Hellboy was entirely the comic I wish someone much more talented than I was doing, because I would have been a huge fan of that comic. But nobody was doing it, so it fell to me to do it.

What keeps this industry alive is creators doing their own work. Once you change a costume or origin enough times, it's a dead body - you're just electrocuting it and keeping it sort of shambling on. There is a lot more creator-owned stuff now, and some of it I look at and go, 'Oh, that's his pitch for a TV show. That's his pitch for a movie. That's him saying oh, this kind of thing sells.' I didn't do that.

Hellboy was entirely the comic I wish someone much more talented than I was doing, because I would have been a huge fan of that comic. But nobody was doing it, so it fell to me to do it.

With a rasping cough, the vampire shakes its head. "It was you who called us. All of you, with your war. The roar of your cannons shook us from our quiet graves.

Lady, I was gonna cut you some slack, 'cause you're a major mythological figure...but now you've just gone nuts!

Things do look pretty grim, but I think there are more laughs in Hellboy in Hell than there are in B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth. I think Hell is getting nicer and Earth is getting worse. Once we figured out what we were doing, the whole point of the Hellboy/B.P.R.D. stuff has always been evolution. The kind of evolution we're seeing on Earth is nasty evolution - part of this kind of evolution is that you have to wipe out what was there before you can replace it.

My thumbprint is on every single thing that happens with Hellboy. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do professionally, letting someone else draw the main Hellboy comic. He's so much mine. But I still have no intention of ever handing over the writing of the main Hellboy comic to someone else. That character is my baby.