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.