Earlier today, Dark Horse Comics announced Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and Helena Crash artist Warwick Johnson-Caldwell will unite for Mr. Higgins Comes Home, an over-the-top vampire story influenced by the movies.
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“This one started when a mutual friend pointed out Warwick Johnson-Cadwell’s affection for sad werewolves. Then Warwick and I exchanges a few words about vampires and that was it,” said Mike Mignola. “Mr. Higgins Comes Home is my very obvious nod to any number of old Hammer Dracula films and my all-time favorite vampire film, Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers.”
In Mr. Higgins Comes Home, preparations begin at Castle Golga for the annual festival of the undead, as a pair of fearless vampire killers question a man hidden away in a monastery on the Baltic Sea.
The mysterious Mr. Higgins wants nothing more than to avoid the scene of his wife’s death, and the truth about what happened to him in that castle. However, these heroic men, sworn to rid the world of the vampire scourge, inspire Higgins to venture out and to end the only suffering he really cares about–his own.
“Working on a project with Mike Mignola is an amazing thing to be able to do,” said Warwick Johnson-Cadwell. “His art and storytelling is a massive influence and inspiration for me and chatting with him about werewolves, vampires and the like was very exciting. When Mr. Higgins Comes Home turned up in my email I was in awe. It’s a rollicking vampire romp right in the Hammer vein and it’s a pleasure to be slapping that crimson goop they used for blood all over it.”
This outlandish tale, set outside the well-established “Mignolaverse,” will go on sale in comic book stores on October 25, and in bookstores on October 31.
It’s not surprising to see Mignola tell tales outside of that world: while he’s always gone back to it eventually, it’s not like he set out to make it a shared universe in the way of Marvel or DC.
“It was simply having too many ideas and too many places where this thing wanted to spill out. And then you couple that with artists who come to you or you meet that you would like to work with and suddenly all these things are possible that I never imagined when I started. I really did think Hellboy would just be my book,” Mignola explained to ComicBook.com in 2012. “But as soon as Hellboy outgrew the BPRD, the idea of all of these characters I had created having no home…it just didn’t make sense. So the trick is to make sure it’s an organic, natural expansion and not an explosion where you suffer from quality.”
