–Kroenen’s room. A dirty mosaic. Filled with pipes and black hoses
MOUTH on his “hand”
Structures made of bars on every street and in all the cavities of the buildings.
HB.
TWO OR THREE NIPPLES ON ONE SIDE
Sammael must be asymmetric like a crab or a malformed foetus. He has 2 eyes on one side and a big ass on the other one. A small claw on one arm
He should be an ornate creature much like H.B markings. Call him “brother”
He has double-jointed legs if Mike Elizalde thinks so.
Bigger claw with a Haialai basket of boney tissue.
ROWS OF NODULES
GDT: Sammael again [opposite]. Now, the one thing that I am sad we lost on Sammael was the horns, because I really liked that demonic silhouette. But we preserved a lot of stuff. I love that double-jointedness for the pincers, but, again, it was very hard to keep. And, as you can see, he was always asymmetric. But the elements are all there—the circles, the spirals, the bones extruding from the skin, the tentacles, the eyes, the many rows of warts, the protruding pelvis, and the double-jointed legs. Those were things that were important, and you see them repeated again and again in the drawings.
The problem is, when you see a drawing like this, I find the silhouette interesting, but it doesn’t feel like a creature. It feels like a bunch of notions put together.
MSZ: You said you were sorry to lose the horns. Why was that?
GDT: I liked the horns because they were designed to come out of the floating cheekbone, and then the floating cheekbone would echo the first row of horns, and then the second. I just liked that it had an African mask quality.
–100,000 dollars you can visualize. A 1,000,000 fits in 2–3 cubic feet. Buys you a house. A really, really big, nice house. Then you start going into abstraction. Well is the same thing with years.
TANOSHI WILLOW TOWN—Boken Shonen Shadar, Ogon Bat, Toriton (OSAMU, T Nekome, Dororo, Marine and the patrol. oceanica, Okami Shonen Ken (pepito) Fushigina Melmo, Skyers-5 (s-5
–The interesting thing about Junji Ito is that he rarely offers explanations in his horror stories. He was a dental assistant and in a certain way his brand of horror shares the same precise attention to biological detail and exerts the same morbid fascination as his old job. Show, don’t tell.
–The Sammaels move in unison like a “chorus line” a la Harryhausen in Jason.
–The world’s greatest paranormal detective. I must say he can’t detect much can he—?
–In Wind in the Willows, the trees move so that people can’t get in, and the animals greet one another with “may man avoid you” or “may man ignore you” whether it’s day or night.
–The Beaver [?] (the human “boat”) in the gigantic [?] and, in order to save himself, he must abandon his “human” body.
–Toad and Beaver become very good friends, and at the end they’re seen flying together in an enormous dirigible that they both built together. Only Ratty is an adult. The others are children.
GDT: What’s great about this page [above] is the mechanism in Sammael’s arm is almost exactly how it came out. The unfolding blade is there, and on the facing page [opposite] you can see me again trying asymmetric eyes. The wart rolls, the tentacles. And this element of the protruding bone again. But that didn’t make it.
And there’s a little note to have Hellboy grabbing the mosaic or the tile as he is being dragged backward, which made it into the subway scene [opposite, top]. In a different way, but I did it. I originally wanted it for a fight with Kroenen, but, you know. One does what one can.
–Mammalian Diving reflex. Body memory.
–The Sammaels move in “Chorus line”–style in the egg chamber
–Hellboy uses his hand to stop himself from sliding, destroying the mosaic floor.
–Random ideas for Sammy
–His shoulder blades have peaks on them that stick out in his silhouette.
Old, hard bone
String of nodules that stand up and push against each other.
Only one eye on this side, but it‘s a big O and blind
Layers that peel back to reveal the horse’s skull beneath them.
Human eyes, but in groups of 3, 5 on one side.
2 of his tentacles should be translucent with blood inside.
The other tentacles form a “mane” around his mouth.
A large number of nodules and infected, asymmetrical nipples on his sunken, dead chest.
–Olivier is a tiger, Javier is a mammoth.
–Episode with a brigade soldier with a rifle in a tree. There he removes the ring he gives to Conchita. In the middle of a sandstorm.
–Look for the ghost’s torso. It could he “splattered” with blue paint “blue screen.” Irregular patterns. CGI
–Just a mistake, that’s all, I thought I was human.
“Abe” with a helmet and his respirator
GDT: The idea I was exploring here [opposite] was how to make Abe Sapien blink. Because back then it was so expensive to make him blink. I knew I needed to make him blink digitally because there was no way I could hide a mechanism in the face. So I said, well, if his breathing apparatus is very elaborate but cool-looking enough, I can have the bubbles in the water, and the eyes lit, and people will find him entertaining, and I don’t have to spend all that money on making him blink. So I designed that, and I added little fishes in the way that you would draw a cheesecake girl as nose art on a World War II bombardier. Or the way that Joker puts “Born to Kill” on his helmet in Full Metal Jacket.
MSZ: So these aren’t real fish. They’re intended to be a motif?
GDT: Yeah. Like, he was drawing on his helmet. And the respirator on the side was sort of like a bellows. Those ended up being Johann’s in Hellboy II.
MZ: Why did you move away from this design? Because it’s a very fun design.
GDT: Well, I got away from it because, when we finally went to make the movie, José [Fernandez] at Spectral Motion took a long time to get to Abe. We fucked around for a long time. Then Wayne Barlowe did a beautiful drawing, and Mignola refined it, and then José sculpted it, and it was so gorgeous that I said, “I’m not going to fucking hide the face.” So I just gave him goggles, goggles with water. Because the face, it was so harmonious. The worst thing you can do—and this is really useful advice—in any design, the worst thing you can do is make a big-headed design. The head has to be the smallest part of the creature.