^{BLUE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 90}

* If you love “meee,” make ‘er bleed.”

* The A/B/C from the Quiroga plan.

* The needle’s thread —>CHRIST.

* Everybody talks about the Devil’s evil, God’s evil.

* He is: a man of God † / Goat’s leg and I’m the virgin devil, pure evil.

* She is the devil/of the devil.

* CITY IN FIRE 1912.

* SAMURAI (police story)

* “How to MASTER U’R V. GOMES” Finger exercises

* PROOF: Move earlier

* I… you… I love your… the way you dress the way… your hubcaps…

* Somebody who’s deeply in love tells his loved one: (who is interested only in “X”) I trust you and I want us to be together but I don’t “X” you (or something like that). (She—or he—says “Yes”). or “aha” very simply, casually.

(A) When he opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue, a small thorn emerges from its tip and secretes a liquid.

^{BLUE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 91}

(1) Extended arm

(2) Fist turns, arm shrinks.

Wrist changes position.

Natural “hinge” instead of a common human elbow.

(3) Pupil activates reptilian membrane in his eye

When the pupil dilates, a second eyelid slides up over the eye.

* Somebody tells him something tragic about his worst enemy and when he is alone: “THAT’S NICE”

• GDT: Now these pages [above, left, and opposite] are full of notes on vampirism that make it all the way to Blade II and The Strain. The stinger, the nictating membrane. It’s funny. These were done in ’93, years and years and years before. I write, “When he opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue, a small thorn emerges from its tip and secretes a liquid.” When I was a kid, I had a fascination with the origins of vampirism, and in eastern Europe, the vampire, the strigoi, have a stinger under the tongue.

MSZ: So you were actually designing your vampires back in 1993 in these drawings?

GDT: Yeah, yeah. These were ideas I couldn’t put in Cronos. I was making an inventory of vampiric stuff. Then this idea of the tumor, like a parasitic heart growing in the human heart, came to me at some point. My thought was, “Okay, how does it actually happen?” A vampire bites you, the virus spreads, parasitic organs grow next to your heart. They suffocate the heart. The patient dies, and then the vampiric heart starts beating and the vampire wakes up. That idea gave birth to The Strain.

^{Del Toro wanted Damaskinos (Thomas Kretschmann), the vampire king, to have cracked, white-blue skin,}

• MSZ: So then we come to this illustration [opposite] of Damaskinos, the vampire king.

GDT: The idea here with Damaskinos was an exploration in color. Back then, I wanted to evoke a guy that looks like he’s from a Bruegel painting—like an aristocrat from the Renaissance. And the idea of the skin being made of cracked white-blue marble? Like, see the striations of the marble? It’s a demonstration of how old he is, and it comes from Cronos. I tried it first in Cronos, but the makeup was not good enough. And I tried it again here, and guess what? The makeup was not good enough again. I tried it yet again in Hellboy II with Prince Nuada. I think that came out decent. It was not marble by then; it was ivory. I’m bound to try it again.

MSZ: And then there’s a halo, almost like a saint.

GDT: I was trying to evoke wall portraiture, so I wrote some fake Latin, too. Completely fake.

MSZ: And the notes you have along the periphery about 1930s motion detectors, a body that twitches and then appears to come alive, but that is really covered with squids. What was that for?

GDT: Well, that is all in Mountains. In a way. Not all of it, but some of it. The 1930s motion detectors are a good idea. [laughs]

^{An idea he had been toying with since Cronos.}

^{NOTEBOOK 3, PAGE 33 B}

– Cannibalistic squids in the whole torso of a victim. Animals are a part of a cave’s texture (walls).

– They see the body twitch and the think: ALIVE!!… but when they turn it, it’s covered with “squids”

– 1930’s motion detectors for the ice—

It is both sad, sad and very apparent that in this, the “age of communication” no one calls.

– Dead animals in a circle

– Under the ice chase w/ gun to take a breath

– In Hellboy, we’ll use grays, blues, greens, etc., and except for Chinatown, things Nazi, and Hellboy himself, we won’t use reds

– Diagonal beams “a la” Piranesi.

– A man is dismembering a corpse. Someone knocks at the door. He wants to speak with the man’s wife to sell her a vacuum cleaner. NOT TODAY. NOT A GOOD DAY. DAMASKINOS ON THE BLADE II POST 1/21/02.

HELLBOY

^{Page from Rasputin’s journal by Mike Mignola.}

^{Storyboard panel of Sammael by Simeon Wilkins.}

^{Drawing of Hellboy by Mike Mignola given to del Toro when wrapping Hellboy preproduction.}

^{Sculpture depicting Hellboy’s confrontation with the Behemoth.}

^{Rasputin (Karel Roden), flanked by Ilsa (Biddy Hodson) and Kroenen (Ladislav Beran).}

^{Storyboard panel of Abe Sapien by Simeon Wilkins.}

^{Concept of a young Hellboy by Wayne Barlowe.}

^{Sammael sculpture by Spectral Motion.}

“AT ONE POINT, I was going to do Mimic, and Jim Cameron said, ‘Aren’t you afraid people will pigeonhole you as a horror director?’” Guillermo recalls. “I said, ‘I’d love that!’”

Artist and writer Mike Mignola—the creator of the Hellboy comic book series—is a kindred spirit, someone who happily let his passion for horror tropes define his place in the world of comic books. “I’ve just always liked monsters,” Mignola said in a 2012 podcast interview with Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. “Since I was a little kid, it was always the thing I found interesting. It’s always what I wanted to draw. It’s always what I wanted to read.”