"Hellboy: The Bad Day"




citizen 14 | chew before you swallow | hummingbirdman | chazz | elmer | hellboy



I love Hellboy and I love Mike Mignola’s artwork (and writing). So it should come as no surprise that at one point I would try to tell my own Hellboy story. But I wanted to take this one a step further. You see, Mike Mignola occasionally frequents my favorite comic store (The Comic Bug in Manhattan Beach, CA www.thecomicbug.com) , and I decided that I wanted to try to get Mike to actually see my story! Perhaps he would love it so much that it could get published in the next “Strange Tales” anthology (if there were to ever be another) or perhaps he would like my style enough that he would give me a shot on some other project he has going. Needless to say, when I finally showed him the fruits of my labor, he was pretty unimpressed overall. Not to say he was snobbish or anything; in fact he gave some great pointers for cleaning up some rough areas. Oh well… Once I get a little recognition in the industry, maybe he’ll take another, deeper look. Maybe you’ll end up seeing this in “Hellboy: Strange Tales: Volume 3” after all!!!

The art process itself in this story was a bit ill-concieved. I mean, I friggin drew the word balloons onto the page! My thinking was that this was going to be quickly produced and would have a very “hand-made” feel to it anyway, so it didn’t matter. The problem is that my style for Hellboy didn’t quite come about until around page 3 and at that point, it was looking a bit more cartoonish than I had originally conceived the tone of the book to be. So these really slick action pieces ended up being kind of hammy in the end. I guess it’s better overall since the story itself IS a comedy… but I still wanted to maintain an overall dark Mignola-esque sensibility to the project. I think I failed in that sense, but otherwise, I like my little story: Taking jabs at the similar situations that Hellboy tends to find himself repeatedly getting into, and playing them out as if they all happened to him on one particularly bad day. I tend to cringe looking over certain moments here, but overall I’m pretty proud of this. I give it a B+

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