“It Is Too Much For Any Man – Living Man Or Ghost. Leave Me To My Books.”
I love Hellboy, and Hellboy is where I first learned to love the work of Mike Mignola, but Hellboy is not my favorite thing that he has done. My favorite things by Mike Mignola are the odd little stories that he wrote and drew to accompany The Amazing Screw-On Head & Other Curious Objects.
Here, more so than anywhere else, Mignola’s many gifts expressed themselves at their most eloquent. His surrealism, his humor, his pacing, his many and varied literary and artistic influences – from folklore and classical literature to the pages of yellowing pulp paperbacks.
By the time The Amazing Screw-On Head & Other Curious Objects saw print, Mignola was no longer drawing the Hellboy books and the various attendant volumes that had spun out from them – at least, not mainly. A wide array of other artists had taken up residence in the world that he had created, even as Mignola himself quietly withdrew from it.
That withdrawing took the form of Hellboy in Hell – arguably Mignola’s magnum opus, the culmination and extrapolation of much of the world he had painstakingly built over two decades.
While obviously tied to the universe and events of Hellboy in ways that the stories in Other Curious Objects were not, Hellboy in Hell also sampled from the same techniques and approaches employed in those stories in ways that Mignola’s Hellboy never really had before – creating a bridge, of sorts, between the Hellboy stories of old and the lands unknown that Mignola was about to explore.
Bowling with Corpses & Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown feels a lot like the fulfillment of a promise. As of this writing, I have only read it once, and it is a book that will be a subject of study to me for years to come, so I can’t say for certain how it stacks up against the highest highs of Other Curious Objects, but I can say this: It feels like Mignola has arrived at the place he has been traveling toward for years now.
Who knows how long the stories from Lands Unknown will continue? Mignola says that he already has at least two more collections of them in the works, and Ben Stenbeck – probably my favorite non-Mignola Mignolaverse artist – has said that he will be working on stories from Lands Unknown as well.
What I know is this: I have pored over the pages of the tiny handful of stories in Other Curious Objects probably more than any other in my entire life up to this point. When I was a kid, I used to read those Crestwood House monster books and lose myself in the black-and-white stills from movies I had never heard of, let alone seen. Each one felt like a gateway to a world of imagination. Like an entire story – indeed, a plethora of stories – just waiting to be told.
Every panel in Other Curious Objects felt like that to me – and every panel of Bowling with Corpses feels the same. In this book, Mignola has distilled countless dreams and nightmares, inspirations and insights from throughout his career into something that feels at once familiar and unique.
“For all those writers who transported me to lands unknown way back when,” begins Mignola’s dedication in the front of the book – and Bowling with Corpses by itself is enough to transport me and countless other writers and other artists of the future to an infinite array of lands unknown for who knows how long to come.
