Hellboy Creator Admits He’s Had “Mixed Feelings” About Previous Adaptations Before The Crooked Man

Mike Mignola, the celebrated comic book artist who created Hellboy, says the newest cinematic take is the most true to the source material yet. Hellboy: The Crooked Man is set for a release in the UK in September, and sometime later this year in the US. Mignola praises the movie for its fidelity to the source material, celebrating that he was involved from the beginning, whereas with prior adaptations, he came in later in the process, and sometimes things he didn’t like snuck in before he had a chance to object to it.

In the comic it’s based on, Hellboy heads to the Appalachias where investigates hauntings, witches, and the eponymous Crooked Man, a suspected demonic entity.

“So often I would come in late on projects where somebody else had already put the pieces together in a way that didn’t quite fit,” Mignola told GamesRadar. “And this time, I got a chance to say, ‘We’re going to do The Crooked Man, we’re going to stick to that story.’ We need to add a little bit of backstory. So we borrowed it from one other story so we didn’t have to make up new stuff.”

Mignola has repeatedly said that some of his favorite moments from all of Hellboy were in The Crooked Man, so he’s exciting for audiences to see it. On the other hand, it isn’t a 1:1 adaptation, since they had to blend in elements from other Hellboy stories for time.

“There is a particular moment in the church that I loved so much. I thought, ‘Are they going to add special effects to that?” It’s just a quiet little moment. It could easily get cut, but it stayed all the way through,” Mignola said recently. “Not that I didn’t like the other movies or love bits and pieces from the other movies, but it was just… I was so grateful to see somebody that really did want to put [them in there], because at some point everybody says, ‘Oh yeah, we’re going to put your comic on screen,’ But this is the time that it happened.”

Hellboy: The Crooked Man stars Jack Kesy in the titular role. Jefferson White, Adeline Rudolph, Joseph Marcell, Leah McNamara, Hannah Margetson, and Martin Bassindale will also star. Hellboy: The Crooked Man is produced by Millennium Films, and is set to be released by Ketchup Entertainment. Bryan Taylor, Mignola, and Christopher Golden co-wrote the script.

Hellboy: The Crooked Man is set for release later this year.