Mignola wants a Hellboy cinematic universe

>It’s a very loose adaptation of one of theHellboygraphic novels. When you have more books out there, you have a lot more to sift through. You can look around at how big the world is, and borrow pieces from here and there. You want to sell a larger world, but you have to pick and choose what goes in there. The challenge for us has been to not lose sight of the specific story, but suggest the elements of a larger story. My hope is that this introduces a lot of stuff that then expands into aHellboyCinematic Universe.

theverge.com/2017/8/3/16089200/mike-mignola-hellboy-universe-film-reboot-you-know-comics-interview

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multiversitycomics.com/annotations/hell-notes-religions-of-the-apocalypse/
archive.org/stream/ac_goetia
sutori.com/story/mignolaverse
comicsalliance.com/secret-history-abe-sapien-annotations-santiago-caruso/
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>theHellboygraphic

Didn't they already try that and failed miserably?

No.

No, that was back when cinematic universes were referred to primitively as "franchises", and instead of 90 spinoffs you would just be satisfied with a new movie every couple years.

Are they keeping Ron Perlman? That's all I need to know.

No, David Harbour.

And this is the part were you "but M-MUH could never be replaced" even though you've only ever seen Perlman perform the part

Nope

No.

Don't be that faggot who insists Perlman is the only person allowed to play Hellboy, like the idiots who insisted Adam West should have been in the '89 Batman or that they should have kept Christian Bale for BvS.

But they should of kept Bale and just made the Dark Knight trilogy canon

I'm all for this as long as it sticks very closely to the comicbooks. If they're doing a cinematic universe it would probably mean B.P.R.D receiving a movie as well and I'd love to see comic Abe in the limelight.

says the same type of faggot that wants perlman as hellboy.

Dark Horse has wanted a cinematic universe for years. Rumor was they thought they could launch one with their company owned characters like Ghost, X, or Barbwire.

Luckily someone must've realized that was a stupid idea and backing their biggest shared universe comic was a smart one.

Lobster Johnson directed by Joe Johnston when?

Hopefully they keep the badass Kronen from the Del Toro movie. Seriously its such a cool character design.

...

If they're jumping to Hecate we may not get nazis in the first film

He looks like he came straight out of a Wolfenstein game.

I fucking loved this guy. Does Hellboy 1 still hold up?

There's some spotty CG but it holds up well otherwise.

There could be a Black Flame movie.

>made the Dark Knight trilogy canon
Maybe, but Nolan would not in a trillion years let them and WB needs him more than he needs them.

>But they should of kept Bale
Even if they made the DK movies the start of their universe, they should have recast Bale. Not only has the guy had his shot at the character already, he's awful in the role (no, don't give me that "he's a good Bruce Wayne but a bad Batman" shit, he's awful with both) but he's notoriously difficult to work with. And he's even more pretentious when it comes to "muh mature comics for mature readers such as myself" than Nolan.

>Conan style movie about Gal Dennar
>period piece Witchfinder detective movie
>lobster johnson pulpy movie
>WWII war movie staring Sledgehammer
>et/goonies-esque adaptation of Midnight Circus

I would love a Gal Dennar/howards movie staring this guy

Do you have any idea how much I would freak out if they actually put the Gal/Howards story in one of the movies? Or the Vampire story line?

PUT THEM IN THE GROUND

Make a Baltimore film and make it VERY dreary. Not necessarily a dark and edgy film, but something just relentlessly bleak.

at one point Goyer was actually going to direct a Baltimore film but it got abandoned

All of the rubber suit puppetry managed to make most of the actions scenes still look good (or at least have some weight to them), but that final climax kind of sucks with the CGI

The Mignolaverse is perfect for this honestly, but i would prefer animated series

He's better with ensemble movies. Baltimore has a few helper characters but it's a solo storyline for the most part, besides the vampire villain (I can't remember his name), and the inquisitor that follows him.

>x-files style bprd series dealing with normal agents facing often mundane yet supernatural things
>pickens county horror - the movie

What I want the most is Darkness Calls - the film, though

Koschei deserves a lot more recognition, thank god he's getting his own miniseries

don't forget the best part.

and thank god Mignola's writing it, not Roberson

So wtf era is this taking place in? ...I'm hyped as fuck anyways but if it wasn't modern and set in like 1976 thatd be fantastic too.

Has Robinon been shitting the bed? I don't think I've picked up any of the stuff he's done.

BPRD without Arcudi it is gong to be odd

I'm just glad that Roberson isn't doing the Devil You Know. But, if Mignola wants to keep Koschei as a series a la Witchfinder, we might see it muddled. I hope not.

I mean, I don't like Allie much either, but at least it's something. I liked Roberson's the Visitor somewhat though, although the scene-panel composition was probably mostly the artist's work. I don't know, I've been harboring a hate-boner for Roberson since the Exorcist.

The title suggests it takes place close to when Hellboy dies which is ~2010 in the comics

they've done that already.

Fuck man, JUST GIVE ME MY HELLBOY ANIMATED SERIES.

Roberson writes like he doesn't realize there's going to artwork under it

frankly he's ranged from mediocre to outright bad, I've only liked one arc he's done Hellboy and the BPRD but he's got a major problem with exposition. he did a guest spot on BPRD writing an Ashley Strode story and it is straight up the WORST BPRD story ever published, made even sadder that it broke up the second to last and final arcs of Hell on Earth.

I want to believe he'll get better, mostly because I don't want the Hellboy universe to have such shitty parts. He put a dent in even Witchfinder in my opinion.

Maybe when it's all said and done Mignola will get bored and get his hands on Hellboy and the BPRD himself, and we'll get some cozy, wacky-ass adventures up until the Cavendish Hall incident.

>the Exorcist
What was wrong with the Exorcist?

it really bums me out because Mignola and Stenbeck's 1953 stories were so damn good.

Ashley's first arc, Exorcism is fine, her second arc Exorcist mainly consists of Ashley walking around a house talking to herself and describing what the art is already showing

It felt like a regular comic, really, there was no tension, no horror, nothing. Just a flat, expository character with all her traits looking like they were tacked on (dude why not put in an after-sex scene in there, she's a lesbian isn't she), smart-talking with a demon as said demon ate a child alive, etc.

Liz had a couple of solo stories that could be similar in nature, Lake of Fire and the one set in the trailer getto, but it all felt natural and tense to me. The Exorcist, on the other hand (or is it Exorcism? it's the one that cut up End of Days), felt like it was written by Gail Simone or something.

Lake of Fire was wonderfully cathartic

>he's got a major problem with exposition

So we're full circle back to Bryne's Seed of Destruction scripting?

Huh, I really liked it. I loved how it showed how occultism isn't some super mystical and unattainable thing in the Mignolaverse, dumbasses are tapping into demon power too. And I'm a sucker for the Mignolaverse stories that use actual references to the Ars Goetia.

I don't know why but I love Ben Stenbeck's art. I wonder how it'd have been if he had done Hell on Earth. All that meticulously detailed wasteland landscape. Reign of the Black Flame (or was it? The New York mission) could've looked even more detailed than what Harren has done.

Not that I don't like Harren, of course, but his style feels too wacky for me at times.

yeah, basically. if you want the best example of his worst flaws read the 2 issue Black Sun arc of Hellboy and the BPRD. the first issue setups an interesting mystery and then the second issue the bad guy spends like 18 pages explaining everything and Hellboy ends it all in like 1 hit.

Stenbeck never puts out a bad issue, jesus christ his Lobster Johnson story this week was beautiful.

I think my favorite thing he did was the 2 issue arc of Baltimore that wrapped up the Inquistor's storyline.

It's not *what* the message is, in my opinion, it's *how* the message is conveyed. Hellboy had a couple of shorts in the same fashion, and even he, perhaps the most comic-pulpy character in the Mignolaverse, could pass on the tension.

I guess I just don't like a newly-ordained exorcist just looking a demon in the flesh in the eye like it's nothing, talking to ghosts and quipping, etc. My hate almost extended to Strode herself because of just how bad the story was.

Buster Oakley Gets His Wish is one of the best single issue stories

...

I wonder how wacky or unnatural that japanese sounds to a native japanese speaker

I remember seeing Turkish in Baltimore and one issue of Lobster Johnson and it immediately put me away from the entire story because of just how artificial it was

Two-three years had passed between the two stories so she's not exactly new.

Is Lobster Johnson the most consistently good Hellboy spinoff?

Yes

because Arcudi wrote it from day 1 and still writes it. I hope to hell he doesn't bail on it before they end it.

Might not be Hecate, could be Nimue, which'd be... weird.

>Very loose adaptation
though

I imagine they're just typing it all straight into a translator so it's probably stilted as fuck

It's still not exactly the same. Hellboy himself could get creeped out, and he's the World's Greatest Paranormal Investigator amongst other things, with god knows how many years of experience.

In my opinion BPRD has always been about the humanity - every character has their breaking point, no matter how strong they are, or their experience. The human agents are the obvious examples, but even Johann, Iosif, etc. have had their flaws, their weaknesses, things that make character. Kate Corrigan, for example, she's not even in the action but nonetheless we see her under pressure.

Ashley, on the other hand, feels like a fan character (she somewhat is, actually, iirc Arcudi and Mignola just gave Stewart the character and free rein so he could do whatever he wanted with her). She's a qt homely girl with a lesbian crush who earns magical powers and from there on it's smooth sailing.

The world's falling apart? Sure, it's okay, I'm hunting demons and picking up girls at bars.

You got any better ideas? Perlman is yje best band only actor for Hellboy.

If they have a lobster Johnson movie I'd like it to starvout like any pulp crime fighter movie but have it slowly derail into supernatural freak show

The Iron Prometheus would be best for that in my opinion. That slow burn from pulp to higher powers that are beyond the scale of the Lobster, the bittersweet ending, etc.

My favorite Lobster story desu

seriously though if you haven't read this week's LoJo it's one of the best one shots they've ever done.

the artist also managed an interesting mix of Mignola and Guy Davis, shame they never used him again

Yeah but Hellboy was cocky and talking shit too when he first started out and on top of that she's been the focus of only two stories. Look at Enos at the start, he was cheering for Kaiju fights and exhibiting an even more ambivalent attitude to the end of the world.

Yeah, but we see Enos in danger and how he reacts to it. He talks the talk, sure, but it's his way of coping with stress - when his squad gets wiped out against that monster, when they are surrounded in Wasteland, he's unprofessional and very frustrated. He's a character of mood swings, he doesn't quip jokes with Howards or dodge the frozen monster like it's nothing, he runs the fuck away in fear and huddles in a corner afterwards. His friends die and he's frustrated and angry and he ends up swearing like a madman. He reacts like a human would, perhaps reacts more than he should.

rip, he was my favorite character

Arcudi's great at little character moments

That's what I'm saying, Ashley hasn't had the chance to have that shit happen to her yet. She found her niche and has, as far as we've seen, been on assignment hunting demons away from all the apocalypse stuff.

I'd love it they put in extra scenes like this were we see people reacting to the all the apocalyptic stuff slowly destroying society

It would work with Hellboy.

But he's like an 80 year old jew now. Do you want him to fucking die or something?

The Apocalypse is everywhere. Grind shows it best, Abe Sapien and Fenix' story in the Salton Sea too.

I'm not against the character, as I've said, she has potential and her first story was enjoyable - it's just that imo Roberson's handled that issue so horribly that my dislike for it seeped into the centre of the story, that being, Ashley.

Characters in, say, Arcudi's stories, show humanity to what happens around them, even if they get over it later. In the Exorcist all we see is this unstoppable girl kick a bunch of hillbillies around, then follow a ghost into a haunted house like she's getting cotton candy, have some talk with a shapeshifting demon in its lair as it eats a kid alive, then kill it.

In Reign of the Black Flame, the team that got to Central Park had an almost complete breakdown for a moment when they saw all the suicides. They got back to the mission, sure, but we saw them crumble with that.

In the Exorcist, Ashley literally finds herself face to face with a great demon in a dark cave with tons of children's bones, and a child literally getting crunched apart as she speaks, and she doesn't give a fuck. She's super and she saves the day. I don't like that. But it's not fault of the character, it's the writer's.

Him and Perlman are the only positive things I have to say about that movie after rewatching it.

Funny how in the comics he's an articulate and diligent doctor as opposed to a silent killing machine.

I guess it seeped a little into the comic, during Reign of the Black Flame he was dual wielding machine guns

That's just Harren's art style imo, it's always a bit exaggerated. In the Long Death you see Carla Giarocco getting up and fighting even though her fucking shinbone is poking out of her leg sideways.

i love that shit

Harren is the best, his Black flame is my favorite

I am 100% here for this shit
OBDITH YUG JAHOOD

yeah I don't get why Campbell reverted him from his Xbox Hueg monster mode back to how he looked in Reign.

>She's super and she saves the day
That's litterally the lesson Ota Benga teaches her, not to show fear because it gives them power and she knows Balam can't do anything because the hillbilly dad had him sealed.
I think she just gets a hard time because she hasn't been in as many stories so it just seems like she's a total badass.
>The Apocalypse is everywhere
The thing is, it's not. Yes it is in a lot of different areas and yes in the areas it is it is quite litterally Hell on Earth but I mean The Excorcist takes place at the same time as Johammer and there are still bars open and shit while Abe is walking through desolate wastelands.

His comic version somehow manages to be the broest nazi.

I think a fair part of 'Hell on Earth' is that the Apocalpyse does show its effects everywhere, it's just the matter of how strong its effects are. By Johammer we know that the BPRD can barely hold all the monsters back with Liz + Johann combined (if they can at all), communities are getting fucked up one by one as we see in Abe Sapien, so one way or another, things are getting fucked up. People deal with it, sure, everyone does, but we also see their horror.

As I've said, it's fault of the writer, not the character, that she seems like a total badass. The story with Ota Benga was miles beyond this one. And the owl demon was pretty sick.

I'm actually feeling pretty sorry for the demons in Hellboy's universe. I mean, Asmodeus for example, he didn't really do much wrong - it was all voluntary and Hellboy fucked him up.

>And the owl demon was pretty sick.

don't forget the demon goat

Balam's was nice because it's his actual form and seal from The Ars Goetia used in the comic.
And yeah, the demons get a bad rap in the Mignolaverse, I especially feel for Marchosias and Iblifikawho is one of the few named demons that doesn't correspond to one in real life

A BPRD agent who deals with demons specifically during the Apocalypse will be hardened. With endless horrors going on in the world, and an increased amount of demonic activity (as mentioned in the story) she has a lot of experience. If it's not experience from dealing with demons, it's dealing with the daily apocalypse. It isn't ridiculous to think she might be somewhat collected, or in another word, hardened.

I'm pretty sure most named demons are actually drawn after form. I don't know about the seals themselves.

I've seen an analysis of that one Abe Sapien issue where we see Strobl's life, and it's all to description. It actually got to my mind and I looked for descriptions of others described too, in other works of the Hellboy universe, and most if not all of them are based after their descriptions in occult texts.

anyone read Hell Notes? I love how ridiculously complex the mythology is.

multiversitycomics.com/annotations/hell-notes-religions-of-the-apocalypse/

Johann and Iosif have probably suffered the most, and we also see them deal with the more negative parts of their human nature, Johann especially so despite the fact that he's a literal monitor of apocalyptic activity with no sleep, grudges, vain hopes and constant face-to-face time with the Ogdru Hem, physically, and mentally. We see it all toll up to him. My favorite part of Arcudi's writing is that the toll grows even though the character's power grows - as Johammer Johann's almost as strong as Liz yet we see that inside he's on the edge of breaking down. Hell, his personal catharsis and peace with it is actually part of the grand finale.

I'm all for hardened, but I also like human elements.

Most of the named demons do follow their defined forms in the Mignolaverse, this means that Hellboys sister Gamori is actually a dude btw, and their seals follow suit. You can just look up their names archive.org/stream/ac_goetia
The exceptions I know off the top of my head 1. Iblifika because she isn't a "real" demon and 2. Andras, the owl demon from Exorcism because he is described as "appearing in the Form of an angel with a head like a Black Night Raven."

it'd be so cool to read an annotated version of Hellboy

I'm making an anotated timeline of the Mignolavese to go along with my yearly Chronological Storytime
sutori.com/story/mignolaverse

This is very, very true and fair. But amongst all the shit, another demon is another demon. Nobody can expect a super minor character like Ashley Strode to be as developed as major characters with many, many pages to their name.

The references to real artwork, in form or reference or otherwise, in the composition, is baffling.

I just noticed a homage to Caspar David Friedrich during my last reread of the Warning.

I remember looking up Gamori and seeing that she was, well, a she.

Link related, btw, for and everyone else:

comicsalliance.com/secret-history-abe-sapien-annotations-santiago-caruso/

By demon goat you mean when the Owl demon possessed the goat Ota Benga purchased?

awesome, bookmarking this

Hence why I blame writer instead of character, since even Arcudi's side characters feel like people.

Even the nameless UN guy that shows up in base in a few panels has his own things that makes us relate to him. Aunt in Kansas who died, a job that's crumbling, bafflement at all the stuff around him, etc. He feels more relatable than Ashley in most contexts.

That sentence about Johann should've been about how he *has* grudges and vain hopes and constant face time. Should have removed the 'despite the fact'.