Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and artist Duncan Fegredo will team with colorist Dave Stewart and letterer Clem Robins for what could end up being the most brilliant Hellboy story of all time — Giant Robot Hellboy.
The project was inspired by Mignola’s pencil drawings from Mike Mignola: The Quarantine Sketchbook — as well as his fellow artists Geof Darrow and Art Adams.
“Giant Robot Hellboy is my very obvious nod to all those Japanese giant monster movies—which I actually have no particular love for. What I DO love is listening to Geof Darrow and Art Adams TALK about those movies—so really, I guess this series was inspired by those guys,” Mignola said. “I had the idea for this one a long time ago but figured it was too silly to actually do—then the pandemic came along and I started to do all those sketches I would post online. I had never given a serious thought to what a giant robot Hellboy would look like but I knocked out a few sketches and I liked them—and so the thing started to seem like something that could actually be done.”
While Mignola did the initial sketches, he felt like the idea would work better with a different artist.
“But I knew I wasn’t the artist for it and I knew both Arthur and Geof were busy with other things, so the only other artist I thought of was Duncan,” he said. “I had no idea how Duncan would respond. Too silly? I didn’t know, but I figured I’d pitch it to him and if he said no that would be an end to it. The rest is history.”
The description for the series is fairly simple, as most brilliant ideas are:
In this all-new series, Hellboy is kidnapped and hooked up to a massive mecha-Hellboy for a mission on a mysterious, faraway island, but the island might just put up a fight of its own.
“Hellboy awakes to an out-of-body experience and simultaneously has to deal with the usual fallout from mad scientists doing their thing whilst learning to walk again,” said Fegredo. “Come to think of it, that pretty much describes my return to collaborating with Mike Mignola… if you enjoyed my previous forays into grand scale storytelling, whoops, I did it again!”
“It was a thrill to be working with Duncan again,” said Mignola. “The man can draw anything which is very nice for a writer. What is special about Duncan is no matter what you ask him to draw, no matter how difficult or complicated—he will make it MORE complicated (and, of course, more difficult) . Everything ends up being so much more than you asked for and Duncan will endlessly curse HIMSELF for overdoing things—and we will all sit back (eventually) and marvel at this amazing thing he has created.”
While Mignola provides the variant cover for the first issue, he did manage to get Darrow and Adams on board doing variants for the second and third issues. Look for the first issue of the three-issue series to arrive Oct. 25.