We are happy to announce that Mike Mignola will be Artist Guest of Honor at this year's festival.

Mike Mignola was born on September 16, 1960 in Berkeley, California and grew up in nearby Oakland, the eldest son of a tough and leathery cabinetmaker. His fascination with ghosts and monsters began at an early age (he doesn’t remember why); reading Dracula at age twelve introduced him to Victorian literature and folklore, from which he has never recovered.

After graduating from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1982, hoping to find a way to draw monsters for a living, he moved to New York City to begin a career in the comic-book field. Starting as a bad inker for Marvel Comics, he swiftly evolved into a not-so-bad artist on comics like Rocket Raccoon, Alpha Flight, and The Hulk. By the late 1980s, however, he had begun to develop his own unique graphic style, and moved onto higher-profile commercial projects like Cosmic Odyssey (1988) and Gotham By Gaslight (1989) for DC Comics, and the not-so-commercial Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser (1990) for Marvel. In 1992, he drew the comic-book adaptation of the film Bram Stoker’s Dracula for Topps Comics, which led to his working (briefly) with Francis Ford Coppola on the film.

In 1993 Mike joined several other comic-book creators (John Byrne, Frank Miller, Geof Darrow, etc.) to form the Legend imprint at Dark Horse Comics, where he created Hellboy, a tough and leathery occult detective who may or may not be the Beast of the Apocalypse. The first Hellboy story (Seed of Destruction, 1994) was co-written by John Byrne, but Mike has gone on to write the book himself, and, as of this writing, there are six Hellboy graphic novels (with more on the way), several spin-off titles (Hellboy: Weird Tales, Hellboy Junior, B.P.R.D.), two anthologies of prose stories, several novels, two animated films, and a live-action film starring Ron Perlman. Hellboy has earned numerous comic-industry awards and is published in many countries.

Mike has also worked as a production designer for the Disney film Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) and was Visual Consultant to director Guillermo del Toro on Blade II (2002), Hellboy (2004), and Hellboy 2: The Golden Army (2008).

In 2001, Mike also created the award-winning comic book The Amazing Screw-On Head (recently adapted into animation), and co-wrote with Christopher Golden the novel Baltimore: or the Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire (2007).

Mike lives somewhere in Southern California with his wife, daughter, and cat.

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