The Amazing Screw-On Head

I don’t think I’ve ever written about Mike Mignola on here—rather unfortunate, as he’s a figure of some significance in the wider monster culture space, and one of the most unique artists in the mainstream/mainstream adjacent comics sphere of the last thirty-plus years. His major work is, of course, Hellboy and its various comics and multimedia offshoots, an entire universe likely worth exploring in depth at some point. In Hellboy, a milieu with some moderate superhero influence also becomes one big repository for every occult, paranormal, or folkloric concept Mignola and his collaborators see fit to include, everything from werewolves and vampires and black magic to man-made abominations, space aliens, and other-dimensional eldritch entities. It’s a classic Monster Mash series—maybe one of the classic Monster Mash series—a form pioneered by lifelong horror/monster fiction fans to encompass all their favourite creepy things (for other examples of this, there’s Castlevania, or if you want a more kid-friendly version, maybe even Hilda.) Even with all the obvious influences going into the work, though, Mignola manages to put his own stamp on it, especially with his stylized, shadow-lined artwork, which finds the appealing middle point between German Expressionism and Jack Kirby.

For someone looking for a bit of Mignola’s style in a form more succinct than the sprawling Hellboy and BPRD universe, there’s The Amazing Screw-On Head, a singular take on very similar material whose primary difference from Mignola’s main series is its more overt focus on comedy. Originally published as a one-off comic from Mignola’s regular collaborators at Dark Horse Comics (and since included in a book with several other short comics), it gained additional notoriety when it was adapted into a single pilot episode for a potential animated series on Sci-Fi Channel in 2006, a few years before the channel rebranded itself as the ever-perplexing SyFy. The pilot was one of those early forays into Internet focus testing, with Sci-Fi uploading the full thing on their website and using the feedback to determine if they should greenlight more episodes—which they did not, in fact, do. Watching it again after seventeen years, it feels like something very specific to its era of pop culture, and probably the single most faithful attempt to bring Mike Mignola’s art to a non-comics medium.

Amazing Screw-On Head is a period piece, and that decision alone reflects a certain sensibility. For things in the horror mould, period settings feel like a particular obsession, especially when it’s the nineteenth and turn-of-the-century America and Europe—the entire steampunk genre, of which this is at least adjacent, is an example. This could be because so much of the foundational literature in horror, like the works of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe and Bram Stoker, come from this period, and the Gothic aesthetic so many of these things traffic in feel especially tied to that time (possibly because the Universal horror movies of the thirties and forties stuck to a time-locked vision of Europe); it could also reflect these authors’ general disinterest in dealing with modern technology and culture, preferring the more straightforward spookiness of a pre-electricity age. But these period settings are also favoured by comedy as well—there’s always been a certain joy in using over-the-top depictions of that same time period for laughs. While plenty of it seems to come down to lampooning the overly formal way of speaking (and words like “pantaloons”) or inserting famous historical figures into ridiculous situations, I also think there’s something generally amusing about exaggerating the formative pulpy genre tropes and their unquestioned melodramatics that also end up associated with the nineteenth century.

The titular character of this story is a mechanical man who has apparently been living in America since at least the time of the Thirteen Colonies—where he came from, how he was built, and by who, are not explained—and has been secretly working for the government of the United States since the Revolution, dealing with supernatural threats to the well-being of the new country (and this makes plenty of hay from tongue-in-cheek portrayal of over-the-top patriotism.) Screw-On Head is currently working under Abraham Lincoln, major historical figure and beloved subject for comedy (he would also be used for laughs in the original Adventure Time pilot a year after this), who contacts him through a prototype telephone represented by a portrait of Lincoln himself. As a robot, Screw-On Head can, shockingly, unscrew his own head and place it onto new mechanical bodies as necessary, and is assisted by his competent-but-anxious manservant Mr. Groin, as well as Mr. Dog, which appears to be a living taxidermy dog (as in full of sawdust and often moving around bolted to a platform.) On a whole, Screw-On Head is really a slightly sillier version of Hellboy, the working man personality and hell-bound backstory replaced with vaguer and more ridiculous concepts, but with a mostly similar raison d’être.

The story in both versions is essentially the same: Screw-On Head is called into action by President Lincoln to stop the villainous undead Emperor Zombie (whose existences inspires their belief that “All really intelligent people should be cremated…for the sake of national security”), who has discovered the whereabouts of the hidden temple of Gung, a magically-aided conqueror from several millennia in the past (who, in the animated version, managed to build said temple at the bottom of the Mississippi), which hides a powerful artifact. A plot that could be taken entirely straightforwardly in another context, this finds its humour in little absurdities, much of it in the dialogue or off-kilter characters, but also in things like the Gung’s mystery “jewel” actually being a turnip that contains a pocket dimension housing a demi-god, the kind of gigantic Lovecraftian monster that would fit in Hellboy, but maybe without the goofy grin and the giddy delight in the horrors he will unleash. Contrasting Mignola’s art with the dialogue and plot, you realize that there is really only a fine line that separates the more “serious” work from this—no matter the specific context, he’s always had a “for-the-fun-of-it” approach, joyfully exploring the infinite possibilities of the Monster Mash.

Rather unusually for an adaptation I’ve written about, the TV version of Screw-On Head had to expand on several different things from a very short comic in order to fill twenty-two minutes. The first half of the pilot is comprised of completely new action scenes and additional worldbuilding that sets us up for a climax that is mostly similar to the comic’s, and Emperor Zombie’s henchperson line-up puts more emphasis on the two sinister old ladies (one being a werewolf) and a chimpanzee, which are the exact sorts of underlings a 2006 comedy genre thing would see the need to include (Mignola was on the monkey-and-ape comedy train early.) The expansion also allows them to delve into the backstory of most of the cast, which was probably necessary for the potential series that never was, and deepens the comedy potential of the characters. In particular, Screw-On Head and Emperor Zombie are given a direct connection: Zombie was the first (and apparently still favourite) of Screw-On Head’s manservants, who dabbled too heavily in the dark arts and was affected accordingly, and because of Zombie’s “petty vengeance fetish”, he has chosen to violently murder every one of his successors up until Mr. Groin, who is rather troubled by the ill omens that tides. This not only creates a new silly rivalry between hero and villain, but also plays into the amusingly blase attitude Screw-On Head has for Mr. Groin’s well-being.

The pilot has a shocking amount of talent behind it—voices include Paul Giamatti as Screw-On Head, Patton Oswalt as Mr. Groin, David Hyde Pierce as Emperor Zombie, and Molly Shannon as Patience (named Madam in the comic), Screw-On Head’s former ladylove and the current vampire servant of Zombie (VO legend Corey Burton is the voice of Abraham Lincoln). It was directed by Chris Prynoski, a still-prominent animator who directed the hallucination sequence in Beavis & Butt-Head Do America; and acting as both producer and co-writer (with Mignola) is cult favourite TV showrunner Bryan Fuller, doing this project in between his series Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies, and several years before his take on Hannibal. Also on board are Mignola’s longtime colourist Dave Stewart and artistic collaborator Guy Davis, who would later go on to work on movies like Pacific Rim. The voices are all on point, especially when it needs to shift from comic book colour to more incongruous naturalistic joke delivery—Giamatti finds a perfect amount of old-timey bombast, and Pierce’s refined tones perfectly compliment the low-key ridiculousness of Emperor Zombie.

I remember there being a lot of disappointment when the pilot didn’t lead to a series, and as much as the story and characters seemed perfectly tuned to a time when intentionally silly genre pastiches were an online favourite, I really think the look of it was an even bigger deal. In terms of design—in the smoothly chiselled shapes, the colours, and the billowing blankets of shadow over everything—Screw-On Head is Mignola’s art put on screen, almost verbatim. Sections of the pilot look almost directly taken from the comic itself. That could also be because the animation itself is sometimes a little stiff outside the climactic clash between Screw-On Head in his spidery battle-body and the demi-god, giving me the impression that the budget Sci-Fi allotted to animation studio DR Movie (whose work includes episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender, various DC animated TV series and movies, the two two direct-to-video Hellboy films, and previous site subject Godzilla: The Series) was not particularly high. In some area they work around that well enough—it feels appropriate that Emperor Zombie is mostly rictus-faced aside from his mouth (and a bunch of buzzing flies that look like a digital effect pasted over the animation), and the minimal movement otherwise captures the well-considered layouts of Mignola’s pages. It reminds me of MTV’s adaptation of Sam Kieth’s The Maxx, another animated take on a comic that sometimes appeared to be directly lifted from the pages and only barely animated.

The look is what really distinguishes the pilot—putting one of the most distinct art styles in comics to animation is no small feat. Even with all the clear effort here, though, nothing else came of Screw-On Head, and even Mignola himself has never revisited this idea in comics. I guess this kind of knowing absurd take on pulp adventure and supernatural monster fighting wasn’t quite ready to attract even a niche TV audience in 2006…or maybe Sci-Fi Channel just wasn’t the venue for it. Further sophistication in pastiche, or mock-sophistication in many cases, has led to more things in the same vein as this becoming normalized, but those often display a more meta touch. This, however, runs on a purer sort of absurdity, one that doesn’t feel the need to point out its own ridiculousness while it’s doing it, comfortable to present its ideas and its monsters and just lightly taking them over the edge— it makes it feel particularly quaint.