Mike Mignola at the End of the World.
Hell, Ink, and Water shows off one of the great hands drawing today.
In the first winter of the pandemic, my nightstand was piled high with end-of-the-world books: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man; Albert Camus’s The Plague; Paul Auster’s The Country of Last Things; Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. And, thousands of pages of Mike Mignola’s epic graphic novel series, in which monsters from outer space eat every last person on the face of the earth. Our one potential savior gives the book its name, but the book tells us early and often that he’ll fail—and anyway, his domain is right there in the title: Hellboy.1
Camus and Shelley got reverential reads, but Hellboy’s apocalyptic vision stayed on my nightstand, its eerily-illustrated pages inched through in their entirety at least four times. (I stopped counting around the time I stopped masking.) Mignola mentioned years ago that he hoped to someday write a page that could make someone cry—I think he had succeeded when he wrote that, but certainly the point is settled by now, with his Eisner-award winning The Magician and the Snake. The illustrator of some of the most famous comic book covers of all time and father of a cinematic franchise four movies deep, “Mignola is on the Mount Rushmore of the greatest comic book creators who ever lived”2—but he is, in my view, among the finest drawers of the human form alive.
And of the inhuman form, as an inky show at Philippe Labaune Gallery opening this week elegantly attests. I snuck a peek as the works were being unpacked on the gallery floor, and the drawings are so lovely in their spare, black-and-white form, it makes you wish Hellboy had been published without color. Mignola’s artwork is often placed in lineage with Golden Age of American Illustration painters like N.C. Wyeth, with a twist of Lyonel Feininger’s expressionism:3 both are visible in Mignola’s work. While Mignola inherited some of Wyeth’s pliable human forms, Mignola’s use of black is all his own. Wyeth was a latter-day Impressionist with his paint; he used broken strokes to dapple on sunlight, and he avoided black paint, for the most part, in has fine artworks. Mignola, by contrast, is a poet of the shadows: forms emerge and recede from a ubiquitous, unfathomable blackness.
Many creators of popular literary heroes come to a point when they’d like to move on from their creations. But unlike Arthur Conan Doyle, Patricia Highsmith, and Agatha Christie, Mignola seems to have had his hero’s demise in mind from day one. In there somewhere is a vision of the true artist: a creator who wants to step away from his creation to let it stand or totter on its own feet. If Hell, Ink, and Water: The Art of Mike Mignola is intended to put a final nail in that coffin, it also invites an appreciation for what a fine coffin it is.
II. Divine Tragedy.
Here’s what the layperson needs to know about Hellboy: he is the son of a human and a demon, brought to earth by Nazis lead by Rasputin during World War II. He is a descendant of nobility on both sides—from King Arthur on the human side, and a Duke of the Order of the Fly on the demon side. He’s fated to rule England and to ring in the Apocalypse—but, having been raised by a leather-elbowed professor, he’d prefer to do neither of these. He has a Tom Waits-y appreciation for liquor and cigars and backroads America; he likes cats, and pancakes. He’s self-conscious about his horns and files them down to stubs, and he has a giant stone hand that is supposed to play some role in Ragnarök, but even after a dozen close reads I’m not sure I can explain that one. He’s a good guy, but his trajectory is distinctly downward.
Hellboy is falling into an inky black void. In nearly every adventure, he meets the villain, and then—Boom!—someone blows the floor out from under him, and he tumbles into an abyss. Mignola’s seas of black ink render the point poetically: as in the beginning, darkness is the essential state of things. There is only one way in Hellboy’s world—and perhaps in Mignola’s mind—and that’s down.
That’s the gist of the whole series, which began with a small comic book in 1993: there is only a downside. First a plague of frogs; then a Nazi robot from space; then a swarm of monsters from inside the earth; finally, monsters from outer space summoned by Rasputin. A flash of human-caused global conflagration ends it all, and our species’s time on earth comes to an end, a quarter of a century after the story began publishing. One of Mignola’s greatest gifts is to balance the comic against the absurd: it’s one bad thing after another, but the journey is neither funny4 nor tedious.
But one of the weird features of the series is that we have demons from many religious traditions and monsters from across literature—Frankenstein and ETA Hoffmann greet Hellboy in the underworld—but we don’t have much divinity. We go to hell, we visit with Satan; but we don’t get a Jesus or a God or a Yahweh or a Zeus. The existence of a heaven is sort of implied by the existence of a hell, but—then, there isn’t. It’s a strictly one-sided cosmology, bent on descent. The prophecy about the apocalypse turns out to be true; Hellboy’s reign over England does not. It is a world of inverted faith: no heaven, no god, just hell—no faith required.
That lopsided cosmos allows Mignola’s world to make a kind of mechanical sense—the kind of sense that the worlds of Superman and Jesus generally lack. (The problem of suffering is as real for Superman as it is for St. Thomas: If He is always watching, why does He allow suffering?). Tragedy and woe are natural phenomena; miracle and salvation are not. Imperfect, selfishly-motivated demons of moderate power and influence, tearing the earth apart—that’s plausible, even if you don’t buy Rasputin’s collaboration with trans-dimensional aliens.
I keep looking for some key to the saga, some way to rationalize a world only of monsters. Red-skinned and winged, but monsters in the simplest sense: creatures without creation, purpose, or reason. That resonated with me really hard in the meandering tragedy of Covid, but no less so as the world emerged from it. It reckons with the senselessness of loss; with the inevitable, certain, approach of death. This is why I keep returning to Mignola’s tale of the end of things: it’s sad.
III. Final Nails.
Since the death of Hellboy’s world in 2019,5 Mignola has taken on finite projects: an illustrated edition of Pinocchio; a miniseries about Frankenstein. Perhaps tellingly, these are things that yearn to be alive, in contrast to the Hellboy that was driven toward death. The short story is Mignola’s strongest form. The most decorated of these, The Magician and the Snake, grapples with the same themes of grief and certain doom, economically packed into five pages he wrote with his then-seven-year-old daughter, Katie.6 The magician makes a Promethean error, offending the gods by using a power beyond him; he understands that this overreach will bring his doom; and he prepares, with his friend the snake, for the end. It’s simple, but try to keep a dry eye as the magician explains to his friend that he cannot forestall the hand of death, “but now everything that was mine is yours, and I know that you will remember me.” It’s the same story as Hellboy’s, thousands of pages shorter, no demonology required.
The Philippe Labaune Gallery show can’t be blamed for giving us a few pages of Hellboy; it’s what the people are clamoring for, even if it’s not what they need. Explaining the genesis of the show to Forbes, Mignola sounded a lot like the magician at the end of The Magician and the Snake:
“I finally sat down with my daughter and said, ‘Listen, I'm old. This is all going to be yours. I can't imagine you want all of this. Pick through and see what you want me to save, or just want me to give to you, and then the rest of it we can just pass on to somebody else.”7
He doesn’t “want it sound like a garage sale. I do think it's among the best stuff I've ever done.” It’s hard to disagree—and harder still not to hope that there are many decades more of sumptuous, soulful drawings from this modern master.
Join us next week to celebrate the Emmys (eight days late) with a meditation on our favorite Emmy-winning TV show of the last year. Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
On view: Paul Shore | Whirligig.
Paul Shore | Whirligig is on view now through October 5 at 526 West 26th Street, 419. Open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 5 PM.
Around Town: Elizabeth Catlett at the Brooklyn Museum.
The Brooklyn Museum has just opened an essential, unapologetic Elizabeth Catlett retrospective. Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies leads with a fist, and begins to correct for her absence from the mainline of American modernism. As an adjunct to that monograph, catch the Met’s Mexican Prints at the Vanguard, a group show that gives some context to how Catlett found herself mixed up with political assassins in Mexico City. To find out why the US State Department revoked her passport, read our article about her fascinating career as artist and revolutionary:
I’m going to catch it from the nerds on this one, so please know that I know, and that I don’t care. Talking to the norms here in the sub-subs: Mignola’s stories about Hellboy’s world is a series of miniseries, all with different names, and the bulk of the story falls under one of those miniseries that became an ongoing series, B.P.R.D. Are you happy now, nerds?
According to Josh Weiss over at Forbes, “New York’s Philippe Labaune Gallery Hosting Exhibit Dedicated To Art Of ‘Hellboy’ Creator Mike Mignola,” Aug. 20, 2024.
Feininger is the better comparison—a great painter who also published a beloved comic strip.
I think there are two jokes in the whole series: one in the brilliant two-page story, “Pancakes,” and very near the end: Hellboy surveys a Manhattan lain waste by Godzilla-like monsters, and mutters, “God damn Giuliani.” Perfect.
Delicate matter, because, unsurprisingly, the character was actually killed off long before 2019; and, after an amazing miniseries called Hellboy in Hell, he returned to the world, just as it was in its death throes. Of course the publishing empire of Hellboy is alive and well, his earlier adventures chronicled in movies, comics, and books that will continue for a long, long time.
I cry every time I read it, and you can, too.