Baked into the concept of Mike Mignola's Hellboy is the idea of the Apocalypse. And after decades as one of the most acclaimed franchises in comics, the big red guy's destiny is about to bring him to the final end.

Currently, the Dark Horse series B.P.R.D.: The Devil You Know, is dealing both with the increasing apocalypse on earth and the mysterious return of Hellboy to both the team and the land of the living. In the months ahead, Mignola (along with co-writer Scott Allie and an art team led by Laurence Campbell) will end the B.P.R.D.'s modern-day story once and for all. Even with a movie in the offing and a new series of expansive Omnibus volumes arriving regularly in comic shops, the comic book world of Hellboy has reached its conclusion.

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So where does that leave one of the most celebrated artists in modern comics? CBR caught up with Mignola to unpack his own plans for his work both inside and beyond the world of Hellboy. Below, Mignola digs into why he abandoned a new comic project, what final details he has to complete before saying goodbye to Hellboy and what smaller portents (like the return of Roger the Homunculus) mean for the grand finale to come.

CBR: The last time we talked it was around the end of Hellboy In Hell. You had wrapped the story and were ready to paint and do some personal projects...

Mike Mignola: Yeah, what happened to that? [Laughter]

I didn't want to say it! But it does feel like you're stepping back into the comics with a firmer hand than you have for a minute. Has there been a pull you've felt do do more writing or art there?

No. Basically everything I'm involved in now is stuff that I knew sooner or later I would have to do. The whole story of bringing Hellboy back into B.P.R.D. for the end of the series? That was always planned. And I knew my involvement, especially drawing-wise, would be minimal. The end of Hellboy In Hell did feel like, and in a large way was, the wrap-up of my involvement. But the end of B.P.R.D. is kind of "Phase 2" of the wrap-up of things. I'm actually doing the last five covers for Hellboy and the B.P.R.D., and I'm almost done with my fourth of the five. Now I'm feeling like I'm one and a half covers away from really being done.

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That doesn't mean I won't occasionally write a short story or do more down the line. But I'm still trying to focus on other things. The thing that's caught me by surprise is that when you wrap up your big body of work and are suddenly free to do whatever you want...I didn't think it would be as overwhelming trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do if I could do anything. [Laughs] I have spent a lot of time running in circles saying, "Am I going to do this, or am I going to do this?" Am I going to do another book? No, I don't think I'm going to do that. People have asked for years if I would do an Art of Mike Mignola book, and I'd love to see that book someday. But I don't feel I've done the artwork for that book yet.

So as of today, I feel that rather than try to get involved in another comics project – not that I won't draw some comics because I still love storytelling – what I'd really love to do is wrap my brain around the fact that I can sit down and draw whatever I want. And it will just go into that future Art of Mike Mignola. I want create a body of work beyond Hellboy.

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I was really struck by the image you drew after the Parkland school shooting in Florida. Aside from its very serious political statement, it stood out as a very Mike Mignola kind of image that had no connection at all to your previous characters. Is that the direction you're being pulled towards?

I guess, maybe. So much of the stuff I've drawn on my own really feels like I'm still dwelling in that kind of Screw-On Head/Hellboy in Hell world with that kind of architecture and Victorian era-looking people with floating skulls for heads. I love that kind of imagery.

But that shooting piece – "Enough" – that one was really an eye-opener. I didn't really think about it at the time, but to do a piece that doesn't really rely on any of my usual subject matter and just funnels basically rage and horror into a piece of art? To not have to think about "Where will this be collected some day" or "Is this the part of a larger body of work"? Instead, it was just directly responding to this one incident. And in fact until you just mentioned it, it never occurred to me to ask "Will that piece be collected in a future body of work?" I guess it could be. But I'm so geared to doing stories and for everything I do being a part of something, it's really hard to wrap my brain around saying, "I just want to do one drawing of something." I don't want to have to say, "If you do something, it needs to be collected. And if it's going to be collected, it needs to have ten pieces with it in a similar theme." I'm trying to break away from that mindset where everything is a book or is part of that larger thing and just draw, paint, whatever you want. That's what my brain is trying to wrap around.

Laurence Campbell's cover to B.P.R.D.: The Devil You Know #9

And I'm sure that's no easier when you're sitting down with Scott Allie and the rest of the guys going, "Okay, what is the ending of the B.P.R.D. going to be?"

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Yeah. And it's fine. I did start a comic a while back. I feel bad because I promised it to a publisher, and I started this comic. It was a non-Hellboy thing. I actually got 19 pages into it, and I thought, "It's just too much like other stuff I've done, but it doesn't quite work as well as those things." So I scrapped it. And the idea – which is part of the weird place I'm in right now – is that I can do 19 pages of a comic and go, "Nah." [Laughs] Every once in a while, I'll go through a phase where I cook up a bunch of short stories that I want to do, and then I kind of go, "Do I really want to get sucked back in to doing stories right now, or do I want to just draw some old buildings?" Because sometimes I just want to do six drawings of weird, old, rotted doorways. I just want to draw something that has no particular commercial value and isn't part of a book or anything. It's just, "Here's a picture I really want to draw."

Frankly, the Hellboy machine has been running with minimal input from me. So my days are freed up to see what I can do as an artist.

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Though necessity has called you back into this Devil You Know series of late. When John Arcudi left the book, he had said his piece, but there were plenty of stories unresolved still out there. Has it been a matter of that boulder rolling down the hill this whole time, or did you have to sit down at some point and actually plot out what will happen in the end?

At various points with John, we did discuss where the series was ending. But John was always a little cagey. I'd say, "Are we going to do this or this?" and he'd say, "I'll take care of it." John and I never had the relationship, except at the very beginning, where we'd really button down scene-by-scene where the book was going. Once he really made the book his, as long as things were going in the direction we'd agreed on, I was happy to give John as much room as he wanted to develop things as he wanted. And I did think – maybe John thought too, I don't know – that he would carry that book on to the very end.

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When John got to the point where he said, "I've done everything I can here," that was fine. You don't want a guy staying longer than he has anything to say. So when it came time to decide on who was going to write this thing, of course it was going to be Scott because he's the only person who's been there from almost day one, developing this world with me and John. So he was really the only choice for a guy to finish the series. At that point, Scott and I did sit down and really discuss where everything was – where John had left things, what had been done that needed to be wrapped up and that. John really did a pretty good job wrapping most stories up. It's not like he left us in a lurch. It was just a matter of what was left to do to get us where were were going.

Dark Horse is currently releasing a definitive six-volume series of Mignola's Hellboy work

And at that point, my thing was "If John is gone, let's just wrap it up in like six issues." [Laughs] I just wanted to bang it out and put this thing to rest. And it was Scott who was going, "Well...there's a lot of stuff we still wanted to do." And we agreed that we didn't want to get the book going for another ten years. We just trotted out a list of things we needed to do, stories that had to get resolved and characters that needed to be moved to certain places. And that list informed how many issues the last arc would be. Scott and I spent about two and half days with me holed up in a Portland hotel room, pacing back and forth and plotting the whole thing out. It was a lot of fun to do. And thank God for Scott who had not only been listening to my ideas and remembering all of them for 20 years, but he'd also been working so closely with John. So he was more knowledgable than I was about what John had done. It worked perfectly.

The idea of bringing a different writer in other than Scott never would have worked because you would basically be bringing in another writer and just telling them what to do. Or yu'd be bringing someone in to say, "Now the book is yours. Let's start it up again." But like I said, we'd gone so far down the road that it was time to find a way to pull all the strings together.

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Tell me about the Hellboy of it all. You've said over the years that when characters die, they don't go away, they get more interesting. What is interesting about having him back on Earth and with the team after his time in Hell?

Well without giving too much away or getting too Catholic about it, there had to be the living Hellboy, the dead Hellboy and then... whatever this is. Not only was I raised Catholic, but I read so much Michael Moorcock in high school that it made a magic combination because Hellboy is the doomed hero who doesn't get to rest in peace. So even at the end of Hellboy in Hell, you have Ed Grey saying, "Now you can go have your own life." But this ghost that's haunting Ed Grey's place is saying, "You're lying to the guy. You know he has other things left to do." So I always knew there was a list of things Hellboy still had to do, and it was going to suck when he had to do them. I gave him a little bit of a vacation in that house in Hell.

Originally, the final arc of B.P.R.D. was going to be longer, and so he would have had more time to rest in that house and do whatever he was going to do there. But when we cinched the series a little tighter, we realized we had to bring him back at this point to give him the time he needs to do what he's got to do on Earth.

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There's always a sadness – and I hope it came across in those three pages I drew – to this guy who kind of always knew his real, "final" rest would be temporary. He had shit he had to do. At the very beginning of Hellboy In Hell, there's a conversation between Ed Grey and Baba Yaga and it's established there that he has things he still has to do. I've always had that list of things, and now, Hellboy's going to do them.

As soon as we started plotting the series, I knew at this point I'd have to step in and draw those couple of pages just so we could make that bridge between Hellboy In Hell and the B.P.R.D. It's not that Laurence couldn't have done it, but for me, it connected the series.

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Roger's reappearance was a big surprise for folks too. And I feel like he's kind of "the one that got away" from you. He was original "your" character when Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. split stories, and it seemed that you had to give him up to the other book after a while because of where HB was going. Then when Roger died, he was one of the few characters who never really came back in any way. Had you been wanting to put him back on the board, so to speak?

Well, that was one of those rare instances where I stepped in and did the "Goodbye Roger" sequence. I did Roger's afterlife, and we saw him as this baby sitting under a statue in an idyllic afterlife that he got. I really thought it was just a beautiful place to leave him, and anything that involved pulling him out of that place just felt really sad. Of all the characters other than Hellboy, Roger deserved to get his wish – to be a real boy.

It was sad to bring him back, but I also realized that Hellboy and Roger had a particular relationship, and Hellboy was never there when Roger died. He never got to say goodbye to Roger. So it worked very neatly to have this slight reunion. Also: the mechanics of how to bring Hellboy into the world were tricky, and I thought using Roger who has the relationship with Hellboy as a bridge worked. And it's not something that's capable of being "explained" – the logic of how that worked. But somewhere in the plotting of this thing, I or Scott or the magic combination of the two of us realized that Roger was the proper doorway to bring Hellboy back.

In fact, if you look way back at the end of The Storm & The Fury, there's this apocalyptic kind of thing. It's right when Hellboy dies, and Alice is running back to where Hellboy is in this tower. At some point, the voiceover is saying something about all these characters that still have a part to play. And what you see over Alice is Abe, Liz and Roger. I purposefully didn't want to put Hellboy up there because we were about to kill him. But Roger was up there because at that point, I already knew that Roger would eventually be the bridge to bring Hellboy back. Scott and I have been talking about this stuff for literally years, so there's a lot of conversations that are "Someday we'll do this." We knew where we were going. We didn't know all the exact beats, but we knew the roles characters would play.