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?
