This week on my Robot 6 column, I finally got around to someone who I always knew I'd spend some time discussing. Mike Mignola's approach to comics storytelling is an incredible rarity: something that presents action/adventure style content with both complete clarity and a high level of individuality. Mignola's Hellboy comics were probably the first place I ever noticed that something unusual was happening with the flow of images I was reading, and I doubt I'm the only one: those books stand by themselves as beautifully constructed portals into something no other comics have managed to even come close to. In the column I talked about Mignola's debt to Jack Kirby, the friction between his impulses toward minimalism and maximalism, and his non-narrative flourishes, among plenty of other things. Read it all right here.
2 comments:
Really, Mignola's work often seems like the ideal for genre comics. Nice to look at, possesing a style that's beholden to past masters but still distinctly belonging to the artist. Willing to take the time just be artistic and stylistically innovative while never sacrificing clear storytelling. Adept at building atmosphere, good at doing both character moments and action sequences. And of course he can come up with monsters like it's nobody's business.
I've slowly snapping up the Hellboy Library Editions and loving them, as well as the more recent BPRD hardcovers, which start out a bit rough, but once Guy Davis starts to hit that sweet spot.
Yeah, man. It's hard to even criticize Mignola in an intelligent way cause the authentic reaction is just to be like "see, he does it the right way!" So great.
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