Dan Brereton is synonymous with Nocturnals. Having created covers for the likes of DC Comics, Marvel, Valiant and Heavy Metal, as well as writing and illustrating stories for such iconic characters as Red Sonja and Batman, Brereton’s singular Horror-Noir creation Nocturnals remains his most cherished, personal and idiosyncratic work.
Between commission and cover work, Brereton has continued expanding the Nocturnals universe, which began in the 90s under the independent imprint Malibu Comics, and has continued to grace comic book shops’ shelves throughout the decades since (for a primer on Nocturnals for the uninitiated, see our previous Halloween coverage and get to know this wonderfully weird cast of characters).
While some gorgeous omnibus collections of early Nocturnals stories have been released by Dark Horse Comics, Brereton has shifted to Kickstarter to fund his most recent artbooks, re-releases of earlier creations like the action-packed kaiju comic Giantkiller, and now the newest Nocturnals arc, simply titled Darkly.
The current Kickstarter project is but the first of a 3-part collection which will make up the new graphic novel. Offering oversized 72-page hardcover editions (all signed by the artist), original art rewards, and past art book add-ons, the project has already surpassed its goal and continues to gain traction as a Kickstarter “Project We Love”.
As the stories pour out of Brereton’s mind and into his beautifully Halloween-tinged pages, crowdfunding has become the most trusted way of making sure the stories get to readers’ hands. The intense labor of solely creating a comic book and fulfilling orders without the help of a distributor is matched only by Brereton’s passion for his creation and loyalty to his long-standing readers.
With Dark Horse having just re-released the prelude to Darkly, The Sinister Path, which will be collected in a new edition from the publisher as well, it is a great time to be a fan of Nocturnals and the perfect moment to become one.
I sat down with Dan Brereton to discuss Darkly, maintaining relationships through crowdfunding campaigns, reaching new readers, and what’s next for the Nocturnals.
GABRIEL SERRANO: You released The Sinister Path in 2017 as a standalone graphic novel, and I understand that you kept on writing. I want to know how this new story, Darkly, came about, and where you want to take the Nocturnals from here?
DAN BRERETON: As I was working on that, I had started to formulate an idea for what’s going to come next. And then I realized there was probably going to be some kind of a trilogy. So The Sinister Path was part one, and then Darkly part two, and then there’s the third part that follows. It’s basically this sort of coming-of-age for Evening. Halloween Girl’s character becomes pretty much the main character. The Nocturnals has been around for what will be its 32nd year since it hit the stands in ‘94, but in the beginning, she wasn’t necessarily the focus. But I just feel like she was so interesting to me, and I related to a lot of things about her from my childhood and things like that. I mean, she’s definitely less of a scaredy cat than I was. I think at the beginning, I related more to Doc [Horror], because he’s a father, and I was a young father at the time. I mean, I still am, just an older father. But now I have even more of a feeling and affinity for these characters over the years and getting to know them.
A lot of times it’s because they’re running around your head, you know, and you get all these ideas for stories, and you don’t always have a place to put them. Your “writer brain” doesn’t just turn itself off. It’s running. It’s like an engine. And so I was still working on the last parts of Sinister Path when I started working out notes for what the next story would be and who would be in it, and then doing the layouts. All this stuff took place over several years while I was working on other things. When I did The Sinister Path, it was a Kickstarter, and there was money to fund it, but I had to make a living. So I had to do other things. I ended up working for Valiant on quite a few covers. I did some work for Marvel, and I was pretty busy. And then I had started on Patreon, I want to say in 2019, and then I was doing a Kickstarter for an art book or something every year.
I also did a Kickstarter for a hardcover, a version of my book, Giantkiller, which is my kaiju book from ‘99 I did for DC. I did like a big oversized hardcover, which was a 20th anniversary book. So I was always busy with something, and in the background, I had Nocturnals so getting the entire story penciled took a while. During the pandemic, I was able to kind of focus even more on it. And then after that, still working full time on other things, I was slowly painting pages. When Dark Horse started publishing Nocturnals, starting with the omnibus collections, Sinister Path was going to follow. And the idea was, okay, I’m doing a trilogy starting with Sinister Path.
This story is a little different from Sinister Path. Sinister Path dealt a lot with a secret family history and the fallout from the treatment of the children of this character, The Judge, who locked up his monster kids in a basement for years. Some of them escaped, and some were stuck down there. And when they all get loose, you know, hell breaks loose.
Darkly is more about a kind of wild Halloween night that takes place in an autumn realm that they find themselves in after they find a relic that The Judge had hidden for decades, kept in safe keeping by a covenant of vampires. At the end of Sinister Path, we see one of the characters retrieving this box, and we don’t know what’s in it, but we’re going to find out what’s in it in this new story. And when we find out what’s in it, that’s when everything sort of changes, and they have to go through this ordeal, and there’s a lot of creatures and monsters and all kinds of stuff happening as the story progresses. So I’m really excited about part one. And yeah, it’s nice to see it go off. It was funded like the first day. So that was great.
SERRANO: In terms of the audience you’re reaching, backers that you’re getting from Kickstarter, have you seen some new fans there? How many older fans have come out to support you?
BRERETON: The majority is returning people, which is great, and there’s quite a few Kickstarter backers who have been following my projects for years. So that’s great. I’ve sort of had to be careful about making sure that I make the country that certain people live in available, because you get people who back more than just the book. I usually do an art portfolio too, that goes with these projects. So people back more than those two items. And some people are good for one every year.
One year, I noticed that there was someone from another country in Asia who had not backed the project, and I wrote to them and just kind of reminded them about my thing. And they said, “Yeah, you know, I don’t think you put my country on there”. There are these little relationships that get maintained over the years, and you meet people that way, and you’re bringing in a bunch of new people. Kickstarter brings in a lot of new people too, because they’re very involved, and they make sure that people know these things are out there. And that’s my biggest challenge with Kickstarter, is reaching new people.
I do try and reach as many people as I can, because even when you have all those rewards and everything like that, and people want a sketch or a drawing or whatever it is, you know, that’s great, but I want more copies in people’s hands, because I want people to read this stuff. It’s not just about a bunch of merchandise. And you’ll see a lot of comic book projects where it’s a comic book and it may not be more than 32 or 40 pages, and it’s still $25 you know what I mean? Because most of these are printed on demand. We print our stuff with a printer. You know, it’s not printed on demand, and so we can’t do that. We have to have a minimum, which is fine, but I would like to get these copies in people’s hands so they’re not sitting in storage or a warehouse. I want people to read and enjoy them. So really, it’s about reaching readers. And some people, when you look at their Kickstarters and they’re doing really well, they’ll say, “Wow, we just made this much money”. And I really think it’s about how many readers that you reach. Because that’s what I’m doing for a living. I’m trying to tell stories.
When Dark Horse put out The Sinister Path, they did a “Trick-Or-Read” version of issue one, which was free to the customers. And even though it came out a month after the original first issue came out, that cost money, I thought it was great because it put the book in more people’s hands and they were able to read it. I loved that. I love doing a signing where people were buying it and where people weren’t sure and I said, “Here, take this”. That felt really great to be able to do that. Also, when you’re doing something, it’s a continuation, whether it was the last one, Sinister Path or this one. I make sure that people can get their hands on the original material. Now they can go and get it. They can get the omnibuses from Dark Horse. They can get the trade paperback of The Sinister Path. I made an announcement about that release but sometimes people want it all from the source.
I make sure that I have backstock of those, and back catalog stuff that we offer too. I mean, it’s not on the scale of some other creators who were selling more books and all that kind of stuff. But also, because I started doing a painted book, you couldn’t put it out with the same frequency, and that did kind of limit what I was able to release over time. And when you own a property, not a lot of publishers want to participate with that and pay you a rate that is commensurate with your work, because comic publishers are not paying what they were in the 90s. You know, comics aren’t selling what they were in the 90s. So the reality is, doing a painted series is tough. So I really do rely on the readership, and if they want it, I’ll do it. So apparently they want it. I’m very, very grateful.
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SERRANO: Are there other works that you’re working on that you want to release with a Kickstarter? Or that you want to bring back?
BRERETON: I would like to do another Giantkiller story. For the 20th anniversary hardcover that I crowdfunded, I added like a 10-page epilogue that sort of kicked off a new adventure for Jack and Jill. And I know that people may be reading this and they don’t all know those characters, but they’re the main characters of Giantkiller, and they go off on another adventure to fight giant monsters, kaiju, or as I call them, daikaiju, and they run into two of the Nocturnals out in the Antarctic. I didn’t make a big deal about that when I put it out there, because I wanted people to be surprised. So I had always had it in mind to do a crossover with those two, with the Nocturnals and Giantkiller. So I’d still like to do that someday. I can’t even get into all the things I want to do. I want to do a Western, I want to do ghost stories. If there’s a genre, I’ve got an idea for it. And that’s just how the cauldron works. You put stuff in and stuff comes out, it bubbles up, and you can’t really shut that off. And that’s fine. I don’t need to.
I have a lot of composition books and notebooks that are full of these ideas like a sword and sorcery and a Western over here, and, you know, just that kind of thing. I definitely would like to release The Psycho as a hardcover. I think it needs to happen. I’d like to do an oversized hardcover, for sure. I think enough time has gone by, and it really made a great impact when it came out, which was fantastic. I have a new cover that’s penciled for it. I just haven’t finished. There are definitely characters I’d like to revisit and new things I’d like to do if I can, but I want to focus on finishing this Nocturnals trilogy, of which Darkly is part two, before I move to other things.
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SERRANO: There’s a lot of love for Nocturnals and your creations. People seem to flock to your Kickstarters.
BRERETON: Yeah, it’s just great to be able to do this stuff. And you know, having anyone come to me and know the names of the characters, and ask me questions about them, that connection is kind of surreal in a way, because this stuff was all in your imagination. You put it on a piece of paper, and you wrote it down, you drew it and you put it out there, and then it becomes real, in a way, a reality of its own. And I think that’s what’s so amazing about just stories in general. You create these alternate realities, which was what the Marvel Universe was for me as a kid. Stan [Lee] and the editorial staff and the writers and everybody, they kind of all put it together into one world. And that was genius that they did that. Because it really did create, in a child’s mind, or a reader’s mind, a kind of connected universe and alternate reality you could escape to. And I really needed to escape when I was a kid. I really appreciated that. So for me, that’s part of another thing about the Nocturnals, is the idea of alternate realities and roles within worlds and things like that. So that’s what this story kind of explores a little bit. I’m just really anxious for people to read it. And I think putting it out in three parts gives me impetus to be even more productive on it.
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