“If the apocalypse comes, beep me.” - Buffy

“Dude, that’s Steve Niles,” my friend Arnie said. “He’s just right there!” Niles was there, going through the longboxes at Fantasy Comics in Tucson after a signing event that also included Tim Bradstreet, Bernie Wrightson and David Schow. Niles was cool about the gushing, came over and talked to Arnie for a while, which gave him the courage to approach the other guests. I’ve never seen Arnie glow like that before. “That was awesome!” he said later. “They were all so cool! I had no idea they’d be just like regular guys!”

PRG: Based on my friend’s reaction to you a second ago, I’m curious about something.� Do you get that kind of gushing reaction a lot?

Steve Niles: Not really, mostly because I haven’t done conventions in a really long time. 30 Days of Night, what everyone seems to know me for now, didn’t come out until 2002 and I’ve been in LA, but now that I’m going to more places it’s happening more. I just want to disarm it as soon as possible. I want people to not be nervous and just talk, because that’s where I’m coming from. This is how I did it too, standing around at signings and stuff. Even with Bernie [Wrightson], I have books signed by him and I showed him and he was like “I don’t remember signing that”. That’s because I didn’t say anything! I was just this little fan.

PRG: What was it like developing City of Others with someone you admired like that?

SN: You know, I was just really happy to be friends with him. I never brought up work, refused to bring up work, but every time we got together we would inevitably start working. We’d start talking about story lines and going back and forth and one day he just brought it up. He said “I’m thinking about getting back into comics” and I was thinking to myself, “Play it cool, play it cool, Steve,” and trying not to get too excited about it. He’s one of my best friends now and working with him so much fun. I feel like my job is to try to channel him. Stories he wants to tell, stories he wants to draw. I’m having the time of my life.

PRG: You mentioned to Arnie that you recently turned 42, but have been in this since you were 19.

SN: Yeah, I started when I was a little younger than that. I started self-publishing little stapled books, like prose books, when I was still in high school. I wound up getting in to the punk rock scene in Washington, DC and played with a couple bands with Dischord Records. The whole idea of Dischord was it was all do it yourself. You recorded it yourself, you assembled the record yourself. So, I just started self-publishing when I was 19. That led to me working with a lot of cool people like Richard Matheson and Clive Barker because I would just go bug the crap out of them. I’d go and introduce myself, send them letters, whatever it would take to get to meet them and try to work with them. It was slowly, slowly built.

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PRG: Do you like to do full scripts or Marvel method?

SN: I do full scripts. But, if its a new artist, they get the torturous, paragraph-per-panel descriptions. Then as I get used to them, I develop kind of a shorthand. I’ve been doing some stuff with Bill Sienkewicz recently and found that giving him a tight script was the worst thing in the world. I’ll do the scenes I need tight, then I’ll do Marvel style and do a loose page description, then go back to the other way. For Bernie, I do 22 pages of tight script, but he does 26 pages of art. He pulls his own splash pages. Then I re-script after he does it.

It’s really figuring out the best way to work with each artist. I feel like my job is half cheerleader and I have to get these guys to want to draw this stuff. God knows, its got to be hard doing 22 pages of art like that every month. My job is to write whatever will motivate them to get it done.

PRG: What’s been the most difficult thing about collaborating with an artist? I think that writers and artists speak completely different languages most of the time.

SN: My girlfriend is an artist, and we’ve only been going out for a year, but she had really been teaching me. My problem was I always knew what I wanted in a script, but if it came back because there was something off, I didn’t always know how to spot it. I’m learning - it’s trial and error. I write the same scripts for Ben Templesmith that I write for Justiniano on The Creeper, but the artists just see something different. Most of the time I don’t mind it.

I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone redo anything. I know there are writers who do that. It’s like a music thing. When you’re in a band with three other guys, you play a riff and they jump in and you wind up with something you didn’t imagine. It’s sort of the same with comic collaborators. I like throwing it back and forth and seeing what we get.

PRG: You have that spark, that idea. Take me from idea or concept to finished product. What’s your process, or do you even have a process?

SN: I have notebooks that look like a serial killer wrote them because I usually get my ideas - its so annoying - in the shower. I spend more time bolting out of the shower and jotting things down as fast as I can. Picture that. Or don’t, please!

Mostly I bullet point out ideas. I can do reminder words, things like that. Then, as long as I have a decent idea of what the issue should be, I can just sit down and start writing. I don’t outline too intensely. Then I’ll do two or three rewrites afterwards. But, it’s always different and that’s kind of the fun part.

I got to do one Marvel book and it was like Hulk and Thing meet the pre-Code monsters. I didn’t even outline on that one. I just started typing “page one, panel one”. It just poured out. I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

PRG: When you were starting out, what other writers did you model yourself after?

SN: Richard Matheson was one of the biggest, Raymond Chandler, Dashell Hammett, guys like that. I love the pulp stuff. And then in comics, it was all the 1970s guys that I grew up reading. Steve Gerber. Jack Kirby.

PRG: How involved were you in the adaptation of 30 Days of Night?

SN: I wrote the first draft of the screenplay and that was with Raimi. I hadn’t finished the comic series yet, but I was already developing it as a movie. It was a fun, but confusing time for me. That version came out good, then the studio brought in Stu Beattie, who wrote Pirates of the Caribbean. Me and Stu became really good friends immediately. When Brian Nelson, who was David Slade’s writer for Hard Candy, came on, I became friends with him and we started writing.

Even up until last week I was doing dialogue and some new scenes because they’re doing the last minute tweaks. They’ve kept me in the loop every step of the way and I’m not a producer on the movie. I’m just the writer and creator and, contractually, they don’t have to tell me anything. It’s been so great. I really feel like I’m having the anti-Hollywood experience. It’s going so well and I’m so happy with the way everything is going.

PRG: Since you had already done it in a comic script format, was is difficult to adapt the comic for film?

SN: It was from a movie pitch already, so that was why it was only three issues, one for each act. I had all of these movie pitches that nobody would buy, so I just did them as comics. Me and Ben [Templesmith] didn’t even get paid for the first one.

I knew right away going into it, that I had to populate the town because I didn’t name any of the other people. Develop the characters a little better because when you do comics, its sort of a short hand. You say key things so you know that Eben and Stella are a happy couple and they love each other. But in a movie, they want more of that. In the comic, its just John Ikos and his brother’s bar, but in movies, they want to know the background and about the family. It was kind of fun. I got to expand on ideas. For 30 days, it was really a blast.

PRG: You’re also working with Tim Bradstreet and Thomas Jane on comics from Raw Entertainment.

SN: Yeah, Bad Planet, and we’re sort of producing Alien Pig Farm. And Tom and I have a first look deal at Lionsgate. I’m adapting my comic The Lurkers for a movie and Tom will star in that. We’re trying to do a little bit of everything. It looks like Tom and I are going to be doing a TV show. Hasn’t been announced yet, so I can’t say for who, but we just pitched it.

PRG: What have you done that you’re the most proud of?

SN: Cal McDonald (Criminal Macabre, Savage Membrane, Guns, Drugs & Monsters). Its novels and comics, and the character has been with me literally since I was a kid. I’ve been writing it for a long time. There’s a book I did called Freaks of the Heartland is probably my favorite. It’s this kind of quiet, kind of Of Mice and Men sort of horror story and that’s one of my favorites.

And 30 Days of Night for obvious reasons. I can’t take any credit for thinking that was a great idea. I walked around for years with that idea and didn’t think much of it. Ted Adams at IDW was the one who looked at it and went “Holy crap! That is a really original idea!”

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