In Hellboy’s grip

Mike MIGNOLA knows weird, in fact weird is his job.

Giant demon worms, talking gorillas, boneless Malaysian vampires that hover like jellyfish -- these are the things he frets about on the subway. He is not a guy you can weird out. Or at least that’s what he thought before they came and before they yanked him out of his familiar world like some confused spook snatched to a seance.

They are Hollywood.

“The most surreal moments of my life,” Mignola says of the film industry encounters. “And some of the best moments.” Mignola is a comic book writer and artist of graphic novels that are sublimely unconventional, wicked smart and, again, just plain weird. His signature creation, Hellboy, arrives in film form in theaters Friday, and the early reaction to previews has been enthusiastically positive.

Hellboy is a hulking, half-breed demon who has a blue-collar approach to fighting evil -- chomping a cigar and grousing, if he’s going to hell it’ll be in a lunch bucket. There are some other comics-to-movie vibes at work (as a secret government operative fighting tentacled baddies he is among the “Men in Black” crowd, and his uncertain status between Earth and Hades makes him a less dour “Crow” figure), but the mythology is too rich and detailed to require comparisons.

And despite the Dungeons & Dragons arcana, it is actually quite natural that Hellboy might be a good fit on the silver screen. After all, his conceptual godparents are Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas.

In 1991, Mignola, who works out of his Battery Park studio these days, was a comic book artist drawing familiar heroes like Superman and Batman with a distinctive style -- his exaggerated human figures may not have fit the schematics of Gray’s Anatomy, but their barrel torsos, tapered limbs and kinetic quality reminded many fans of Jack Kirby, the most influential comic book artist in the genre’s history.

Mignola’s eccentric versions of Superman and other familiar heroes were as jolting as a fisheye lens and they made his work a love-it-or-hate-it topic. His affinity for the eerie earned him a gig as the illustrator on the comic book adaptation of Coppola’s take on “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” and his work was so strong that it was used as an editing guide during the film’s final phases.

The work also earned him an unexpected phone call one night. He was home watching “Hearts of Darkness” (“I really was, if you can believe it,” he says) when Coppola called to invite him for a pasta dinner at Zoetrope Studios. Lucas was the other guest that night, and after wine and cappuccino, the three sat down for a screening of the still-protean “Dracula” footage.

Mignola’s design work on the vampire’s castle made a fleeting appearance in the film. The experience had a deep effect on the artist, though. Hearing the filmmakers discuss and dissect the screening -- Coppola all ethos, Lucas all logos -- made Mignola reluctant to return to Marvel or DC Comics, the Pepsi and Coca-Cola of the genre. Before, getting a brand-name assignment, such as his stint on the Hulk, felt like a pat on the back. Now it seemed like backpedaling.

“I don’t know how I got into that room with them, really, but I came out of that experience having meandered for 10 years in a comic book career with no direction at all, and suddenly I’m in this place,” Mignola says. “I was seeing a world I never imagined. So then I’m thinking, ‘What do I do next?’ Another Batman book, another Wolverine comic? I decided to stick my neck out and try to do something new, something for me.”

So Mignola left the safety and stricture of the major comic book companies and, at a company called Dark Horse, he raised a Hellboy.

The first issue was in March 1994, by which point Dark Horse was an 8-year-old venture modeled not unlike an indie film studio with its artist-friendly attitude and risk-taking material by acclaimed creators such as Frank Miller, Dave Gibbons and Paul Chadwick. Hellboy has published sporadically ever since, although the film labors have kept Mignola so busy it’s been a year since the last issue -- which ended with Hellboy trapped at the bottom of the ocean. “I thought he’d be safe there in case this whole movie thing didn’t go well,” Mignola said.

The premise for the film is this: A Nazi occult project during World War II is meant to deliver a hellspawn agent of apocalypse, but the red baby (with horns and tail) who arrives is rescued by American forces and, as he matures, becomes a federal agent assigned to deal with the paranormal -- a sort of Fox Mulder by way of H.P. Lovecraft.

For Mignola, it was a character that spoke to his fascinations with pulp novels, old Universal horror films and all manner of folk-tale horrors. Those interests began, he says, in the sixth-grade in Oakland when he was mesmerized by a classmate’s report on Baba Yaga, the cannibalistic Russian witch of lore who lived in a hut perched atop chicken legs.

“I heard that, and I just thought, ‘Wow, this is for me.’ ” Comics like Hellboy -- ones that have complex mythologies and no Happy Meal tie-in potential -- have historically been treated on Hollywood sets with the same reverence as the catering table (pick it over, consume in haste, leave behind a mess). While films such as “American Splendor” and “Road to Perdition” have shown new hope for offbeat comics as source material, the banal adaptation last year of Alan Moore’s “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” was a crushing reminder of the norm.

The success of “X-Men” and “Spider-Man” have made it easier to escape the spoof mentality that yielded groaner films like “Batman Forever,” but the “Hellboy” film project predates them. Director Guillermo del Toro (“Mimic,” “Cronos”) set his sights on the character five years ago and pledged to faithfully capture “the cosmology, the unique world and visual talents” of Mignola. The director loves comics, but his taste always veered toward underground fare and he had no affection for the brightly colored, caped crusaders that define the genre for most. It was Mignola’s art and sensibility that pulled him toward Hellboy.

“Everyone who puts pen to paper for comics or film these days knows the name and the work and the power of his talent reaches far and wide,” says Del Toro, who also wrote the screenplay, which draws heavily on the narrative of Mignola’s comic books.

That reach led to another of Mignola’s “surreal Hollywood moments,” as he calls them. After Hellboy became a sensation among discerning comic book fans, the artist got another unexpected call. This time it was an invitation from Disney. “Would you be interested in a consulting role in an animated feature based on your art?”

When the artist arrived at Disney animation headquarters he found that his hosts had done their homework. An entire wall was covered with his artwork, dissected and analyzed with an almost mathematical scrutiny. It was as if government agents had trailed his art and laid out its secrets in cold surveillance notes.

“The worst part was I didn’t understand all the words and diagrams,” he says shaking his head.

The Disney executives, looking for an edgier feature film, had brought Mignola in from the East Coast to use his unique art as a stylistic prism -- they wanted to tap his imagination for ideas and also have their in-house animators “Mignola-ized.” The artist agreed and much of his concept for “Atlantis” tanked, but Mignola walked away from the experience with a greater understanding of his art and another oddball chapter in his Hollywood story.

With “Hellboy,” though, the stakes are high. It may be a $60-million movie to Revolution Studios and Columbia Pictures, which is handling distribution, but to Mignola, it’s his little red baby, after all. “I’m thrilled with the movie already,” he says, “so whatever happens next, this is already starting from a good place for me.”

The charm of the Hellboy character is that no matter the size or shape of his supernatural quarry, no matter how turgid the apocalyptic speeches, he sounds like a Brooklyn plumber rolling up his sleeves. The attitude is culled from Mignola’s dad, a cabinetmaker who shrugged “if he came home without a knuckle” because of a work mishap.

Mignola was thrilled with the casting of Ron Perlman in the lead role and, visiting the set in Prague, Czech Republic, he sat down at a lunch table with the actor in full makeup. Mignola began venting about personal problems and his red-faced buddy nodded and offered advice.

“Later I was thinking, ‘What would Freud say? An artist sitting there and pouring his heart out to his own character,’ ” Mignola says. “The funny thing is, at the time it seemed perfectly normal to me. I’m getting used to all this weird Hollywood stuff.”

Geoff Boucher can be contacted at geoff.boucher@latimes.com.