Mike Mignola

"All I really want to do is draw monsters"

 Mike Mignola was born September 16, 1960 in Berkeley, California and grew up in nearby Oakland, the eldest son of a tough and leathery cabinetmaker.  His fascination with ghosts and monsters began at an early age (he doesn’t remember why) and reading Dracula at age 12 introduced him to Victorian literature and folklore from which he has never recovered.

 

After graduating from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1982 (hoping to find a way to draw monsters for a living) he moved to New York City to begin a career in the comic book field.  Starting as a bad inker for Marvel Comics, he swiftly evolved in a not quite so bad artist on comics like Rocket Raccoon, Alpha Flight and The Hulk.  By the late 1980’s however he began to develop his own unique graphic style and moved onto higher profile commercial projects like Cosmic Odyssey (1988) and Gotham By Gaslight (1989) for DC Comics, and the not so commercial Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser (1990) for Marvel.  In 1992 he drew the comic book adaptation of the film Bram Stoker’s Dracula for Topps Comics.

In 1993 Mike joined several other comic book creators (John Byrne, Frank Miller, Geof Darrow, etc.) to form the Legend imprint at Dark Horse Comics and there he created Hellboy, a tough and leathery occult detective who may or may not be the Beast of the Apocalypse.  The first Hellboy story line (Seed of Destruction 1994) was co-written by John Byrne, but Mike has continued writing the book himself and, as of this writing, there are 9 Hellboy graphic novels (with more on the way), several spin off titles (BPRD, Lobster Johnson, Abe Sapien and Sir Edward Grey), 3 anthologies of prose stories, several novels, 2 animated films and 2 live action films starring Ron Perlman.  Hellboy has earned numerous comic industry awards and is also published in a great many countries.

 

In 2001 Mike also created the award winning comic book The Amazing Screw On Head  (adapted into an animated TV show pilot) and in 2006 co-wrote with Christopher Golden the novel Baltimore: or the Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire, published by Bantam Books.
Mike worked on Francis Ford Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), as a production designer for the Disney film Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) and was the Visual Consultant to director Guillermo del Toro on Blade II (2002), Hellboy (2004), Hellboy 2: The Golden Army (2008) and his upcoming Hobbit (2012) adaptation.

Mike lives somewhere in Southern California with his wife, daughter and cat.