The Road to Hellboy ...

When listening to genre favorite director Guillermo del Toro discuss his love for HELLBOY, images of Wednesday afternoon at the local comic book shop the day new titles arrive and fans congregate to debate the latest twists in the lives of their beloved characters immediately come to mind. It's quite clear that the filmmaker is a true admirer of the Mike Mignola-created series and has been for quite some time.

"I've been a fan since the mid-'90s when the book first came out," admits del Toro. "HELLBOY came out, I bought it and I loved the images, but I couldn't follow the story. I found it a little disjointed and, to this day, I think 'Seed of Destruction' [the first book of the series] is not the best story in HELLBOY. To me, the best HELLBOY trade paperback is 'The Corpse' and the short stories. I think Hellboy as a character worked really great in a long arc 'Conqueror Worm' would be my favorite long arc story. But in 'Seed of Destruction,' I still felt a little bit of Mignola finding his footing on the character. Then in '97 when I was shooting MIMIC, they were publishing 'Wake the Devil' and I think that story made more sense to me. Suddenly, the stories of HELLBOY started having their own flavor and I became hopelessly addicted."