Rurik Hover at the opening-night festivities for Mia’s Guillermo del Toro show.
Somehow, over the years, Rurik Hover wound up with 85 boxes of comic books. Now he’s starting to sell—”culling out the crap,” as he puts it. And not just his comics but other people’s, too. He’s gone from a fan to a collector to a dealer, a cycle that has made him something of an expert on comic-book fandom, even as it ironically stands to leave him with fewer of the very thing he loves.
Hover, who works at Mia, was among the Twin Citians most excited when Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters opened at Mia this spring. There are comic-book illustrations throughout the show, from storyboards used to stage GDT films to several walls full of comic books from GDT’s personal collection, spanning the many decades and styles of comic-book culture.
To a non-fan, it’s still just a bunch of muscled monsters and superheroes, and they all seem to blend together in a bam!-pow! blur. But to someone like Hover, they’re coded with a special language and loaded with history. With just a couple weeks left to see the show, he explained to me what he sees in GDT’s collection.
To Hellboy and Back
A prop issue of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comic, made to look far more vintage than it is.
First up are Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comics, the inspiration of course for GDT’s two Hellboy movies. Mignola had worked for all the classic comic-book companies, Hover notes, like Marvel and DC Comics, before “stumbling into Hellboy.” He created the character and an indie start-up called Dark Horse Comics gave him creative control to launch the series in the early 1990s. That was Dark Horse’s niche, Hover says, a sort of auteur imprint that gave comic-book creators great freedom to innovate within the tradition, particularly with graphic novels. Others in the stable included Frank Miller, the originator of the groundbreaking neo-noir series Sin City, who set his anti-heroes in a shadowy underworld. In fact, most of the graphic novels published by Dark Horse were—true to its name—dark. Emotionally and literally. The joke among Dark Horse creators, Hover says, was “who could use the most ink.”
Among the Hellboy comics in the GDT show is a fake issue created in the early 2000s, dummied-up to look like an early 1960s comic. The giveaway is the 12-cent price. It’s even stamped with the seal of approval from the Comic Code Authority, formed by the industry in the 1950s to preempt government regulation by showing that comics companies were policing their own content. That was the golden age of comics, Hover says, at least in collector terms, followed by the silver age in the ’60s and the bronze age in the ’80s and ’90s. “It degrades,” Hover says, while acknowledging that value is in the eye of the beholder. Many of the comics in the show, he notes, are not valuable but were important to GDT in some way.
The Sympathetic Monster
One of several walls full of comics in the show.
Three walls of comics in the middle of the show demonstrate the diversity of themes that came and went over the decades, from the “kiddie comics” of the 1950s (Archie, etc.) to the “creepy comics” of the ’60s and ’70s. Whenever a character or style took off, publishers were quick to jump on the bandwagon. “When someone’s making money…,” Hover says. After DC Comics introduced the macabre Swamp Thing series, for instance, Marvel came out with Man-Thing, which—surprise—never quite measured up.
Also on display in this area is Famous Monsters magazine, which fed a young GDT’s budding sympathy with outcasts. Hover notes that the publisher of Famous Monsters also collected a lot of old monster-movie props. When he died, GDT purchased some of them.
Comics themselves rarely seem to die. Many series keep going, vampire-like, by incorporating new trends into their stem-winding storylines. Even Archie, the fresh-scrubbed comic from the ’50s, has carried on, lately running a zombie series (Afterlife with Archie). “Jughead runs over Archie’s dog with his car, and Sabrina the witch brings it back to life,” Hover explains. Every new meme offers fresh blood.
At the same time, some comics are singular works—masterpieces, even. Near the end of the show is a collection of Frankenstein comics by Bernie Wrightson. GDT is admittedly obsessed with Frankenstein as the ultimate sympathetic monster, and Wrightson shared that view. He spent seven years illustrating Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein book in the comic-book style, a labor of love that resulted in one of the finest achievements of the genre. “He humanized him,” Hover says of Wrightson. And when the series came out, in 1983, GDT noticed. He has now collected some of the original illustrations, and vowed to make a Frankenstein movie in the Wrightson vein. When the illustrator died this past winter, Hover notes, GDT called him the “the greatest that ever lived.”