Mike Mignola has been involved in the new Hellboy reboot from the very beginning. The comic book legend penned the original script for the R-rated movie Hellboy: The Crooked Man with Christopher Golden and has been part of the process of bringing it to the screen throughout.

Speaking to GamesRadar+ at San Diego Comic-Con, Mignola opened up about how much he enjoyed being involved from the very beginning. “So often I would come in late on projects where somebody else had already put the pieces together in a way that didn’t quite fit,” he told us. “And this time, I got a chance to say, ‘We’re going to do The Crooked Man, we’re going to stick to that story.’ We need to add a little bit of backstory. So we borrowed it from one other story so we didn’t have to make up new stuff.”

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Mignola has been involved with many of the Hellboy adaptations in various forms. “Every one of them has been a very different experience,” he added. “But as somebody who’s had mixed feelings about the earlier films, the one lesson I learned is if I can get in at the very beginning, and at some point you know you’re gonna lose – I mean you never have control but you feel like you have control at the beginning and then you hope that somebody doesn’t take apart the thing you built. That happens.”

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“This is the only movie where I wasn’t on set at all but the only movie where I’ve actually seen dailies every day so it was about one day behind where they were shooting. Almost every day was amazement of, ‘Oh my god that looks like that, this looks like this. Oh my god, they used the same angle for that shot.’ It really was that amazing thing of seeing your work brought to life.”