GDT: These pages [opposite] are from the same visit to Japan. While I was there, I tried to meet with my heroes: Katsuya Terada and Yasushi Nirasawa. I love their work, so we went to dinner at a sushi place that Nirasawa’s father owns, and he drew the three of us on a chopstick cover, and I glued it to the notebook [right].
MSZ: So this is his drawing of you?
GDT: Yeah. It’s really good! I look like a Miyazaki character.
MSZ: This is the only time I’ve seen a page where your writing goes in this direction.
GDT: That’s probably because I put in the chopstick-cover illustration. I didn’t start writing until after I put it there. And what I tried to do, in this particular notebook, was to finish all my thoughts at one time on a single page. I didn’t want anything continuing on the next page. I knew that if I did it vertically, I would run out of space, so I did it like that.
MSZ: So each page is self-contained?
GDT: Yeah, I’m pretty sure. I mean, there may be an exception. That’s why facing pages have their own subjects. On the left [opposite], for example, there are multiple ideas for Hellboy, but none of them bleed over to the next page.
Here, I was thinking of an amulet that Hellboy could have to awaken the corpse, which affects the dust particles in the air.
Then I came up with an idea that was too expensive, which was to have Rasputin frozen in a statue like in the comic, and then to have a series of mirrors that were clockwork-operated, which would beam the light into him.
Then, at the bottom, I wanted Abe to have an articulated mouth like a fish. You can still see the old Abe, which is a bit like Moebius’s Silver Surfer. The mouth was going to project out like a fish mouth. And Mignola was so horrified by this idea. He said, “That’s the worst idea!” He was so horrified by the idea of the mouth that he said to me, “If you don’t do that, I’ll give you four pages of any of my stories you like.” And I have the four pages upstairs. I’m a cheap man.
Then you see Sammael, again, attempting the same thing. This drawing is a little more similar to what we ended up with. And the claw—I wanted it to look like a lobster claw in the air. That didn’t make it.
MSZ: Now, as we’re going through these pages and seeing the designs of Sammael, it’s becoming refined. Were you working with your design team at this point?
GDT: I was already talking to Mike at this point. I think Wayne Barlowe was already on board, and I started to send him these things, but these were still my own musings.
MSZ: What’s this bladder?
GDT: The idea was that the neck would inflate like a bladder, and the tentacles around his mouth would do a “Brrrr!” and expand to reveal his teeth.
Terna © Terada san Katsuya Terada © chopsticks for sushi.
Drawing of Terada, Nirazawa, and Hellboy with me below them. 5/29/02 Tokyo
MASTERPIECE
SOLD OUT
Ton of pus!
Masterpiece!! Dinner with two Japanese buddies, both very friendly and talkative.
–Floor and murals on the walls
–[?] digital lines for punch
–Vibrating shine in the eye a la ANIME
–Medieval architecture mixed with industrial
–Blue set, blue character, blue days
–The eggs shine, acrylic nest
–The [?] for the tentacle BW.
–Build the outside space (eye).
–Dry leaves around him (a la O).
–Cloud from above, see tentacles
–Nest with eggs made from acrylic.
–Theatrical effects for water [?].
–No baby [?] to No Abe injured.
–Tongue design should be bigger than the mouthspace visible outside (7 feet).
–Steadicam guy should be Varomia. Tell Patrick ASAP.
–clak clacks clikty-clack, clack clack, then grows silent. The mouth smiles.
Try to keep Sammael changing his silhouette whenever possible.
His bones dislocate. This helps
–Broom’s autopsy: “a piece of nail split his spine in two, the impact pulverized two vertebrae.
–The idol on the altar should be a highly stylized Behemoth
octopus’s
pupil
–When we film Sammael, we should vary the speed and perhaps use a long lens for detail.
Lower teeth are bigger than upper.
Backlit Fog
–Hair implants for one of the agents.
–[?]
–The “little hand” establishes the episode CBL.
–The “Marita” establishes the episode CBL.
–Wax cylinder for the recordings of memories in a journal, in AMOM.
–Use ribbons or climbing ropes to come and go in the areas of temporal distortion. Movement sensors.
GDT: The eye here [opposite, top] is me exploring the idea that Sammael would have an egg-shaped pupil that would dilate. And I thought, “One of the eyes could have flies on it,” which is very disgusting.
At the bottom of the page is me reflecting on how to fit vertical information in a 1:85 frame.
The next idea was to give Ron Perlman longer lower teeth than upper teeth, which ended up in the movie. He has huge fake teeth in the movie, but the lower ones are bigger than the top ones. Now, why did I want the lower teeth bigger? Hellboy has a really extreme lantern jaw in the comics [above left], and one of the ways Mike does it is by doing the lower teeth the way Jack Kirby did. Kirby used to have his bottom teeth come up above the lip in a straight line.
GDT: You can see [opposite], as strange as it is, I’m already trying to draw Hellboy like Ron Perlman. I’m trying to find a way. And there is a nick in the flesh of his cheek, which I wanted to be very, very deep. I couldn’t do it. But it’s the nick that Kroenen gives him in the final fight.
And I wanted Hellboy jumping between buildings with the moon silhouetting him. I didn’t do that.
This is pretty accurate to the way he looks in the Apocalypse, though—at the top of a mountain of debris, with the horns.
Then, in the center are Kroenen’s skin grafts. DDT was using these sketches, and they were becoming a little extreme. I was thinking, strangely enough, that Kroenen needed to be sexy. And I know an eyeless, lipless guy is not sexy, but I thought, “There needs to exist some kind of really, really, really twisted girl that is going to get off on Kroenen.” So I said, “For that, my minuscule audience, we have to make him sexy.”