INTERVIEW: Mike Mignola, Lemony Snicket join forces for ‘Pinocchio’
Image courtesy of Mike Mignola / Provided by Superfan Promotions with permission.
Beehive Books assembled quite the A team for its latest project: an adaptation of the classic tale Pinocchio. The original Carlo Collodi novel is presented in a new edition that features 50 illustrations from Mike Mignola, the creator of Hellboy. He bring these scenes to life with the help of colorist Dave Stewart and none other than children’s book author Lemony Snicket (A Series of Unfortunate Events), who provides annotations throughout the text.
Pinocchio: The Illuminated Edition is now available from Beehive Books. Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with author and editor Josh O’Neill, who co-founded Beehive Books with artist and designer Maëlle Doliveux. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
How did this project begin? What did day one look like?
There was a long run-up to this one. We’d been talking to Mike Mignola about it for years. We invited him to choose a book to illustrate for our Illuminated Editions series, and he immediately brought up Pinocchio. But he hesitated to dive in, for reasons that I think include both his enormous reverence for Collodi’s story, and how incredibly busy he is with his many books and films and other projects.
But after a lot of circling around, the real day one happened early in the pandemic. Mike emailed us out of the blue saying, basically, “Let’s go,” and then we were off and running. It was a nice distraction in a dark and confusing time, getting lost in Pinocchio and the swirl of gorgeous artwork that Mike was creating.
Lemony Snicket came on board later, but his contributions redefined the project in a profound way — and have expanded what we can do with our Illuminated Editions series in general. We originally invited him to write an introduction, but he offered us something so much stranger and more interesting: a full-text annotation documenting the effects of reading Pinocchio on the Snicket psyche. We wound up presenting them as these slipped-in typewritten sheets, covered with corrections and coffee stains. It’s really a singular literary experience. He’s not just commenting on the story; he’s adding a second story layer, a fictional encounter with a fictional text. It has a hall-of-mirrors effect that’s fitting for a text as wild and unconventional as Pinocchio.
What was it like to collaborate with the likes of Mike Mignola, Lemony Snicket and Dave Stewart?
A genuine thrill and wonderful pleasure, which I suppose I would be obligated to say even if it were an excruciating nightmare, but in this case it happens to be profoundly true. I’ve had such a deep admiration for these authors for so many years, getting to work with them simultaneously was so exciting as to seem a little unreal.
For the Illuminated Editions series, we try to focus on illustrators with storytelling chops and narrative sensibilities. We’re less interested in illustrating scenes from our books than we are in taking a sort of conceptual approach to how to use visuals to expand beyond the boundaries of a text. Mike, as one of the best storytellers in comics, was a dream Illuminated Editions illustrator and a great collaborator. He went above and beyond the call, establishing and then refining a truly singular approach to Pinocchio, and creating a huge number of illustrations in a relatively short time span. (Quarantining may have helped with that part a little bit.)
I love how he created these sort of small frozen moments for each character. There’s something fantastically theatrical about [his] approach, building out the world and backdrops of Collodi’s Pinocchio, and giving each performer their moment in the spotlight — a cast to be further animated by the reader’s own imagination.
And Dave Stewart, of course, is the best there is — a comics legend and a colorist working in perfect sync with Mike for decades. So much of the mood and atmosphere of Mike’s entire Hellboy multiverse emerges from Dave’s palette, and he brought some fascinating variation on those tones to their work together here.
And I really can’t say enough about working with Lemony Snicket, whose books I’ve been admiring since he began publishing. We invited him to be part of this project, and he took it as an invitation to play, to create, to imagine. Rather than remark directly on the text, he entered into this sort of elaborate playful dance with it. His enthusiasm for the whole process, his deep love for this book, and, of course, his wild, untrammeled imagination and uniquely vivid wordsmithing were such a boon to this project.
Do you feel that the original Pinocchio still resonates in 2024?
I think the answer to that is unambiguously yes, since we seem to be living in some kind of odd unexpected Pinocchio boom-time, with a whole batch of new film adaptations, including a gorgeous stop-motion puppet version from Mike’s longtime collaborator (and occasional Beehive contributor) Guillermo Del Toro. If anything, it feels like Pinocchio is trending? I’m frankly not entirely sure why, but Snicket’s notes highlight that this is story about the craziness of life — a story in which so little makes sense, which somehow makes perfect sense for those of us that live in this world, a world that makes very little sense, and seems to make less and less sense by the day. I think Pinocchio could be considered a sort of guidebook for that type of world.
How exactly does this new edition work? What can fans expect?
Well, you open it up and if you’re not careful several dozen little slipped-in pieces of stationery come fluttering out of its binding, so you’re already in trouble and you haven’t even read a word yet.
It’s an unusually tactile experience, reading it with these crammed-in typewritten notes in hand. Mike Mignola and Dave Stewart’s astonishing work sets the scene in this strange vision of 19th-century Italian village life as a sinister, shadowed puppet-world, and Collodi’s madman narrative pulls you up and away into its bizarre compounding horrors and hilarities. And meanwhile you have these little coffee-stained typesheets, one for each chapter, talking you through what you can barely believe you’re reading, as though Snicket is leaning over your shoulder, his brow furrowing beyond repair as he tries to make sense [of] a text that’s much too strange to be fully encompassed by a mortal mind.
Did you ever actually meet the mystery man himself, Lemony Snicket?
Not in person, though we received increasingly frantic letters from him as Collodi’s work began to take hold. We shipped pallet after pallet of Beehive Books stationery to his study, where he spent weeks more or less chained to his typewriter, cranking out these notes and madly stuffing them into each edition. By the end of this process, I think he was in no condition to “meet” anyone at all. It’s my understanding that it was several months before he could speak full Snicketian sentences again.
What’s next for Beehive Books?
It’s a busy fall and early winter for us! We have a wonderful piece of graphic art history called Myths of Making dropping in bookstores later this month, a debut from a French author known as Julien-G. Beehive is mostly a crowdfunded venture, and we’ll be launching Kickstarters for three new projects, including the new issue of Laab, our annual-ish art newspaper; our next Illuminated Edition, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, illustrated by the great Rosemary Valero O’Connell; and the long-awaited oracle expansion of Botanica, Kevin Jay Stanton’s wonderful tarot deck about the language of flowers.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Pinocchio: The Illuminated Edition is now available from Beehive Books. Click here for more information.
