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Scott Bukatman Talks Hellboy And Weird Fiction

by Vince Brusio

Demon hunter, Hellboy, has his world magnified in the book, Hellboy's World: Comics and Monsters on the Margin (APR162222) from UC Press. Scott Bukatman delves into the dynamic profession of creating compelling worlds in the genres of weird fiction and folklore. This unique insight is not something to be missed as it goes into depth about not only the creators' process, but the complexity of the readers' experience as well. Read our interview with Scott below and make sure to pre-order the book with item code APR162222 at your local comic shop!

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Article Image 492aPREVIEWSworld: The book Hellboy's World is said to illustrate how our engagement with Hellboy's world is a "highly aestheticized encounter with comics and their materiality." Could you elaborate a bit more on your analysis? Why do you think Hellboy is so successful in displacing readers, and putting them in a pseudo-virtual reality experience?

Scott Bukatman: When I was able to interview Mignola, just about the first thing out of his mouth was that he when he was finished telling stories about Hellboy, he wanted to leave him someplace with a great library. This resonated with my own sense of the comics: they're very (this is the word I use) "bookish." The stories belong to the worlds of horror and weird fiction, and those stories are so often about mysterious books that have gone missing, or which have been rediscovered. These are books with power. And the stories themselves frequently take the form of a journal or captain's log or series of letters. Texts within texts. Hellboy, as I say in my book, kind of wanders through stories that are original, but which explicitly reference other stories, other folklores, other mythologies. And Mignola's own aesthetic differs from many of his peers in that he doesn't just compose beautiful pages, but he designs two pages that are meant to be looked at side by side. In Hellboy's World, I reprint several of these gorgeous double-pages. Meanwhile, Mignola's art emphasizes flatness over depth, and — surprisingly — stasis and stillness over exaggerated motion. Double-pages, flatness, stillness — these are some of the ways that Mignola's art directs attention to the book, the material object, being held in our hands. As I say, it's a very "bookish" sensibility.

PREVIEWSworld: Mike Mignola's graphic art style is a polar opposite from other acclaimed illustrators like Ashley Wood. How will this book put Mignola's art into context, in regards to how it's abstract designs have found a place in today's comic book pop culture?

Scott Bukatman: Well, as you say, Mignola's art moves toward abstraction rather than either the cartoony-photorealism of most DC and Marvel books, or the busy-ness of the Liefeld era or the impressionism of an Ashley Wood. It's clean and flat, with a greater emphasis on mass rather than line. And Dave Stewart's color of course accentuates that flatness — he doesn't use color to suggest 3-dimensonal volume. Other elements that push Mignola's art towards modernism and abstraction could include his use of panels that only contain sound effects, and panels of pure black. But while I can argue for the validity of these high art comparisons, when all is said and done, Hellboy looks like a COMIC BOOK from the days before digital enhancement. It has monsters, comic book sound effects (BOOM), and a team of heroes. It's both old school and strikingly modern; it tells stories but edges up on abstraction — all of this is heightened, by the way, in Hellboy in Hell. Mignola just loves the medium, and it shows. It always shows.

PREVIEWSworld: Does this book get into how Hellboy affected the horror genre in comic books? Or does it look at Mignola's books as more "supernatural" than "horror"?

Scott Bukatman: Rightly or wrongly, I don't emphasize the narrative elements of the Mignola-verse as much as I could. I want this book to be read by non-Hellboy fans (who might well become fans when they see how beautifully Mignola's art is reproduced), and trying to deal with the ins and outs of a two-decades long story would have taken me away from how Hellboy works as a comic. But I do discuss how Hellboy exists at the intersection of Lovecraftian weird fiction and the occult detection genre. From the former, Mignola derives his cosmology; from the latter he gets the matter-of-fact tone that the B.P.R.D. characters display when confronted by the weirdest of weird phenomena. 

PREVIEWSworld: What in particular drew you to the Hellboy mythos? Did you find it comparable to other works of literature (Lovecraft), but in graphic form? Or did Hellboy raise the bar for comics based on its own merit?

Scott Bukatman: It definitely helped that I was a Lovecraft fan (and a horror fan, and a science fiction fan); it also helped that I was around for the rise of the direct market, when censorship waned, paper stocks and printing got better, and authors controlled their own properties. But I didn't fully get bit by the Hellboy bug until relatively recently, when Mignola, John Arcudi, and Guy Davis were killing it on B.P.R.D. My generous research funds allowed me to buy all the trades and happily bury myself in them. Good as the stuff was when it was coming out, it looked even better nearly twenty years later alongside the (mostly) ongoing mediocrities of most of the DC-Marvel comics. I responded to Mignola's craft, the storytelling, the careful curation of a universe. The just-released Library Editions of Hellboy were also crucial, I think. Mignola's art always looked good, but they never looked better than in those gorgeous editions. So it's not so much that Hellboy "raised the bar" as that it's still going so strongly when so many other creators and creations from that period were, for various reasons, unable to sustain it.

PREVIEWSworld: If you were to make any of the previous Hellboy books required reading for a classroom syllabus, what type of class would best be served by reading Hellboy, and what would the objectives be for the student in studying Mignola's work, in part or as a whole?

Scott Bukatman: I don't think I'd devote an entire course to Mignola, just because there are so few classes and so many comics. I teach Hellboy in my Reading Comics class at Stanford (which is where I developed a lot of the material in the book). I tend to assign his more formally audacious works — The Strange Places trade has both "Third Wish" and "The Island," which are so beautiful, and Hellboy in Hell: The Descent is where I think he's really pushing the artistic envelope. I also used these books in a more interdisciplinary freshman course about the arts more broadly, where I could help them to see both Mignola's accomplishment and the fabulousness that is comics. I'm really interested in helping students understand what we do when we read comics, how we make sense of them, how we derive pleasure from them. In fact, a colleague of mine teaches a course on philosophies of reading, and he wants to use Hellboy's World, which delights me to no end.

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