When I conducted the following interview with Dan Brereton of Nocturnals and Thrillkiller fame, nobody in my office could believe how long we were on the phone. An average-to-longish interview generally runs about an hour tops when there is a lot of ground to cover. My interview with Dan? Just shy of two hours. It was really quite amazing and pretty silly as far as interviews go, because half way into it we were babbling madly about our favorite shared scenes from The Shining and other classic horror flicks, and any sense of maintaining professional decorum was abandoned.

In all truth, this conversation was one of the most fun I've had with a creator since I started this job. What follows is an excerpt of our discussion, with lots of stuff edited out for clarity's sake. For an idea of how the rest of our conversation went, and for a discussion of some of the movies that have inspired Dan's work, check out the features section of this web site. Also be on the lookout for the collected Nocturnals DHP serial Witching Hour, on sale May 20.

Shawna Ervin-Gore: So, how did the Nocturnals get to Dark Horse?

Dan Brereton: Originally I did a six-issue mini-series for the Bravura line, which was Malibu's creator owned line before Malibu was bought by Marvel and then taken apart. Bravura was a really cool group of people for a while. Originally, I had pitched it to Bob Schreck when he was at Dark Horse, and it just didn't come together at that time. A couple of years later Mike Richardson and I were talking and he said "Maybe you should do something for Dark Horse Presents, and we can collect it later."

Ervin-Gore: And where did you get your inspiration for the series and the characters?

Brereton: I was on a plane to Scotland with another comic book friend. We were going to a convention, and at the time I was still working on a superhero book for DC, Legends of the World's Finest, a Superman or Batman book. Anyway, I really wanted to start doing my own thing, and I thought about how I used to come up with all these characters on my own even before I was in comics, and now it seems like I'm coming up with characters for everybody else, and then they go away.

So I had a few characters sort of rolling around in my head, and I put them together on a piece of paper. I came up with the idea for this main character, and I wanted to give him sort of a silly, kind of a pulp-crime-whatever name, and I came up with Doc Horror. I already had a character sort of waiting in the wings called the Gunwitch, who appears in Witching Hour.

And my oldest, Lindsey, inspired another character. When she was about four years old, we were talking about what she wanted to dress up as for Trick or Treat, and it was only like the second time she'd gone. She thought about it, and then she said "I know what I want to be for Trick or Treat -- I want to be Halloween Girl!" At first I thought that she didn't quite get that she could be anything she wanted for Halloween, but then I thought it was such a cool idea to dress up as the walking icon for Halloween. So I started drawing in my sketch book this girl with a mask, carrying a pumpkin, wearing a witch costume and a witch hat, and I thought it was a really cool name for a character. It kind of stuck, and she became one of the cornerstone characters for the book.

And it's funny, because when I started putting the idea together, I never imagined Halloween Girl would be the most popular character, with the Gunwitch being probably the second most popular, even though he has very little to do with the events of the story. He's really just Halloween Girl's chaperone . . .

Ervin-Gore: Yeah, but he's such a bad-ass.

Brereton: (Laughs) Yeah, well he's just a bad-ass chaperone, but he doesn't really say anything.

But when it came time to decide what to do for DHP, I thought that since it was gonna be in October around Halloween, I wanted to have Halloween Girl go trick or treating with her babysitter, and it just seemed like a natural thing to do since I didn't have six issues for seven different characters. I knew I'd have to pare it down, and as the story progressed I was able to figure out how to put in some of the other characters. I didn't fit all of the Nocturnals into the DHP serial, but now that I'm doing eight extra pages, I actually was able to include the other ones, at least in cameo roles -- and in color.

Ervin-Gore: So, who are the Nocturnals? What are they doing and where did they come from?

Brereton: Okay, well, Doc Horror is the leader, and his daughter Eve -- Evening Horror -- that's Halloween Girl -- they're from another dimension, another planet, and they come to earth. A lot of this stuff is covered in the first series, Nocturnals: The Black Planet, which is being collected in October by Oni Press.

So Doc Horror and Eve are the core characters, and then there's the Gunwitch, who is Eve's baby-sitter or chaperone or whatever, who's a kind of resurrected gunfighter-zombie-scarecrow thing. For a long time I didn't even describe the Gunwitch as a he, I described him as an it.

Ervin-Gore: But he's a pretty masculine character.

Brereton: He's probably pretty much a guy, or was at some point. And then there's Polychrome, who's like a wraith -- a ghost who also appears in Witching Hour. She's a wraith, which is like a ghost in that after the person's death it sticks around because of unfinished business, and for a wraith, that unfinished business is probably revenge or something kind of nasty. But Polychrome has just chosen to ignore it and put it on hold for a while, whatever it is. So she's found a home for herself with the Nocturnals.

And then there's Starfish, who's this amphibian girl, whose origins are a mystery, and Firelion, who's got a human brain and an android chassis, and he's pyrokinetic, and he's also something of a Samurai nut, so he carries a sword.

Ervin-Gore: (laughing pretty hard) That's some character.

Brereton: I know (laughing, too), but I was having fun with this. And there's one more, the Raccoon, who is actually a pretty violent guy. I think [editor] Jamie Rich refers to him as being "uncouth," but he's this guy that has a temper and kind of hangs out with Starfish. It's pretty well known that he has a crush on her, and maybe she likes him, too, but they keep it under wraps. Or maybe she's too much of a tomboy to accept his affection, but whatever it is, they keep it pretty much to themselves. Is that seven? I think that's seven.

Ervin-Gore: Now that Witching Hour is being released as one-shot, and Oni Press is releasing a trade of the original series, do you have more in store for the Nocturnals?

Brereton: Oh yeah, I always want to do more with them; it's just a matter of getting the time to do it. Nothing can come close to working on your own creation, and as much as I have fun doing other stuff, I just can't wait to get back to work on these guys.