“I wanted it to be clanky and brutal, like a huge piece of farming equipment”: Artist Duncan Fegredo On Creating ‘Giant Robot Hellboy’
Mary Beth McAndrews
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Artist Duncan Fegredo is no stranger to collaborating with the legendary Mike Mignola, creator of the beloved giant red man known as Hellboy. Together, they’ve worked on such stories as Hellboy: Darkness Calls, Hellboy: The Wild Hunt, and Hellboy: The Storm and The Fury. Now, Fegredo and Mignola are getting the band back together, along with colorist Dave Stewart and letterer Clem Robins, for the three-part miniseries, Giant Robot Hellboy.
Read the full synopsis below:
In this all-new series, Hellboy is kidnapped and hooked up to a massive mecha-Hellboy for a mission on a mysterious, faraway island, but the island might just put up a fight of its own.
Dread Central spoke with Fegredo about working with the legendary Mike Mignola, crafting Hellboy’s mech suit, and how he creates those incredible backgrounds.
Dread Central: So I know Mike [Mignola] said he isn’t particularly a fan of Japanese monster movies, but are you? What’s your relationship to mech films/anime?
Duncan Fegredo: I’m not so much a fan of the movies as I am of the creature designs. As a kid, I only saw photos of those things in magazines like Starlog and Fangoria. I didn’t have access to the films themselves beyond the odd screening of an early Godzilla movie. I loved Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion creations like Talos and the skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts, I just found them more convincing and otherworldly than a guy in a rubber suit stomping around a miniature set. But I loved the designs, and the idea of monumental creatures and robots. There is a moment early in Giant Robot Hellboy that is my tongue-in-cheek homage to ‘the guy in the rubber suit’, it’s very silly and I’m laughing just thinking about it.
DC: There’s so much mech anime and manga out there, so I’m curious if you need any research into any specific works as you were designing Mecha Hellboy.
DF: Well of course Mike Mignola had already designed Giant Robot Hellboy back when he was producing all of those wonderful sketches during the pandemic. In fact, I think the character appeared six or seven times, so I had all the references I needed right there. Obviously, I did make design tweaks as I became familiar with drawing the character, small stuff so I could make sense of his articulation. I didn’t really realize how much I had changed the design until later when I had to check on an element of Mike’s original sketch, I was a little alarmed.
Fortunately, Mike was happy with the way it was developing and said nothing. He is, after all, used to me making problems for myself. I was foolish enough to draw all of the skeleton army back in Hellboy: Darkness Calls, remember? It seemed like a good idea to me! So if I wanted to add all these clunky joints to Robot Hellboy’s right hand, who was going to stop me? But you are right, there is a wealth of incredible mech design out there, but clearly, I didn’t refer to it because I didn’t want it to be too polished. I wanted it to be clanky and brutal, like a huge piece of farming equipment.
DC: Your backgrounds are SO detailed and gorgeous. What’s your process in layering all these elements to make this world feel so real?
DF: Thank you, I’m glad they work for you. Like any artist out there I search online for visual references and I build up a library of whatever I need to create the world for that story. It is rarely that simple, though. Reading the script I jot down ideas, sketches of possible location designs and set dressing, keeping in mind the flow of the story.
The problems start where you can’t find the precise reference to match your ideas, you end up having to Frankenstein all the disparate elements together. If I was remotely sensible I’d find a picture of a location and stick with it, planning out the action around it. The problem is once I have an idea I like I can’t dispense with it just because I don’t have the right reference. I mean, I could, but then I know I’m going to be stuck with a compromised design that I hate, just to make life easier.
A perfect example is the lab in which most of the events take place. I could have gone with a far simpler design based on an old Russian nuclear facility. But I’d already visualized the multilevel design in a thumbnail and loved it. I was already doomed!
DC: What do you love so much about Hellboy?
DF: It all starts with Mike Mignola’s art and his storytelling, and that of course predates Hellboy. Even aside from the stories I was always drawn to great drawing and the mechanics of visual storytelling, and Mike handled these things like nobody else. Hellboy has evolved over time, becoming ever more sophisticated, but even from the early days Hellboy for me has been like a subset of comics. It has its own visual language unique to Mike Mignola.
I can’t begin to describe it without sounding like a crazy person, but I can tell you from experience that even following Mike’s script, his thumbnail visual for the page, it was nigh on impossible to make the page read the same as if Mike had drawn it himself. Not that that has ever stopped me from trying to make it work. I love the way that Mike has built upon Hellboy’s relatively simple monster-of-the-week beginnings to something rather more intricate, the way he has connected disparate strands of stories and made the tapestry of the overarching mythology so much richer. No matter how grand a scale or dark the stories get, Mike grounds it all with a wonderful sense of the absurd. If he ever starts to take himself too seriously you can be sure that he’ll undercut it with a BOOM! It’s clever stuff.
DC: What’s your process for taking Mike’s sketches and ideas and bringing them to such epic life?
This is comics, it is always about the story. No matter the location, creature, or character that needs designing it all has to serve the story. There is nothing more important. If Mike has sketched the design for a creature then that pretty much stays as it is, it becomes a matter of finding a way to capture that design and draw it in a way that feels natural to you. Then you have to work out the way that character or creature moves, give it some characteristic beyond its appearance.
So for the robot, you ask yourself, how can I make this feel huge? Can I reflect that in the way he moves? He’s a little tricky as his face is much less mobile than Hellboy’s so you find a way to light it that might suggest a particular emotion. There are a couple of smaller robots that Mike designed; they have unusual proportions and it was a lot of fun drawing them in such a way as to suggest they had a loping, rolling gait. Most of this stuff occurs as you are working out the page layout and the panel compositions. There are a million subconscious decisions that go into making a page work, not just on its own but along with the page preceding and the one after until the story is told.
Big Robot Hellboy is out from Dark Horse Comics on October 25, 2023.
Categorized:Interviews
