The ‘Hellboy’ Artist Makes a New Playground

BOWLING WITH CORPSES & OTHER STRANGE TALES FROM LANDS UNKNOWN, by Mike Mignola

I’m sure the artist Mike Mignola has, at some point, drawn a straight line, but it wasn’t recently. In “Bowling With Corpses & Other Strange Tales From Lands Unknown,” his work is at its most willfully cockeyed. Every tower and parapet stands at an improbable angle to all the others, every staircase appears on the cusp of collapse and the only things that look truly stable in this unfamiliar world — a new fantasy realm for Mignola, best known as the artist behind “Hellboy” — are the tree branches, the tentacles and the plentiful undead.

Mignola is justly celebrated as a visual stylist, not just of horror comics but of comics writ large. Where another artist might rely on grotesque specifics to frighten the reader, Mignola’s insinuating expanses of black ink conceal all but the most necessary details of a rich and malevolent world, filled with monstrosities, yes, but also oddities, many of them delightful.

The task of communicating complex information serially and simply challenges every cartoonist, and it requires an especially fine balance in work like this. If a page is too ornate, the reader can’t be sure what information is part of the progress from panel to panel. But if it’s too simple, there’s no way to imply or suggest something instead of stating it outright. To balance nuance and clarity, Mignola has become a kind of genius at reducing the lavish styles of his visual influences — mostly illustrators, among them Frank Frazetta and Arthur Rackham — to their essences.

His work is beautiful, marbled with pregnant shadows and full of weird, fun-to-look-at monsters, but it is also almost impossibly minimalist. Often his characters don’t even have faces because his silhouettes are so striking that he need barely draw anything inside them. And his stories barrel along at an entertaining pace, leaving us no time to wonder how, exactly, we have been conned into reading a whole page of implied noses.

As a writer, Mignola seems to have been working toward “Bowling With Corpses” for most of his career. “Hellboy” began life in 1994, when the revision and subversion of aging adventure-story archetypes were all the rage. Frank Miller was already drawing Raymond Chandler-flavored manga in “Sin City”; Gregory Maguire would fill in the salacious untold details of the Oz stories beginning in “Wicked” the following year; George R.R. Martin began having it out with H. Rider Haggard and Robert E. Howard in “A Game of Thrones” the year after that. Hellboy himself is an anti-Nazi crusader in a world largely inspired by the fiction of the notoriously racist genius of weird fiction, H.P. Lovecraft. (All these works, of course, spawned lucrative adaptations.)