The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

Microbial Alchemy and Demented Machinery: The Mignola Exhibits

The Mignola Exhibits

The artifacts researched as part of the Mignola Exhibits tend to reflect Hellboy creator Mike Mignola’s own fascination with Lambshead’s cabinet. Mignola says he first remembers reading about Lambshead “in a comic when I was nine—it was one of those two-page spreads they used to fill space, with a title like ‘Strange but True.’ It might’ve been a Tales from the Crypt.”

The images of such iconic Lambshead pieces as the Clockroach were originally intended for an abandoned Mignola project titled Subsequently Lost at Sea, which would have been a detailed illustrated chronicle of, as Mignola puts it, “important stuff that got lost at sea.” The book would have reached back as far as the Romans with their “often unreliable galleys.” Mignola feels the results “would’ve been as important to the study of all kinds of crap lost at sea as Alasdair Gray’s Book of Prefaces is to the study of the English language.”

The pieces documented herein were initially lost at sea in the spring of 2003, following an urgent directive from Lambshead that rescinded the museum loans on the Clockroach, Roboticus mask, Shamalung, and Pulvadmonitor.

Lambshead’s directive sent the exhibits to the Museum of Further Study in Jakarta, Indonesia, all by circuitous routes. Roboticus and Shamalung left via the HMS Dorsal Fin of God, which disappeared seventy miles west of the Canary Islands. The USS Jeraboam II, carrying the Clockroach, was captured by pirates off the coast of Somalia, led by, as the BBC put it, “What looked like someone’s Greek great-grandmother with a knife in her teeth,” who managed to elude U.S. and British naval units during a heavy storm. The Baalbek, flying the Libyan flag and carrying a twice-hermetically sealed Pulvadmonitor, vanished off the Horn of Africa. (Some—specifically, Caitlín R. Kiernan—have suggested that the route of the freighters and the points at which they disappeared form a complex message from Lambshead “to parties unknown,” if we could only interpret it.)

By then, the good doctor’s heart had finally given out and his heirs countermanded his orders, an act that seemed to have no agency. However, astoundingly enough, Roboticus, Shamalung, and the Pulvadmonitor (babbling incoherently) turned up at Lord Balfoy’s Antiques on London’s Portobello Road two years later, selling for fifty pounds apiece. The artifacts were turned over to the Museum of Intangible Arts and Objects in Saragossa, Spain, where experts eventually confirmed that all three pieces now met “all of our requirements regarding Immateriality, Intangibility, Elusiveness, and the Ephemeral.” When the objects were returned to their respective museums, the attendants therein seemed united behind Billy Quirt—thirty-year velvet-rope veteran of Imperial War exhibits—in believing that the artifacts are “a bloody lot more and a bloody lot less than they were before they went traveling.”

The predicament does underscore one reason Mignola abandoned the book: “Too much stuff eventually washes up. Sometimes just when you’d like it to stay lost. I’d rather just draw stuff that’s always there, like monsters.”