Mike Mignola

I didn’t read the names of creators on comics when I was little, I just knew that I related to the anger that Wolverine kept bottled up. The name Mignola didn’t mean anything to me as i delved into Wolverine: The Jungle Adventure, until years after it had already shaped my style. As a kid I just knew that something about this story felt different: the weight of the figures, the way shadow did meaningful structural work, not just as decoration. Long before I tried translating illustrations back into dimensional sculptures, Mignola had tipped the scales towards how those depictions should manifest. His later work introduced me to Lovecraft, but more personally to a way of handling Lovecraft; acknowledging the hostility and bigotry baked into that source material without apologizing for it, and building something new atop it regardless. It seems that Mexican folklore and tradition set a framing of refusal to separate magic from science, the sacred from the mundane. Mignola embodies that same refusal. It makes his worlds feel infested with life to be interacted with rather than a stage to be observed.