Mike Mignola knows that there’s one thing people will always think of when they think of his work.
“I have a one-sentence bio: Mike Mignola, the creator of ‘Hellboy,’” the comic book writer/artist quipped in an interview with TheWrap. “So everything beyond ‘Hellboy’ feels like just me getting to play. I’m super lucky in that after all these years — I mean, 40 years of doing comics — my favorite thing to do is still to sit at the drawing table and draw all day.”
That’s despite Mignola now considering himself semi-retired, having completed the epic story of “Hellboy” over his many years as a comic creator. Both “Hellboy” art and more of Mignola’s work is now on display in the artist’s first-ever gallery show, running at the Philippe Labaune Gallery in New York City through New York Comic-Con next month. The artist called the city his “favorite town.”
“The idea of having a gallery show in New York City is a really big deal,” Mignola said. “It’s been a really long time since I had an event coming up that felt, not like everything is riding on this, but that it has the potential to change the way I look at the future. It’s because of the paintings, finding out if there’s a market for that kind of stuff, finding out if doing more things like gallery shows is a possibility.”
Mignola is also releasing a new book from IDW, which contains all of the pieces being shown in the exhibition.
“I don’t think of it as an art book,” he said. “I think of it as the catalog for the gallery show. And I didn’t know that we were going to have an art book or a gallery catalog, but it made it much easier to let these paintings go, because I was very precious about the paintings, because I haven’t done a lot of them and I did them just for me.”
“Some of them are my favorite things I’ve ever done. And here at the house, they were just going to be sitting on a shelf, so the idea of selling them … It was like, yeah, but if I have a picture of them, so I could look at them and say, ‘Oh, look, I did that.’ So that made it possible to let the paintings go, assuming anyone wants them,” Mignola continued. “So to be in a room with 160-some-odd pieces of your best work? It’s pretty exciting. I honestly cannot wait to get in there and see what it looks like.”
One thing that makes the work on display so special is that Mignola hasn’t made the transition many other modern comic book creators have to producing their work digitally — and he’s thankful he’s never had to.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at artwork that … ‘Oh, I want to buy that,’ — somebody says, ‘Well, it doesn’t exist,’” Mignola lamented.
But the art in this exhibition are very much real, tangible pieces that exist in the real world. You can view these items as part of the gallery exhibition or in the new book, “Hell, Ink & Water: The Art of Mike Mignola” from publisher IDW.
Check out exclusive glimpses of the new book and exhibition, below:
