Recently, MTV asked Hellboy creator Mike Mignola whether there would be a Hellboy III and what the story would be about. This question spawns from a statement made by movie director Guillermo del Toro, who said that, “The third one would be facing your destiny, if such a thing exists, and making the ultimate decision.”
This creates a problem though, for Mignola, who hasn’t actually finished writing his creator-owned comic book series. “The problem is, what del Toro’s talked about to me is that ‘Hellboy III’ would be the end of Hellboy,” Mignola said. “And here’s where we have the big conflict. My version of Hellboy in the comics is a finite story, but it’s going to take me 15 years to get to the ending. If he makes ‘Hellboy III’ and it’s the death of Hellboy, I’m left doing the comic going, ‘But I’m not done yet.’”
So this asks a question that, I honestly don’t think has been encountered yet: what happens to the creator-owned books that get optioned for movies, but haven’t finished their comic run yet?
It would be like if J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books had taken longer to come out than the movies. Would we have seen a seventh movie before the seventh book came out? I don’t think so, but if we did, what would it be?
“My Hellboy is not going to have kids,” Mignola added. “My Hellboy is going to die, but I want to be the one who does that. And if del Toro does my ending, there won’t be a lot of surprise when I get to the end of the comic.”
And with more and more comics being optioned off — Scott Pilgrim, Y The Last Man — and some being optioned off before they’ve even reached a second issue, what is going to be the priority? The comic or the movie?
That’s very interesting indeed!
I know that Japanese artists have run into this problem when translating their manga into anime. Fullmetal Alchemist was based on a Manga that was (and still is, I believe) running when the anime series finally ended. In the DVD interviews, the creators talk about how it got to a point where the anime had reached the same point in the story as the manga, and so had to deviate and create their own story from there. This led to them making up their own identities for the two or three remaining sins, since their identities in the manga hadn’t been revealed yet.
In the end, I doubt it hurt the manga much because comics are much more popular in Japan than they are here, sadly. I’m very curious to see where this goes.
Though, I’m a little surprised to hear Mignola sounding so put off by Del Toro’s intentions. I was always under the impression that the two of them were damn near best friends, and that Mignola’s approval and involvement in the movies was of the utmost importance to Del Toro when making them. Now it sounds like he’s swiped the rug out from under Mignola (which would suck if that’s the case, because I really, really love Del Toro).
Either way, I’m still skeptical because I can’t see a movie studio in this day and age letting a director decide to kill their big franchise character in the third movie.
Wow, I never considered any of this. Comics should be top priority but I don’t see that happening.