At this point fans of Hellboy are no doubt acquainted with the name of Tad Stones. Stones has been immersed in the world of Mike Mignola's creation for some time now. As Supervising producer and co-director, he's been the driving creative voice behind the two animated Hellboy features to be released on DVD in the past year: 'Hellboy: Sword of Storms' and 'Hellboy: Blood and Iron'.
With 'Blood and Iron arriving in stores last week, the same week the new live-action 'Hellboy' movie started principal photography, Comics2Film chatted with Stones about the films and what's next for Hellboy.
Rob Worley for Comics2Film (C2F): I just watched 'Blood and Iron' this weekend, and thought it was quite good. I'd seen 'Sword of Storms' when it aired on Cartoon Network as well and --
Tad Stones (TS): Were you able to see it later on DVD?
C2F: Not yet. I have a copy but I'm giving it away to one of my readers this month.
TS: When we were color-correction, we worked in HD so that eventually it can be an HD release. I was surprised at how much more quality there is in HD when it comes to cartoons. They're pretty much colored in lines. I didn't expect a big jump in quality but it really did have an impact.
Then when I saw it on normal television, I was appalled at how degraded the image was.
The DVD is somewhere in the middle. The DVD looks good and there's all the commentary and extras on the DVD.
C2F: Are there plans to release it in high def?
TS: That's more a company-wide plan. I'm not following what Anchor Bay [the DVD arm of Starz Home Entertainment] does. But it's all about, "is there a perceived demand?"
C2F: How did you come to be involved with Hellboy and his creator Mike Mignola, and Guillermo del Toro, the director of the live-action films, and producer of the animated films?
Lots of payoff. Lots of cocaine. [laughs]
No. I was always a Hellboy fan, when it first came out. I got to work with Mike on a spin-off of Disney's 'Atlantis'...a TV show. Basically I was in the position to hire Mike to design monsters for us.
The series was cancelled and we put a couple of the episodes together on DVD and Mike and I started a friendship there.
When I left Disney finally I did a couple of Hellboy scripts as samples. Working with Mike: I pitched him premises, he picked out the premises he liked, he gave notes. He pretty much did the same thing with outlines and scripts.
By the time we got to the actual movies, Mike was already comfortable with me knowing how the characters should be written and portrayed. There wasn't the uncomfortable, "well here's the guy who's gonna rape your child" moment.
In addition to that, I was always on the Hellboy message boards and when Guillermo started talking about animation, I made contacts with him too.
By the time the movies came around, Guillermo already had me in mind and Mike certainly felt comfortable with me and I was kind of in the center of things as the project came together. I've never been attached to a project before, but I came with the package when it was bought by Film Roman Studios.
C2F: Did any of those early pitches for Mike evolve into 'Sword of Storms' or 'Blood and Iron'?
TS: No. One was completely original and it was Hellboy and Liz Sherman dealing with the F.B.I., and the B.P.R.D. was definitely a second-rate organization in the FBI's eyes. So that was a new and very creepy story.
The second one started with a short story by Mike, which made up act one and then turned into a whole different story to show how even some of Mike's smaller stories could be turned into a half-hour.
C2F: What was the inspiration for 'Blood & Iron'? There's almost a reverse-Scooby-Doo thing happening, with a landowner who isn't faking ghosts to scare people, but instead has real ghosts that he hopes will attract tourists.
TS: [Laughs] Uh...strangely enough we did not go to Scooby Doo for our inspiration.
C2F: That's good.
TS: We wanted to do something completely different. Mike knows I love the Celtic folklore, fairies and things like that, but that is the central story of Guillermo's second film ['Hellboy 2: The Golden Army'], which is currently being shot.
In the middle we toyed with showing Hellboy's animated origin and came up with a story called "Origins". Lloyd Levin, one of the live-action producers pointed out that, "yeah, it's not the same story but it's got a lot of the same elements as Guillermo's first movie and we want to do new things with the animated brand."
Mike took that to heart. I forget how we ended up on vampires. We batted around a lot of ideas and Mike loves the vampires as creatures. We started out doing something totally original.
At a certain point Mike said, "this just seems like the time to bring in Hecate." Once we did that, that brought in other elements of "Wake the Devil," the second trade paperback. We didn't start off bringing "Wake the Devil" to screen, but we ended up bringing a lot of elements from it into the movie.
C2F: Talk about the "Memento" structure that you have on Broom's flashback story.
TS: What happened there was: at a certain point we realized that we were twenty minutes short on both movies. In the first movie we added in a sub-plot of Abe and Liz.
In this movie we decided to tell more of the story of Broom's first adventure. Up to that point Broom had been more of an academic. Certainly he had encountered the supernatural through mediums and séances, but this was his first mission where he had to face evil in a physical form.
The original flashback that you see, the first one where they go up to a castle and bad things happen was always part of the 'Blood and Iron' script. When I was writing it, I didn't want it to feel too generic, so I said, "Let's give this little group some definition. We'll have a couple of police officers. We'll have the village priest and the reason they go in the castle is this young guy who has lost his fiancé."
It just seemed like, without much explanation, we got a sense of this group. Why I thought the priest should lose his will to go on in the middle of that flashback, I have no idea, but thank goodness I did. When it came time to stretch out that story, there was so much more we could do with the priest character that became a major element in the movie.
Going backwards just allowed for some neat juxtaposition. It came down to, "There's no point in going forward with the flashback. What if we go backward?"
It turned out that several parts of the story really were in synch with going in reverse.
Mike didn't tell me at the time, but he though it was a great idea that had no chance of actually working. He told me that just before we did the commentary for the DVD and I said, "thank you for not telling me because I probably wouldn't have tried it."
I think Kevin Hopps, the screenwriter really fleshed out that stuff with some great ideas.
C2F: Mignola's work is very distinct and yet Hellboy has been reinterpreted many times, as a live-action movie, in your animations, in various comics as well. What special challenges do you have in making the Hellboy animated be it's own entity but still preserve the Hellboy feeling.
TS: Visually it was part of the deal that the animated series have a different look than Mike's work. That was for licensing reasons and, more importantly, that's how Mike was more comfortable with it. He does not like to see people copying his work because he only sees how they don't succeed, not where they do, and it drives him nuts.
Had that not been the case we probably would have done a more Mignola version of the style that was used in Disney's 'Atlantis.'
So the rest is trying to get as much of the comic onto the screen as we could.
We analyzed how he did frame panels and see if we could change the staging. Much of what Mike does in the comic is counter-intuitive.
In a heroic story, in general, the first thing in the bag of tricks is to do an up-shot of the hero. He looks more powerful that way.
Mike hardly ever draws an upshot.
That stuff is probably more subliminal if anything. Mostly it was to get the pacing and the mood right. To not be afraid of half-seen things in the darkness. Not everything has to be in bright light. If something's at night, play with that idea instead of illuminating everything on the screen.
Mostly, capturing the atmosphere came from working with Mike on story. He's a very visual storyteller. As you talk through an idea, he often instantly sees it in his head and he'll describe the staging and he'll describe the colors quite often. He'll describe how he sees the sequence playing out.
Most of my phone calls early on were recorded just so I could get all that stuff.
C2F: Do you find any resistance from the fans who want it to look just like Mike's drawings?
TS: More so on 'Sword of Storms' and then everyone accepted it as a given.
C2F: The posting on your blog from last Friday seems to indicate that the series is done. Are you sealed off from doing a third one at this point?
TS: No. That was more about ending the blog than ending the movies. Until [Starz makes] a decision, there's nothing to blog about.
Even if they decided not to make another animated film, the rights eventually revert to Universal, who's doing the multi-million dollar summer blockbuster with Guillermo del Toro, so I'd think they'd be interested in keeping the animation going.
We'll have to see how the sales go and how Starz reacts.
C2F: What is the premise of the planned third movie?
TS: 'The Phantom Claw' is another original story, although it does take from that story we briefly considered. You do get to see Hellboy's animated origin, but its part of flashbacks in a story about the mad science side of Hellboy.
You get to see Rasputin. He knows that Hellboy had not cooperated in bringing about the apocalypse and he has another plan. He starts manipulating people to bring about the end of the earth, as we know it, in a different way. It involves elements of the original summoning of Hellboy.
It's chock full of fun stuff: We have Von Klempt and his floating head. His cybernetic apes. We've got the Frankenstein-like army that he's building. We've got a brand new demon that we introduce...and Lobster Johnson!
We see him in flashback. We see him as the movie serial version. He's part of the story all the way along. We even see Hellboy as a little kid on the air force base being a fan of Lobster Johnson.
C2F: I'm glad you mention Lobster Johnson, and also the cybernetic apes. They almost seem forgotten about in the Hellboy stories.
TS: Mike did a lot of the World War II stuff early on, so much so that people identified that with the book early on. It was always supposed to be a lot more than that and his storylines have moved into other areas.
There's a Lobster Johnson mini-series coming out. I don't know that there are any cybernetic apes in it. There's a lot of the same kind of creepiness. I've seen some pages and they're looking fantastic.
C2F: What is the weight of responsibility you feel with Hellboy? Is it difficult to take on a character with a faithful fan base?
TS: I've never been associated with a project before where I had such a strong sense that people were looking at it with expectations.
I had done movie spin-offs with Disney, but it wasn't such a vocal group. But then, this was pre-internet so maybe there were just as many incensed fans back then but now they have a way of making themselves heard.
C2F: Are they really incensed? Or do you find that they typically like the movies? I'm a Hellboy fan since issue #1 and I think the movies are great.
TS: Most of what I've seen is overwhelmingly positive.
I wish more people know about it. Every once in a while I run into a fan who says, "Oh, the DVDs are out?"
I just want to pull my hair because it's like, "You're the fan! You should know this!"
I think people appreciate what we did and what we kept. You hear, "Gee, why couldn't it have Disney-level animation." Because we didn't have Disney-level money, that's why.
Most of that criticism is just the nature of the beast. It's a very low-budget film that we put as money of the budget as we could onto the screen. We did the two movies overlapping each other as one long production at a break-neck pace. I'm really pleased with what we got out, having produced it in such a fashion.
C2F: If sales warrant it, how many Hellboy movies do you foresee doing?
TS: There is no plan to do any finite number. Mike and I have talked about stories set on the Sargasso Sea. Stories set in the South West. All different adventures of Hellboy.
He's very much a pulp character, inspired by the authors of "Weird Tales" and "The Spider" and "The Shadow" and all of that. I think we probably would have gone through all that material and done the Hellboy slant on each. We would have had something as "non-Hellboy feeling" as Hellboy in Burroughs' Pellucidar.
Ideas are not a rare commodity when you're working with Mike Mignola. Part of his storytelling is to think about ideas for a long time. Then when somebody says, "We should do a caveman story," [Mike would say,] "Well I thought about a caveman story once."
They develop over time in his head. He's got way more stories in him than he'll ever get down on the page.
C2F: What is in the future that you can talk about?
TS: I'm deciding that. Film Roman likes my work. We've done a work for hire project since 'Hellboy: Blood and Iron' and the people who are behind that would very much like to work with and my associate producer on another one.
There are projects back at Disney.
After working with Mike, it's been very inspirational to see how he pushes himself and to see what he's accomplished trying to design something that would be really fun for him to work on and it turning into the 'Hellboy' monster.
He's encouraged me to take one of my animated ideas that I've played around with for a long time and put it in comic form. So I'm toying with that.
I did spend about three decades coming up with ideas to make money for a corporation that was not me, and they continue to make money off those ideas. So, maybe I want to do something creatively in a different direction.
I would probably have to pencil an entire issue just to find out how long it takes me to pencil an entire issue when I'm only doing it after hours.
One of the friends I made in the world of 'Hellboy' was David Petersen, who does 'Mouse Guard'. Again, playing with an idea that he believed in, that he thought would be neat to do. So he did these fully painted stories of Mice on a medieval quest, and it's taken off like crazy.
I can look at that and say, "Wow, I wish I could do that." Or, I can at least make an attempt.
C2F: And it's great to see something like that succeed. With both 'Hellboy' and 'Mouse Guard', I don't think either of those seemed, commercially, like a no-brainer to anyone.
TS: I think that's key, if you're going to do something on your own. It's probably silly to try to chase some commercial whim. By the time you get to market, that fad has passed, or there's already somebody doing it better than you, or you're seen as just one more knock-off.
You might as well come up with something you're really going to enjoy doing.
My problem is getting out of the television animation mindset. Working in that industry, you cannot develop a personal style. You're always trying to make the characters on model. A character designer could work on things as diverse as 'Powerpuff Girls' and 'Batman', so where do you have time to say, "If I'm gonna draw a character, what's it gonna look like?"
I find that I just have a lot of bad drawings to get out of my pen. Or, I'll do a neat drawing, but it looks sort of like 'this artist' and that's not Tad Stones.
I'm finding it's important not to be too precious with the artwork, where I'll erase things and start over again. With me actually keeping some of the fresh feeling I get in a normal sketch or a doodle, has more appeal than something I labor over.
C2F: We'll be looking forward to those comics and any new Hellboy movies that are coming. It was a pleasure talking to you.
TS: Well thank you very much.
'Hellboy: Blood and Iron' is available in stores now, including the C2F Shop.
Starting tomorrow Hellboy takes center stage in our DAILY GIVEAWAYS.
C2F readers from all over the world are invited to check out the daily drawings over the next four weeks for hard-to-find Hellboy stuff direct from Starz Home Entertainment, like store-premuim copies of 'Blood and Iron', exclusive Hellboy animated T-Shirts. One lucky winner is going to collect a premium Abe Spaien Maquette from Sideshow Collectibles. Keep tuning your browers to channel C2F!
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