940’s mystery world that Lobster inhabits. Mignola has apparently teased that the book may give us more about who he is and may have some ties to BPRD’s Ben Daimio mention of the legend of the Crimson Lotus, although he admits that Arcudi is doing the majority of the work in terms of scripting and plotting for the new series.
What’s really interesting about the CBR interview, though, is this bit (with a few bits bolded):
“Sometime later this year, I’m going to be writing a miniseries. And on that one, I’ll probably do some design stuff for it just because it’s what’s in my head,” Mignola explained of where he’s at in terms of designing for his world since returning to Hellboy at full time. “But since Scott [Allie] is doing the Abe book and John is doing B.P.R.D. and Lobster Johnson, they’ve kind of worked that out with their guys. And the guys we’re using are so good that there’s nothing for me to do. Guy [Davis] and I used to bounce stuff back and forth. It’s not like Guy ever needed my help, but I was a bit more of a control freak back then. Now I’m content to let these guys do their stuff.”
And that’s exactly what he plans on doing with “Lobster Johnson” — in part because Arcudi is furrowing away some secrets of his own. “John’s actually very cagey some times. I’ll say, ‘Are you dealing with this at any point?’ because we talk on the phone about where the books are going in general, but it’s not like we go over the plot of each miniseries. We just talk in general about what he thinks he’s going to get done, and I have to call him up sometimes to say ‘Did you do this, or are you still going to do it?’ and John just says, ‘Yeah, don’t worry. Go back to thinking about Hellboy’ without telling me any specifics!”
So take that as you will. Maybe 2013 will end up being Year of the Lobster!
Look for more “Lobster Johnson” books later this year (and probably a collection in trade of all the one-shots), and keep your eyes and ears peeled to MC for more Mignolaverse updates as we get them.
