Princess c/c with set.

Mythic stories fall into several categories. There are sagas, epics, and fantasy stories called “märchen.” These stories depend on something difficult for us to conceive these days: Simplicity or the “Logic of the Fairy Tale.” In other words: things are just what they are, because that’s just the way they are. What I’m trying to do is create a more complex moral dilemma. The faun’s ambiguity [continued page 231]

The plates express emotion

–Negative space in the ribs pops open

Red Hot gears and hot oil lubricate the insides

“Amber” column with interior illumination.

–Scene of the princess escaping when they discover about the tooth fairies and then, once they’re in the box, Abe touches her belly. That’s when he says that he knows. The trick is how to [?] HB.

NOTES FOR P.L.’s AUDIO commentary.

GDT: This [above] is my first sketch of the Golden Army, which fortunately was highly improved. I wanted them to have these golem-like proportions. I wanted them to be cute, and I wanted them to all be eggs that transformed into the open figure here.

On the right [opposite] is one of my favorite designs, which is Cathedral Head. It says, “The man with the city in his mind.” It was one of those designs that just came out fully formed in my head. I did a sketch, and it’s very similar to the way it came out in the movie.

^{NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 25B}

would be unusual in “marchen.” These stories frequently examine or teach a moral lesson, exalting it or exposing a particular flaw. If the story is a parable or doctrinal, one of its goals is to delineate the characters as “types” in order to illustrate this basic lesson, characters which make the story whole and who are also contained by it. The lives of these “types” can and must have links with the past and the future but their role ends with the story

In a magic story, the flow is more important than the logic. Man invented monsters to explain the entire universe. Once man began to live in an organized way, with a “social contract,” an abyss was opened up between his instincts and his thoughts, and monsters started to REPRESENT another universe altogether: man’s inner universe. The pagan prefigures the social and offers us a glimpse of the deepest reaches of man’s soul, articulating a primordial, savage universe, populated by fauns and ogres and fairies

“The man with the city in his mind.” 11/1/06

MY DAYS WITH DEL TORO

^{MIKE MIGNOLA}

^{An early sketch of Rasputin from del Toro’s third notebook, Page 10B.}

I’M A LUCKY BOY. I first worked with del Toro on Blade II, sometime in late 2000. We’d met a few years earlier when he was first trying to get Hellboy up and running. We’d stayed in touch while he took all kinds of meetings—meetings he kept me out of because (as he told me later) I would not have survived them. He was almost certainly right. Anyway, when it became clear that this Hellboy thing was going to be a hard sell, he took on Blade II and brought me along. I’m pretty sure this was mostly to see if we could work together, on the off chance that Hellboy would actually happen. It certainly was not because I knew anything about being a preproduction artist. Though I served no real function (my title was “Visual Consultant”), he brought me with him to Prague to scout locations. It’s that trip that I’ll always remember: discovering the wilds of eastern Europe together for the first time; wandering through endless ruined (and yet somehow still functioning) factories; wondering if (or when) our very scary driver was going to pull over into the woods and shoot us; hunting for a really good Kafka puppet (I still maintain that he should be wearing a hat); descending into the Prague sewers (which we discovered are coated in semi-transparent living goo); and just laughing like crazy about a whole lot of stuff I can’t repeat here.

The less said about the actual design work I did on that film, the better. Although del Toro and I like a lot of the same things (art, books, movies, etc.), when it comes to design I am sort of a minimalist, a “less is more” guy. He is very much a “more is not enough” guy. Often I would start a design and then he would hand it over to one of the other designers (usually my genius officemate, TyRuben Ellingson) to add a whole lot of stuff that would light up and spin around. The running joke was that if you could get steam to spurt out of the thing (whatever it might be), del Toro would really like it. The great artifact I have from that time (along with a bug-eyed, green vampire puppet) is a particularly terrible drawing I did of an autopsy table. It was so pathetically simple that del Toro was actually at a loss for words. He gently took my pencil from me and drew in Elmo and Big Bird standing behind the table. The look on their Muppet faces spoke volumes. That was Blade II.

Of course, we did go on to work together on both Hellboy films. On those I got to be there from the beginning (Hellboy II literally started with the two of us sitting in a room having no idea what we were going to do), through preproduction (I contributed a bit more on these films), filming, postproduction, and all the strangeness that comes after. I not only got to have Guillermo del Toro adapt my comic book character to film (which in my world is pretty much like winning the lottery) but I got to watch him do it. It was an amazing experience. And if I never set foot in another production office or sit on another film set, it will be okay, because I’ve done it—and I got to do it with him.

^{NOTEBOOK 4, PAGE 31B}

Floor is white ash

The Temple of the Angel of Death.

BIGGER!

Jupiter. Machine Vox Von K.

The pendulum of G.A.

–[?] bottles in the eighteenth century

It was a handicraft similar to that of “ships in bottles” with scenes of daily life or religious motifs.

–Law Hand. Trained to write legal documents.

–UNUS MUNDUS. A unitary world (everything is everything).

–Every day is an opportunity to affect the world—

–The human species can he divided into two types: “the tragic man” (introverted) and “the conqueror man” (extroverted). Socially, each one has tools to ensure the continuity of his own type and survive. MARTYR/TYRANT

–“There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so” Hamlet.

VFX-BOOTS, BAGS, TRAINING, WARP GEARS, PROPS, JACKET. ROOF in the LOCKER ROOM

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Pigeons or crows in the meeting—

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–In April Navarro will pass through London. We talked about scouting in Ireland for the final scene

Gas comes out of J

GDT: Here [above], you can see Johann emptying himself, literally, on the floor of the locker room, next to a photo I bought of a dead baby. I bought a bunch of old photos in Budapest, and one of them was a dead baby. And it was really, really disturbing.