Hell, Ink & Water: The Art Of Mike Mignola

Mike Mignola, The Ghost Bell, 2024. Watercolor on Illustration Board, 15 x 10 in.

By DANIEL MAIDMAN September 25, 2024

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been a fan of Hellboy since 1997, when my friend who knew all the coolest comic books said, “Here, read this.”

A key component of Hellboy has always been creator Mike Mignola’s distinctive visual style. It fit hand in glove with his sense of humor, a mix of the absurd and the menacing. This may be why it has been difficult for the movie adaptations to capture the feel of the comics – so much of their sensibility is conveyed not in the words, but in Mignola’s linework.

For all that, when one reads a comic, one barrels onward, eager to gobble up plot. And so the compelling qualities of the drawings themselves take a back seat, in one’s consciousness, to the scripts.

For his first gallery show, “Hell, Ink, and Water” at Philippe Labaune Gallery, the textual narrative has been set aside. The drawings and paintings, both linked to specific comics and free-standing, have been isolated on the wall, leaving the viewer no option but to confront and contemplate the work as visual art.

It is a revelation, allowing the motifs and ideas underlying Mignola’s unique sense of droll threat to flower into decipherability. When his lines and shapes are not martialled directly into service of a written plot, they arrange themselves instead to express the metaphysic of his universe. And it emerges that the core quality of his universe is decay. Everything is organized around decay. Everything responds to decay. Everything emerges from decay and returns to it. Mignola’s universe is a universe of that frenzied half-life between vitality and obliteration.

Consider his Hellboy: Weird Tales – Cover, a 2022 ink drawing.

Mike Mignola, Hellboy: Weird Tales - Cover, 2022. Ink over graphite on Bristol board paper, 17 x 11.50 in.

The central element is a human skull, incompletely rotten – it retains one eye. It is of tremendous size, its weight toppling the headstones on the hill on which it sits. It has already half-subsided into the earth: mushrooms sprout from it and roots descend from it.

Curling in and around it are tentacles. One extends toward a lone figure standing atop the skull. This figure is like a man, but his proportions are distorted, and something is wrong with his brow. He has evidently just chopped off the end of the marauding tentacle with the sword he holds loosely at his side.

The history of Mignola’s influences is compressed into this artwork and its title. He cites pre-code comics, the ones that told luridly grotesque tales frowned upon by Congress and parents. He cites the short stories these comics themselves drew from, chiefly the manically detailed, violent, and pessimistic worlds of Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft. He showcases certain motifs of gothic fiction and weird fiction – the grave, the skull, and the tentacle.

But his drawing is not homage alone. He uses the elements of work he admires in order to express his own vision.

Consider good health and vitality as a matrix of information. Health is orderly. It is regulated and predictable. Therefore much of the available information in a matrix of good health is devoted to repetition: the repetition of cells, of heartbeats, of neural signals, of hormone cycles. There is a great deal of meaning, but information is nowhere near its maximum.

Consider, contrariwise, the information content of a state of total mess, of sand or dust or heat. It is maximal but meaningless, a noise without a signal.

Poised between these two extremes, health and annihilation, is decay.

Shortly after an organic system dies, its density of information spikes. The regularity of vital structure remains, but it has been invaded. A diversity of invaders remakes the system: heat, moisture, chemical decay, bacteria, maggots, fungi, and so on. A riot of invasion breaks down the orderliness of life. During this period, the grand order of the body gives rise to a surging chaos of competing sub-orders of death and new life.

Decay is that overwhelming state where information and meaning are both at a maximum.

This is the state which it seems to me animates Mignola’s imagination. On the dark hill of his drawing, forms are jumbled together, and yet each one is distinct and legible. Their relations are comprehensible. But they seethe. The drawing itself seethes, with almost random little dashes scattered over the white areas. They do not express forms or textures so much as activity, the proliferating activity of a system in a state of transformation from life to vanishing.

Atop them all stands the figure, Mignola’s iconic Hellboy. In this classically triangular composition, he takes the hero’s place at the apex. But true to Mignola’s vision of a cosmic state of decay, the role of hero is compromised. Man does not reach ever upward toward God. No God, no final state of order is available. Hellboy, a demon who has elected to side with the good, is shown as being capable only of beating back the most aggressive elements of chaos. In the moment of triumph depicted here, his shoulders are slumped and his shadowed eyes stare wearily into the empty distance. He takes a breath before resuming his fight. He is alone in this dismal universe. That’s it. That’s the fate of virtue in a universe of decay.

Consider next Old Vampire, a 2023 watercolor.

Mike Mignola, Old Vampire, 2023. Watercolor on Illustration Board, 14.25 x 10 in.

This painting foregrounds other elements of Mignola’s outlook. The brightest point in the composition is the vampire’s face, corpse-pale and surrounded by a blaze of snowy hair. He has nasty little fangs, sharp and yellow, and blood runs down his chin. His eyes are glowing red almonds.

The vampire is thematically central to Mignola’s metaphysic. The vampire is a person who has died but refuses to cease his activity. If a corpse is invaded and consumed by living elements of its environment, the vampire inverts this process, a dead thing invading and consuming the living. The process itself remains the same: decay. The vampire is a walking agent of decay. And he is not without consciousness. But his consciousness is not the same as ours. In his hideous image, Mignola uses the eyes – the windows of the soul – to reveal the degenerate consciousness of decay itself, blinking and malign.

At the same time, Mignola’s sense of humor begins to emerge here. There is an upper limit to how seriously one can take this pervasive atmosphere of horror. And if one is not going to run screaming, the only thing left to do is laugh.

This vampire, like anybody else, likes some decoration in his home. He’s got some framed pictures. We frame pictures that are important to us. This belligerent asshole is a vampire, so the pictures that are important to him are skulls and flies. He’s not especially good at hanging them – death can afford to be careless – so they’re irregularly placed and crooked.

There’s a skull lying discarded on the floor. He really is a slob.

His home may be a mess, but he likes to make a good impression when he goes out. He’s a natty dresser, except his clothes date to when he was alive. And of course he’s gotten blood on his cravat.

He has wings, but the wings aren’t what allow him to fly. Clearly, he can fly as an act of pure will, maybe accompanied by a spooky note on a theremin. The wings, therefore, are vestigial. As vestigial structures, they’ve shrunk. They’re just stupid, useless little bat wings.

These are all jokes. They’re funny. That central monstrosity – the dim acquisitive consciousness – is contextualized within an ordinary sociology, producing endless humor at the boundary between the sublime and the banal.

But the ordinary sociology has itself been skewed by the proliferative quality of decay: images breed images, tropes are heaped on tropes, and the entire affair comes off as a madcap carnival of perversity and destruction.

Much more could and should be said about the works in this show, but a close look at these two images suffices for me to convey the striking qualities of Mignola’s art when considered in isolation from his narrative comic books. The show taken as a whole is a giddy delight, and if you have a chance to stop by while it’s up, I highly recommend it. On view through October 26, 2024. WM