When Mike Mignola created B.P.R.D. to tell stories of the eponymous organization he’d created in the pages of Hellboy, he also handed the reins over to new creative teams. It was a necessary move, as Mignola was still keeping busy with the adventures of his big, red, stone-fisted firstborn, but it must have been an unnerving move. Mignola had created these characters, and written them for years. Now, it was time to find artists and writers who could help carry the B.P.R.D. story forward while the creator moved back to a plotting/consultant role on the series. Luckily, B.P.R.D. has been blessed with a pretty constant flow of shining talents. Each writer and penciller finds a way to capture Mignola’s indelible style, while also taking the characters and mythos in a fresh, individual direction.
One of these inspired artists is Guy 
Davis. Davis has been drawing for B.P.R.D. since 2003, shortly after the inception of the series. In that time, he’s created, designed, and drawn any number of fanged, tentacled, and many-limbed hellspawn to bring about the ever-approaching apocalypse of the Hellboy universe.
When I was given the opportunity to pick Davis’ brain about his work, I jumped at the chance (if you saw my review of the latest B.P.R.D. trade, you know I’m a fan). And, I figured, what better place to start than at the beginning?
Wincing at the unavoidable cliché of it, Guy says he’s been drawing as long as he can remember. As a kid, he would turn to his pens for entertainment when there was nothing on TV. This, of course, was “back before internet, cable, or even VCRs,” he reminds me, “when kids were at the whim of network programming and had to wait for a good monster flick to come on!” So, when he couldn’t see spaceships and giant monsters on late night creature features, or after-school favorites like Ultraman and Lost In Space, the young Davis just drew them for himself.
In high school, he found an application for his hobby, in the form of a comic strip for the local paper. “Really awful stuff,” he chuckles, “but I liked telling stories sequentially. And once I graduated I decided to try and keep working at it – very starving artist, rough times ahead, but I kept at it.”
Originally planning to chase sequential storytelling in the form of storyboards or conceptual designs for film, Davis eventually found comics “a lot easier to just fall into, and that’s really how it happened.” He found that one comic job led to another, and then another, and so it’s gone for what has now become a 24-year career.
Though he’s applied his pencils to Marvel’s Fantastic 
Four, and DC’s Starman and Sandman Mystery Theatre, Guy is best known for his work with B.P.R.D., where his penchant for drawing monsters has found a very apt home. With cartoony yet dark, intimate yet dynamic style, the artist has breathed continual life into the series with an endless parade of yetis, frogmen, and various Lovecraftian nightmares.
“I don’t know, pretty much most of it just pops into my head when I’m sketching out designs – lots of organic shapes, tentacles and bones are always good to flesh out a creature drawing,” he says. “And it usually just starts with trying to find an interesting shape and form before I work it up with whatever monstrous details of claws, eyes and fleshy bits. I guess it’s like some sort of monster ‘Mr. Potato Head.’”
In 1997, Davis also became a comic book creator in his own right. “I enjoy the collaboration of working with a writer to make their script realized on the final page but I also like the freedom and self-expression that goes with drawing a book that I also write. So I’m pretty lucky that right now I get to juggle both types of jobs!”
The other job he’s “juggling” right now is The Marquis, a more “grotesque [and] obscene” book than B.P.R.D. that recently moved from original publisher Oni Press to join Davis’ Hellboy-related work at Dark Horse. “Really the only big change to the series is just that I’m doing the remaining stories as original graphic novels instead of single issues that we’d later reprint into a trade paperback,” he reassures his fans, “[which is] something I always wanted to do with it – I really like that format.”
Davis says there will be 3 more Marquis 
books following the recently released Inferno collection before he brings the series to an end. “I always had a set end plotted even before I started the first issue, and look forward to finally wrapping it all up.”
But that doesn’t mean the series is losing steam. “The next graphic novel, The Marquis and the Midwife, is definitely the darkest and probably sickest of the bunch – but I’m just telling the story I had planned for it all along and hope it’s entertaining for the reader.”
His advice for aspiring comic book writers and artists? “Just keep producing work, and learn from your mistakes along the way. Don’t rest and wait to hear back – just keep producing new work every chance you get.”
Of course, that’s easy for him to say, right? Once you’ve racked up a few Eisner awards (1997 Best Serialized Story, for Starman; 2004: Best Limited Series, for Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules; 2009: Best Penciller/Inker, for B.P.R.D.), they’ll just let you do whatever you want to do.
Won’t they?
“The Marquis actually first saw print… after they canceled Sandman Mystery Theatre because I couldn’t find… jobs doing the type of stories I wanted to do,” the artist laughs by way of rebuttal. “So it really wasn’t a case of any sort of acclaim letting me do my own projects – pretty much the opposite. Nobody was letting me do the types of stories I wanted, so I just started doing them myself. But now Mike and John [Arcudi] are definitely spoiling me with all the B.P.R.D. stories – those are just the type of stories I want to do and it’s always fun!”
And we’re glad it is – because it’s damn fun to read, too.
For more on Guy Davis, visit guydavisartworks.com or darkhorse.com.
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