Steve Niles remains best known for 30 Days of Night, a three issue comic series that grew into a massive hit and later a successful film. Since then Niles has written a number of sequels to the book, but hes also moved in different directions including Batman, Simon Dark, Criminal Macabre and collaborations with Rob Zombie, Thomas Jane, Richard Corben and Tim Bradstreet.
Last month IDW, the publisher of 30 Days of Night, released Mystery Society, a new book written by Niles, and a hardcover collection of The Ghoul, a book Niles did with legendary artist Bernie Wrightson. Niles agreed to appear and sign at every comic store that bought 1000 copies of Mystery Society and thirteen stores across the country took him up on that offer.
Between now and the end of the year there are number of Niles-written books coming out including an X-Files/30 Days of Night crossover miniseries that starts this month. Hes also writing a novel thats scheduled for release next year in addition to co-writing the movie 30 Days of Night: Dark Days and working with filmmaker John Carpenter to write the video game F.E.A.R. 3. In the midst of a long month that included criss-crossing the nation, signing thousands of books and his birthday, Niles poke with us by phone and gave us an exclusive look at artwork for his upcoming books Something Monstrous illustrated by Stephanie Buscema, Edge of Doom illustrated by Kelley Jones and Lot 13 illustrated by Glenn Fabry.
ALEX DUEBEN: Im glad we could find the time to talk. Youve been on tour for Mystery Society and the deal was that you would appear that any shore that bought 1000 copies, is that right?
STEVE NILES: One thousand issues. I signed over ten thousand books in three weeks.
AD: Im amazed you can hold the phone to talk at this point
SN: Its not too bad. Everybodys been really nice. Believe me, Im so happy they ordered a thousand copies, Im more than happy to appear at the store and do the signings.
AD: Youre pegged as a horror guy, but one of your big influences, at least Ive thought so, has been pulp, and Mystery Society is really in that vein.
SN: Definitely. Thats whats really funny. For all the horror I do, I probably read and watch a lot more pulp stuff than anything. Its definitely much more in the vein of classic movies. Action adventure as opposed to horror.
AD: Where did this idea come from?
SN: I really like writing about happy couples. I did it in 30 Days of Night and Ive done it a couple other places. You just dont 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.
AD: The book may center around a happy couple but there is an actual society that youre building.
SN: Oh yeah. By the second issue there will be six members total.
AD: Any strange odd characters you want to mention?
SN: 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. Its 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 its nice to just have some fun.
AD: It is and people probably wouldnt expect you to be the one to bring the fun back.
SN: I guess. Im enjoying everybody being so surprised by this, but I guess I cant blame them considering what my output has been for the past ten years. Ive definitely been focusing on horror but I have a lot of other interests in my life and its really nice to just have fun for a change.
AD: Every time weve met, youre always a nice, fun guy. I dont know why we should expect you to always create morbid and dark work.
SN: Thanks. I dont know. You meet the guys who do horror and starting with Clive Barker, who writes some of the darkest stuff in the world, hes one of the nicest guys youll 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 dont know what they expect. Im going to be a little troll with an axe? I always get that. Youre so nice. You seem so happy.
AD: Your other big project, which starts next month is the X-Files/30 Days of Night crossover.
SN: That turned out to be a pleasant surprise. I wasnt 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 didnt 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.
AD: What was hook, can you say?
SN: I cant 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 Im 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.
AD: Thats interesting because you look at the Arctic and every year theres disappearances and strange deaths and bodies going missing and lots of really odd circumstances.
SN: 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 theres a large amount of actual Arctic disappearances and saying that maybe they met with a grimmer fate than people think wasnt too big a stretch.
AD: Will the next one be Global Warming: Polar Bears and Vampires Move South?
SN: No. [laughs] Well stay away from all that. Despite the changes in the climate it still gets dark up there for a long time.
AD: You mentioned old movies earlier and recently youve been doing books with the great artist Bernie Wrightson. Most recently The Ghoul, which just came out in paperback and you have another one coming out this fall, Doc Macabre.
SN: It started with Dead, She Said which was about a detective, Coogan, who basically has to solve his own murder and find out why hes still alive after being murdered. It was followed by The Ghoul and in The Ghoul for people whove read it, theres 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 were 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.
AD: And this all started with City of Others that you both did for Dark Horse years ago.
SN: 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. Weve got two of the books out. Were halfway through Doc Macabre right now. Were already making plans for what The Moorpark Rejects will be like. It seems to be working.
AD: It feels like youre having a lot of fun.
SN: Getting to work with Bernie Wrightson. I mean, it doesnt get any better than that.
AD: Are there plans to continue after The Moorpark Rejects? Are you leaving it open-ended to possibly continue?
SN:[/B} The idea was to keep feeling around to see what people respond to and people seem to have really responded to the Ghoul, so were thinking that after The Moorpark Rejects, well probably do more Ghoul books. Were having fun with all of the characters, but we definitely want to see what readers seem to respond to the most, and right now that seem to be the Ghoul.
AD: I wanted to ask about the sequel to the 30 Days of Night movie, Dark Days. It doesnt have a release date yet, does it?
SN: It does not have a release date. Im 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 Bens 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.
AD: It helps that the first one is set in Barrow in this almost hermetically sealed world that had to be recreated while this one takes place in Los Angeles mostly.
SN: Exactly. 30 Days of Night and it all takes place in LA (laughs) Were hoping that what will wind up happening is well 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. Its a very different world because its going to have limited theatrical and we recast and all that so Im curious to see what happens.
AD: You have Mia Kirshner as Lilith, the Vampire queen, which Im excited about because I think shes always amazing.
SN: You know more than I do! (laughs)
Im 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. Im really curious. Im just now starting to pay a little more attention to the direct to DVD market and it seems like theres 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 Im very very curious to see if it works. Ive been talking to other people about doing lower budget horror movies and try to get them right to people.
AD: Thats a nice segue because one company thats had success is DC and Warner Brothers and their animated direct to DVD films.
SN: 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 theres a market for it. I know theres been a lot of scifi stuff and Im hoping for the same thing for horror.
AD: Had you written for animation before?
SN: 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.
AD: I wanted to ask about Ashley Wood and Fiona Staples with whom youre doing Mystery Society. You mentioned that you and Ashley came up with idea.
SN: 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 weve 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 cant 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 Ive done with these very dark artists. She has, I dont 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 peoples expressions and all these little touches that really help bring out the fun and the humor in particular scenes and shes added so much to this series. Like I said, I cant say enough about her. Shes one of my favorite artists right now.
AD: The only other project Ive seen from her was North 40 from Wildstom the other year.
SN: 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 dont know what youre 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. Im 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. Im hoping one day well get Ashley to do an issue. Id love to do a giant size one with him. In the meantime he and I are creating other stuff and were always talking. Were on skype together all the time. Were working on a very dark paranormal story together right now that we might do in short installments in one of his publications.
AD: Weve covered god knows how many things, but I know youre in the midst of so much more. Its a lot to juggle.
SN: You juggle half a dozen and youre lucky if two see the light of day. I have permanent freelancers disease and I can never relax. Im always worried about where my next job is going to be coming from. Ive got a few things going on at once. One of them is with Glenn Fabry called Lot 13 that Im doing through Wildstorm. Weve got about four issues of that in the can. Its so visually over the top. Its easily some of the most graphic stuff that weve ever done, both me and Glenn. He has a way of making it look so beautiful.
Ive got a new creator owned series coming up with Kelly Jones at IDW called Edge of Doom and Im playing around with the short form. Its 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 theyre 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. Its the best Kelly Jones artwork weve ever seen. Hes just its 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 Im working on. Im doing this book for Pocket books, Simon and Schuster, called The World of Hurt which will be out July 2011
AD: Do you want to say anything about the book or should I ask in year?
SN: Im 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 Ive always looked at Cal as being comedy. To me its much more comedy than anything else, so I want to try to up the ante and do it dead serious.
AD: So this fall, F.E.A.R. 3 comes out that you worked on with John Carpenter. What was that liked?
SN: I was scared to death at first [laughs] Like Bernie, hes 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 Ive ever met. Weve struck up a friendship and working with him was so easy.
AD: Its been a while since he came out with a movie.
SN: Hes working on one now. We met to work together on a movie that didnt 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.
Theyre 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. Its so freaking violent its unbelievable. F.E.A.R. 2 ended on a very specific, odd note and John and I took that idea and ran with it. Theres some pretty dark shit coming.
AD: So a John Carpenter-Steve Niles film collaboration is in fact a possibility?
SN: That would be a dream come true. Im hoping to talk with John about doing some comics, but right now hes been filming and editing his latest movie so Im hoping when the dust settles well get to sit down and figure out some new stuff to work on.
AD: Youve worked with so many artists with a defined style, but you really create a story that is a collaboration in a way that many other writers dont.
SN: I really do try. That comes from working with the artist. Also, when I look at my favorite writers or filmmakers or artists, its 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 its the same filmmaker who made the three movies. If I can come within a mile of that, that makes me really happy. Id hate to think I was doing the same thing over and over again.
AD: You want to be one of those old hollywood filmmakers jumping from one film and one genre to another.
SN: At the end of the day Im still a sixteen year old nerd making super-8 movies. I just love telling stories for whatever reason and its what motivates me and gets me excited. I have fun with Mystery Society because Im 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 its kind of all I do. I dont have much of a life outside this stuff, Im afraid to say.
AD: Maybe we should end on that note. [laughs]
SN: [laughs] Lets end on, I have no life.
AD: Youre on facebook. Doesnt anybody want to be your friend? [laughs]
SN: [Laughs] Really, the best part of doing this tour is finding out how much I like my fans. Theyre really nice people and I can have ten people in line and nobody brings me the same book. Theyre not even aware of the other ones. People come up and theyre like, I love 30 Days and they dont 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 lets do more of connecting directly with the retailers and the fans. I think it really helps.
Last month IDW, the publisher of 30 Days of Night, released Mystery Society, a new book written by Niles, and a hardcover collection of The Ghoul, a book Niles did with legendary artist Bernie Wrightson. Niles agreed to appear and sign at every comic store that bought 1000 copies of Mystery Society and thirteen stores across the country took him up on that offer.
Between now and the end of the year there are number of Niles-written books coming out including an X-Files/30 Days of Night crossover miniseries that starts this month. Hes also writing a novel thats scheduled for release next year in addition to co-writing the movie 30 Days of Night: Dark Days and working with filmmaker John Carpenter to write the video game F.E.A.R. 3. In the midst of a long month that included criss-crossing the nation, signing thousands of books and his birthday, Niles poke with us by phone and gave us an exclusive look at artwork for his upcoming books Something Monstrous illustrated by Stephanie Buscema, Edge of Doom illustrated by Kelley Jones and Lot 13 illustrated by Glenn Fabry.
ALEX DUEBEN: Im glad we could find the time to talk. Youve been on tour for Mystery Society and the deal was that you would appear that any shore that bought 1000 copies, is that right?
STEVE NILES: One thousand issues. I signed over ten thousand books in three weeks.
AD: Im amazed you can hold the phone to talk at this point
SN: Its not too bad. Everybodys been really nice. Believe me, Im so happy they ordered a thousand copies, Im more than happy to appear at the store and do the signings.
AD: Youre pegged as a horror guy, but one of your big influences, at least Ive thought so, has been pulp, and Mystery Society is really in that vein.
SN: Definitely. Thats whats really funny. For all the horror I do, I probably read and watch a lot more pulp stuff than anything. Its definitely much more in the vein of classic movies. Action adventure as opposed to horror.
AD: Where did this idea come from?
SN: I really like writing about happy couples. I did it in 30 Days of Night and Ive done it a couple other places. You just dont 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.
AD: The book may center around a happy couple but there is an actual society that youre building.
SN: Oh yeah. By the second issue there will be six members total.
AD: Any strange odd characters you want to mention?
SN: 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. Its 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 its nice to just have some fun.
AD: It is and people probably wouldnt expect you to be the one to bring the fun back.
SN: I guess. Im enjoying everybody being so surprised by this, but I guess I cant blame them considering what my output has been for the past ten years. Ive definitely been focusing on horror but I have a lot of other interests in my life and its really nice to just have fun for a change.
AD: Every time weve met, youre always a nice, fun guy. I dont know why we should expect you to always create morbid and dark work.
SN: Thanks. I dont know. You meet the guys who do horror and starting with Clive Barker, who writes some of the darkest stuff in the world, hes one of the nicest guys youll 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 dont know what they expect. Im going to be a little troll with an axe? I always get that. Youre so nice. You seem so happy.
AD: Your other big project, which starts next month is the X-Files/30 Days of Night crossover.
SN: That turned out to be a pleasant surprise. I wasnt 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 didnt 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.
AD: What was hook, can you say?
SN: I cant 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 Im 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.
AD: Thats interesting because you look at the Arctic and every year theres disappearances and strange deaths and bodies going missing and lots of really odd circumstances.
SN: 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 theres a large amount of actual Arctic disappearances and saying that maybe they met with a grimmer fate than people think wasnt too big a stretch.
AD: Will the next one be Global Warming: Polar Bears and Vampires Move South?
SN: No. [laughs] Well stay away from all that. Despite the changes in the climate it still gets dark up there for a long time.
AD: You mentioned old movies earlier and recently youve been doing books with the great artist Bernie Wrightson. Most recently The Ghoul, which just came out in paperback and you have another one coming out this fall, Doc Macabre.
SN: It started with Dead, She Said which was about a detective, Coogan, who basically has to solve his own murder and find out why hes still alive after being murdered. It was followed by The Ghoul and in The Ghoul for people whove read it, theres 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 were 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.
AD: And this all started with City of Others that you both did for Dark Horse years ago.
SN: 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. Weve got two of the books out. Were halfway through Doc Macabre right now. Were already making plans for what The Moorpark Rejects will be like. It seems to be working.
AD: It feels like youre having a lot of fun.
SN: Getting to work with Bernie Wrightson. I mean, it doesnt get any better than that.
AD: Are there plans to continue after The Moorpark Rejects? Are you leaving it open-ended to possibly continue?
SN:[/B} The idea was to keep feeling around to see what people respond to and people seem to have really responded to the Ghoul, so were thinking that after The Moorpark Rejects, well probably do more Ghoul books. Were having fun with all of the characters, but we definitely want to see what readers seem to respond to the most, and right now that seem to be the Ghoul.
AD: I wanted to ask about the sequel to the 30 Days of Night movie, Dark Days. It doesnt have a release date yet, does it?
SN: It does not have a release date. Im 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 Bens 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.
AD: It helps that the first one is set in Barrow in this almost hermetically sealed world that had to be recreated while this one takes place in Los Angeles mostly.
SN: Exactly. 30 Days of Night and it all takes place in LA (laughs) Were hoping that what will wind up happening is well 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. Its a very different world because its going to have limited theatrical and we recast and all that so Im curious to see what happens.
AD: You have Mia Kirshner as Lilith, the Vampire queen, which Im excited about because I think shes always amazing.
SN: You know more than I do! (laughs)
Im 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. Im really curious. Im just now starting to pay a little more attention to the direct to DVD market and it seems like theres 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 Im very very curious to see if it works. Ive been talking to other people about doing lower budget horror movies and try to get them right to people.
AD: Thats a nice segue because one company thats had success is DC and Warner Brothers and their animated direct to DVD films.
SN: 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 theres a market for it. I know theres been a lot of scifi stuff and Im hoping for the same thing for horror.
AD: Had you written for animation before?
SN: 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.
AD: I wanted to ask about Ashley Wood and Fiona Staples with whom youre doing Mystery Society. You mentioned that you and Ashley came up with idea.
SN: 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 weve 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 cant 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 Ive done with these very dark artists. She has, I dont 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 peoples expressions and all these little touches that really help bring out the fun and the humor in particular scenes and shes added so much to this series. Like I said, I cant say enough about her. Shes one of my favorite artists right now.
AD: The only other project Ive seen from her was North 40 from Wildstom the other year.
SN: 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 dont know what youre 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. Im 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. Im hoping one day well get Ashley to do an issue. Id love to do a giant size one with him. In the meantime he and I are creating other stuff and were always talking. Were on skype together all the time. Were working on a very dark paranormal story together right now that we might do in short installments in one of his publications.
AD: Weve covered god knows how many things, but I know youre in the midst of so much more. Its a lot to juggle.
SN: You juggle half a dozen and youre lucky if two see the light of day. I have permanent freelancers disease and I can never relax. Im always worried about where my next job is going to be coming from. Ive got a few things going on at once. One of them is with Glenn Fabry called Lot 13 that Im doing through Wildstorm. Weve got about four issues of that in the can. Its so visually over the top. Its easily some of the most graphic stuff that weve ever done, both me and Glenn. He has a way of making it look so beautiful.
Ive got a new creator owned series coming up with Kelly Jones at IDW called Edge of Doom and Im playing around with the short form. Its 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 theyre 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. Its the best Kelly Jones artwork weve ever seen. Hes just its 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 Im working on. Im doing this book for Pocket books, Simon and Schuster, called The World of Hurt which will be out July 2011
AD: Do you want to say anything about the book or should I ask in year?
SN: Im 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 Ive always looked at Cal as being comedy. To me its much more comedy than anything else, so I want to try to up the ante and do it dead serious.
AD: So this fall, F.E.A.R. 3 comes out that you worked on with John Carpenter. What was that liked?
SN: I was scared to death at first [laughs] Like Bernie, hes 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 Ive ever met. Weve struck up a friendship and working with him was so easy.
AD: Its been a while since he came out with a movie.
SN: Hes working on one now. We met to work together on a movie that didnt 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.
Theyre 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. Its so freaking violent its unbelievable. F.E.A.R. 2 ended on a very specific, odd note and John and I took that idea and ran with it. Theres some pretty dark shit coming.
AD: So a John Carpenter-Steve Niles film collaboration is in fact a possibility?
SN: That would be a dream come true. Im hoping to talk with John about doing some comics, but right now hes been filming and editing his latest movie so Im hoping when the dust settles well get to sit down and figure out some new stuff to work on.
AD: Youve worked with so many artists with a defined style, but you really create a story that is a collaboration in a way that many other writers dont.
SN: I really do try. That comes from working with the artist. Also, when I look at my favorite writers or filmmakers or artists, its 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 its the same filmmaker who made the three movies. If I can come within a mile of that, that makes me really happy. Id hate to think I was doing the same thing over and over again.
AD: You want to be one of those old hollywood filmmakers jumping from one film and one genre to another.
SN: At the end of the day Im still a sixteen year old nerd making super-8 movies. I just love telling stories for whatever reason and its what motivates me and gets me excited. I have fun with Mystery Society because Im 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 its kind of all I do. I dont have much of a life outside this stuff, Im afraid to say.
AD: Maybe we should end on that note. [laughs]
SN: [laughs] Lets end on, I have no life.
AD: Youre on facebook. Doesnt anybody want to be your friend? [laughs]
SN: [Laughs] Really, the best part of doing this tour is finding out how much I like my fans. Theyre really nice people and I can have ten people in line and nobody brings me the same book. Theyre not even aware of the other ones. People come up and theyre like, I love 30 Days and they dont 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 lets do more of connecting directly with the retailers and the fans. I think it really helps.