In the aftermath of a #1 box office debut for the movie based on his graphic novel, 30 Days of Night, Steve Niles could be forgiven for pausing to enjoy the nationwide film success of his vampire series. Instead of basking in that success, however, the prolific creator is busier than ever, with a slew of comics and prose projects underway and even more on deck for the coming year.
Following up on his 2006 Batman miniseries, Gotham County Line, Niles returns to the popular DC franchise in 2008 with Gotham After Midnight, a 12-issue limited series drawn by previous Batman artist Kelley Jones and planned for release before the new Batman Dark Knight movie. “The idea behind it really is that nighttime is the busiest time for Batman,” said Niles. “It's when the weirdest villains come out. So, it's after midnight.”
Gotham After Midnight won’t be the only book Niles writes in DC’s Gotham City, either; he also has a recently launched ongoing creator-owned series with artist Scott Hampton called Simon Dark, about an amnesiac hero built from dead bodies who also happens to live in Batman's crime-ridden hometown. “I was going to do it in an imaginary setting, like ‘Central City’ or something,” said Niles. “And then [DC] said, ‘Why don’t you just put it in Gotham?’ ”
"And now everybody asks, 'When's Batman going to show up?' Never," he vowed. "I like the shadow he casts. I don't care what anybody says, Batman's human and he can't be everywhere at once. So, there is room for this kind of stuff. If anything, what I'd love to do in a couple of years, if Simon Dark takes off, is to do a Batman story and have Simon in it. That would be interesting. "
Niles, who publishes his comics through a wide array of companies, also announced that he will soon be writing a new comic for DC’s Wildstorm imprint, Lot 13. He described the six-issue miniseries, which will be drawn by illustrator Glenn Fabry, as a “haunted house” story.
Although most of his work, like Lot 13, tends toward the dark and supernatural, Niles manages to bring a surprisingly comedic and family-friendly touch to his usual horror with The Cryptics, an Image Comics book about elementary school monsters that labels itself “for immature readers only.” The series, which releases its third issue in December, is something Niles said he writes “just [for] pure fun."
"I grew up with Peanuts and Dennis the Menace and all that stuff,” he said, “and I thought, I want to do monsters like that. It's sort of like The Munsters, where you throw all the rules out the window and have fun with it. There's just something funny about the monsters in the fourth grade."
Although the title is only published intermittently, action figures of the characters Dracula and Seaboy are planned for release through Hot Topic to accompany the trade collection. The Cryptics is also moving into the realm of video games; it will soon become available for download to the Sony PSP through D2C Games, and a Cryptics party game in the works for the Nintendo Wii system will allow players to participate in games like king of the hill, paintball and basketball as the characters of the series.
More true to form, Niles is developing a horror/superhero book for Image called The Sinner, and has several projects in process for Criminal Macabre, his long-running Dark Horse Comics series about a paranormal, drug-addicted detective named Cal MacDonald. "Cal just writes himself," said Niles, adding that he receives more fan mail for his Cal stories than anything else he's written. "I just love him so much. I feel like I just channel him sometimes."
Although Niles hopes to see Criminal Macabre make it to the big screen as well, he has had some trouble making that dream a reality. A film option for the series by MGM fell apart after disagreements over whether to portray the protagonist as a drug user. Niles also said no to "somebody [else in Hollywood] recently who said the same thing: 'How about if we just make him hard drinking?' And I said, why don't you give him a fedora, too, and set it in the ’40s? No! No. Stop it."
Back in the more faithful realm of print, Niles is hard at work on his third Criminal Macabre prose novel, with his older Criminal Macabre short stories soon to be republished as The Complete Cal MacDonald Stories, a prose collection coming out from Dark Horse on November 21. "I'm so excited about [it]," said Niles. "Every bit of it was out of print. And there are [also] a couple [new] short stories that I've written in the meantime.... Any time anyone asks me to do something for an anthology, I say, 'Can I do a Cal story?' So that's an excuse to keep writing prose."
And thanks to Pocket Books, his prose fiction will soon expand beyond the familiar stories of Cal MacDonald; Niles recently signed a “first novel” contract for an original hardcover fiction book, “even though I’ve written lots of novels,” he laughed. Although the concept for the new book is in the works, he admitted that "my bad habit as a writer is that I really like to fly by the seat of my pants. I like to have as much fun as the reader does, like, 'Oh! I didn't expect that to happen.' So I do very thin outlines."
Despite the intense demands of a daunting number of projects across numerous companies and media, Niles somehow manages to remain unfazed by his obligations and unafraid to take on more. “I’ve discovered that if you just say yes, and you have a deadline, you have to get it done,” said Niles. "I’m terrified of angry editors. That's my one East Coast trait that I still carry with me: I can't be late. I stress out so badly if I’m going to be late somewhere. If I miss a deadline, I'll stay up all night; I'll do anything."
