Mike Mignola: I don't know exactly. I guess I haven't looked at those numbers. Maybe we haven't gotten that royalty period yet. Certainly I saw that with the first film. I assume there was something like that with the second film but I didn't really pay attention.

Crave Online: Do you have the best of both worlds, getting to do the story you want in the comic but seeing where else it could go in the hands of Guillermo del Toro?

Mike Mignola: Yeah, it really is great because as much as I'm involved in the film, it's very much his thing. I think in a way, it's more comfortable when it's clearly his thing because then I can really be separated. I'm not going, "Ooh, you didn't do this right, you didn't do that right." Clearly at this point, we are in Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy. The first picture was kind of about handing off that character to him and the second picture is about him running with that character.

Crave Online: What surprises you about where he's gone with it?

Mike Mignola: Almost everything. We didn't write down our original version of the Golden Army which wasn't called the Golden Army because we didn't have the Golden Army yet. But if you were to hear what we originally came up with, it would be radically different. The basic idea is the same but it took on such a different life as he wrote two or three drafts of the screenplay.

Crave Online: What was the original idea?

Mike Mignola: Well, the original idea was the thing with the elves and the prince. I don't know if there was a sister yet. I'm sure the whole Abe Sapien/Princess thing wasn't in there. And we didn't have the Golden Army. It was going to be something, he was going to wake up something else. There was going to be some kind of giant, I think very much an old German impressionist film image. I was thinking something like the old German Faust where this big devil thing would kind of wake up at the end. Gotta stop that thing from happening. Night on Bald Mountain from Fantasia, it was that kind of a thing. It was going to be he's going to do this, he's going to do that and that thing, the Angel of Death is going to wake up. It's very much del Toro's personality to say this one gigantic character with wings, let's have 200,000 little mechanical robots.

Crave Online: Is there any image or scenario from Hellboy II you wish you could have written or drawn for a comic book?

Mike Mignola: Well, I love that whole puppet sequence. Of course, I got to design those puppets so that's the one part of the film where I look at it and I go, "You know, that part's kind of mine." But based on what I would have done with it had I drawn it would have been radically different. It would be interesting to see me do the troll market because my version of the troll market is probably the most different from what del Toro did as anything else. Mine would have been dark and spooky and it would've been empty. It would have one guy way down at the end of the street rattling a big key. "Remember, you're the Beast of the Apocalypse." It would have been very Seventh Seal. It would have been very bleak and stark and nobody would have seen the movie.

Crave Online: You talk about a 30 year plan for the Hellboy comics. As far as society may get by then, do you imagine addressing events of the real world?

Mike Mignola: The beauty of what we're doing in the comic is, just in the next couple months, we're making drastic changes to our physical world. So it'll be very clear that I own this world. I don't know exactly who the president is but we're going to start altering the landscape of the planet, because the whole Hellboy story, dealing with the Beast of the Apocalypse and this whole plague of frog things that's going on in BPRD, we're really dealing with in my world, the last 100 years of life on earth. So I've got a whole different plan regardless of who's president.

Crave Online: That's interesting. I wasn't thinking politically. I was thinking if we have flying cars in 30 years, will they show up in Hellboy?

Mike Mignola: I suspect the way Hellboy is going, there won't be much left. There won't be any gas and people will just be running for their lives from stuff. But if there's flying cars, we might work those in.

Crave Online: So if they're all equal, which Hellboy incarnation is your preference, the movies, the comics or the animated movies?

Mike Mignola: Well, I'm the guy who writes and draws the comics so that's my version. To me, that's THE real version. That's the version that's my storyline. The film is great and to a lot of people, that will be the real version of the character. I have to live with that but the story I made up and the story I continue to make up is the story of the comics.

Crave Online: How do you feel comic books have changed since Hellboy?

Mike Mignola: I don't know. I've gotta say, I don't pay as much attention as I used to so I'm kind of dimly aware of what's going on. I've kind of disappeared into my own little [world]. I've created my own little world and my own little world keeps getting bigger. So I've got my hands full just dealing with my little collection of books so I'm not as aware of what's going on as I used to be.

Crave Online: Does Guillermo's Hellboy world reflect any of what you thought in the beginning?

Mike Mignola: Guillermo's Hellboy world is a lot more fun I think than my Hellboy world. It's a lot more colorful and a lot funnier. My Hellboy I think is getting bleaker because I'm dealing with the whole Beast of the Apocalypse thing in a different kind of way. I think they're very different.

Crave Online: Yet it feels cohesive with the comics.

Mike Mignola: Yeah, yeah, it's really just a different [take]. It's the same thing. It's just his personality laid into it. Like it's got a color filter on it or you're turning up the volume or you're very much amping up the humor. So I'm very happy with what he's doing. We did plot the story together and it's basically the same rough idea we both had, but he really grabbed a hold of this and really felt like this was his movie, so he kind of ran in his direction with it.

Crave Online: So when did you work with Guillermo on the film?

Mike Mignola: I had a lot of input at the beginning. Guillermo and I worked very closely on the first film but as I get a little bit of perspective on it now, what I realize is, the first picture was all about helping him create his version of Hellboy. The second picture, even though he and I came up with the original storyline together, at this point it was very much his character. So on the second picture, there was a lot less of him saying, "Would Hellboy do this? Would Hellboy do that?" Because I think he had taken ownership of that film character, which is fine by me. I've got my version of the character. I'm very happy to see him do his version of the character.