Steve Niles: Mystery Society

It’s not too bad. Everybody’s been really nice. Believe me, I’m so happy they ordered a thousand copies, I’m more than happy to appear at the store and do the signings.

Definitely. That’s what’s really funny. For all the horror I do, I probably read and watch a lot more pulp stuff than anything. It’s definitely much more in the vein of classic movies. Action adventure as opposed to horror.

I really like writing about happy couples. I did it in 30 Days of Night and I’ve done it a couple other places. You just don’t see that anymore. I always loved the old Thin Man movies with Nick and Nora. That they were really in love with each other and just happened to always have to deal with these mysteries. When I was talking to Ashley Wood about it, we just sort of collided it with Unsolved Mysteries, In Search Of kinds of things. Again not so much horror, but strange phenomenon and just weird stuff. We meshed those two ideas together and came up with the Mystery Society.

Oh yeah. By the second issue there will be six members total.

One of them turns out to be a robot with a brain in it that looks almost like a turn of the century diving suit. His name is Verne and when questioned a little further they realize he spells his name V-E-R-N-E. It’s very possible that he is in fact Jules Verne, or at least his brain is. Again, a little macabre, but mostly for fun. Comics have gotten kind of deadly serious over the last few years and it’s nice to just have some fun.

I guess. I’m enjoying everybody being so surprised by this, but I guess I can’t blame them considering what my output has been for the past ten years. I’ve definitely been focusing on horror but I have a lot of other interests in my life and it’s really nice to just have fun for a change.

Thanks. I don’t know. You meet the guys who do horror and starting with Clive Barker, who writes some of the darkest stuff in the world, he’s one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet. I find that to be the case almost across the board with horror guys. Generally we work our shit out on paper. [laughs] People are always surprised. I don’t know what they expect. I’m going to be a little troll with an axe? I always get that. You’re so nice. You seem so happy.

That turned out to be a pleasant surprise. I wasn’t really sure how that was going to shake out. I had been offered other crossovers for 30 Days of Night in the past and just thought they didn’t quite work. When Wildstorm and IDW came to me with the X-Files idea, I immediately saw potential. Mostly because they both sort of exist in a real world sensibility where X-Files always tries to find some basis in reality that these horrors can exist and for 30 Days of Night, one of the things I did in the series was strip away all of the mythology and things that were more on the supernatural side. At the time I was trying to find a project for me and my friend Adam Jones to work on and I asked if he wanted to join in. Being a big X-Files fan like I am, he jumped in and came up with the hook that I think made the series work.

I can’t tell you other than one of the big issues we had to address was making sure the continuity worked. Keep in mind this is a crossover between X-Files the TV Show and 30 Days of Night the comicbook. Adam came up with a really cool twist on that, so I’m very happy. What I can elaborate on is we wound up exploring that the Arctic Circle is this really perfect place for vampires. The attack on Barrow is just one of many over hundreds of years.

You look back at some of the original explorers, there are cases of entire ships disappearing and neither the crew nor the ship ever seen again. We dipped into a little actual history because there’s a large amount of actual Arctic disappearances and saying that maybe they met with a grimmer fate than people think wasn’t too big a stretch.

No. [laughs] We’ll stay away from all that. Despite the changes in the climate it still gets dark up there for a long time.

It started with Dead, She Said which was about a detective, Coogan, who basically has to solve his own murder and find out why he’s still alive after being murdered. It was followed by The Ghoul and in The Ghoul for people who’ve read it, there’s an appearance by Coogan and an appearance by Doc Macabre. On top of being self-contained books, going back to the idea of old Universal movies where everybody lived in the same universe and would interact and team up and all that. And so what Bernie and I are building towards with this, after Doc Macabre we’re going to do a thing called The Moorpark Rejects. That will be a series starring the Ghoul, Doc Macabre and Coogan and possibly some other characters.

City of Others was supposed the umbrella title that we did this under, which is why we were going to call it “City of Others,” which would we populate with all these characters, but Dark Horse crapped out after the first run. We took the idea to IDW and started doing them all as individual series and this two year plan that Bernie and I had is starting to come together. We’ve got two of the books out. We’re halfway through Doc Macabre right now. We’re already making plans for what The Moorpark Rejects will be like. It seems to be working.

Getting to work with Bernie Wrightson. I mean, it doesn’t get any better than that.

It does not have a release date. I’m actually waiting to see a final cut of it. I helped write it almost a year or two ago. I did some story meetings with Sam Raimi and the director Ben Ketai. This is very much Ben’s movie. My involvement was fairly limited and we had much less to work with than the first one, but Ben was responsible for doing the webisodes that came out on FEARnet. I was really happy with those, so I have high hopes that this movie will be on par with those.

Exactly. 30 Days of Night and it all takes place in LA (laughs) We’re hoping that what will wind up happening is we’ll get to do the third one, Return to Barrow and then have the whole trilogy made. Like I said, I have high hopes for it. It’s a very different world because it’s going to have limited theatrical and we recast and all that so I’m curious to see what happens.

You know more than I do! (laughs)

I’m curious to see the reaction to Dark Days. Like I said, we had a fraction of the budget and recast and limited theatrical but Ben did so well with much less with those webisodes. I’m really curious. I’m just now starting to pay a little more attention to the direct to DVD market and it seems like there’s a lot of really interesting stuff, especially scifi and stuff that has a following. We have to figure out different ways to get movies to people. It gets harder and harder to do theatrical and so I’m very very curious to see if it works. I’ve been talking to other people about doing lower budget horror movies and try to get them right to people.

I wrote the short Spectre for the last Justice League [movie] and I had a blast. The response to that has been really positive. It seems like there’s a market for it. I know there’s been a lot of scifi stuff and I’m hoping for the same thing for horror.

No. Well, this was first thing that was ever produced that I wrote for animation. I wrote something for Heavy Metal with Bill Sienkiewicz that hopefully will someday see the light of day.

Ashley and I have known each other now for well over ten years and we worked together peripherally. He did the covers for the first run of 30 Days of Night. We worked together for Todd MacFarlane on Hellspawn for a short amount of time. We did Book of the the Dead together, a history of Spawn. Mystery Society was one of these things that we’ve been wanting to do for a while, but either I was too busy or he was too busy. We finally decided to seek out another artist and I found Fiona and I just can’t say enough about her. I feel like her artwork really helped solidify Mystery Society as something different. So many people associate me with a lot of the work that I’ve done with these very dark artists. She has, I don’t know if you can tell from the first issue, it definitely kicks in on the second, but she has this amazing sense of comic timing. She can do action and people’s expressions and all these little touches that really help bring out the fun and the humor in particular scenes and she’s added so much to this series. Like I said, I can’t say enough about her. She’s one of my favorite artists right now.

Yeah I feel bad because my editor at Wildstorm actually sent me an advance copy and asked me for a quote. Basically I swiped her. [laughs] I called her right away and was like, I don’t know what you’re doing after North 40, but I would love to do something with you. I lucked out because she wound up being nominated for an Eisner for North 40. I’m really glad I got her for at least the first run of Mystery Society before she went off and became all famous, which is going to happen. I’m hoping one day we’ll get Ashley to do an issue. I’d love to do a giant size one with him. In the meantime he and I are creating other stuff and we’re always talking. We’re on skype together all the time. We’re working on a very dark paranormal story together right now that we might do in short installments in one of his publications.

You juggle half a dozen and you’re lucky if two see the light of day. I have permanent freelancers disease and I can never relax. I’m always worried about where my next job is going to be coming from. I’ve got a few things going on at once. One of them is with Glenn Fabry called Lot 13 that I’m doing through Wildstorm. We’ve got about four issues of that in the can. It’s so visually over the top. It’s easily some of the most graphic stuff that we’ve ever done, both me and Glenn. He has a way of making it look so beautiful.

I’ve got a new creator owned series coming up with Kelly Jones at IDW called Edge of Doom and I’m playing around with the short form. It’s a five issue series that you can read in any order. Every issue is a standalone 22 page horror story and they all wind up being tied together but you can read them all in any sequence you want. You can do a series of one shots and they wind up just getting lost in the shuffle, but we wanted to come up with a way to tie it together. The Twilight Zone is always brought together by the fact that these stories happen in the Twilight Zone. In Night Gallery they’re always brought together by the fact that they come from these paintings. We came up with a similar add-on to the stories that make them all interconnected, but again at the same time each one is a little mini-movie within itself. It’s the best Kelly Jones artwork we’ve ever seen. He’s just it’s amazing.



Kelly, like Bernie, is one of those guys where we spend hours talking about our favorite movies and obscure stories. Being able to sit down and jam on our own stories especially with Edge of Doom. The first one is a Gullivers Travels in Hell kind of story. The second one is a story about a guy marooned on a planet. The third one is a completely over the top just unbelievably graphic story about scientists out of control.

I have a novel I’m working on. I’m doing this book for Pocket books, Simon and Schuster, called The World of Hurt which will be out July 2011

I’m going for more cops and monsters, like Cal McDonald, but with no humor. People always look at Cal McDonald as being a horror series, but I’ve always looked at Cal as being comedy. To me it’s much more comedy than anything else, so I want to try to up the ante and do it dead serious.

I was scared to death at first [laughs] Like Bernie, he’s one of those guys who has influenced me on every level. Especially John, because John did movies independently, he made his own music, he did some of my favorites. The Thing has had a huge influence on me. I was so nervous and he turned out to be one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. We’ve struck up a friendship and working with him was so easy.

He’s working on one now. We met to work together on a movie that didn’t pan out. When I was working with him on that I discovered that he was a big video game fan, so when the F.E.A.R. 3 offer came in for me, I was already a fan of the series and I knew John was too, so I suggested that he come on with me. We worked really close with Day One and Monolith and Warner Brothers and I think we managed to come up with a way to tie the two previous games together but at the same time kind of restart the whole thing, too, without giving too much away.

They’re running demos right now where if you run it in this new co-op mode, one character can telepathically hold a soldier off the ground while the other one empties clips into him. It’s so freaking violent it’s unbelievable. F.E.A.R. 2 ended on a very specific, odd note and John and I took that idea and ran with it. There’s some pretty dark shit coming.

That would be a dream come true. I’m hoping to talk with John about doing some comics, but right now he’s been filming and editing his latest movie so I’m hoping when the dust settles we’ll get to sit down and figure out some new stuff to work on.

I really do try. That comes from working with the artist. Also, when I look at my favorite writers or filmmakers or artists, it’s the variety of their work and the body of their work that inspires me. That John Carpenter, for example, can do Halloween and The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China, you can hardly believe it’s the same filmmaker who made the three movies. If I can come within a mile of that, that makes me really happy. I’d hate to think I was doing the same thing over and over again.

At the end of the day I’m still a sixteen year old nerd making super-8 movies. I just love telling stories for whatever reason and it’s what motivates me and gets me excited. I have fun with Mystery Society because I’m having so much fun with the characters and then seeing what Fiona did with them got me even more excited. I like to do a lot of stuff because it’s kind of all I do. I don’t have much of a life outside this stuff, I’m afraid to say.

[laughs] Let’s end on, I have no life.

[Laughs] Really, the best part of doing this tour is finding out how much I like my fans. They’re really nice people and I can have ten people in line and nobody brings me the same book. They’re not even aware of the other ones. People come up and they’re like, I love 30 Days and they don’t know Criminal Macabre exists. Or they just read the Batman stuff. I had somebody come in and the first thing they ever saw of mine was the Spectre cartoon and so they were working backwards. I talked to IDW today and said let’s do more of connecting directly with the retailers and the fans. I think it really helps.