Horror website Shock Til You Drop labels Steve the Busiest Man In Comics in this interview. He was also, obviously, the busiest interviewee at the Fangoria con in Jersey!

Shock: Obviously when the comic books came out, they were fairly popular right off the bat.

Niles: You know what was pretty surprising actually. At the time I was working for Todd McFarlane doing “Hellspawn” and “Spawn: The Dark Ages” and my buddy Ted Adams called me and said, “We’re doing some comic but we can’t pay you.” I did the first issue of “30 Days of Night” for free and then it only sold 4,000 copies. Once the first comic hit, that’s when everybody went nuts, so the numbers on #2 and 3 went way up, and then it went into multiple printings and all that stuff. Initially, we were like, “Oh, well, we tried” and then the comic came out and the bidding war started.

Shock: Was the idea for this something you had for a long time before you finally did the comic? How did you hook up with Ben Templesmith?

Niles: Through “Hellspawn.” We both worked at McFarlane and we had this thing where any time we did an issue of “Hellspawn,” we had to wait about a month for Todd to approve it, so we’d be sitting around twiddling our thumbs, and I had this whole pitch list of movies I’d been pitching that never sold. I gave it to Ted Adams and he picked “30 Days of Night,” and since then, literally everything on that list has become either a comic or sold as a movie. (chuckles)

Read the entire interview here!