Texan Drew Edwards blended his love of comic books, horror movies, and psychobilly music and created Halloween Man, a hero to freaks everywhere.

Born on October 31st, every important event in Solomon Hitch's life happened on Halloween... Even his death. Reborn as a super-powered zombie and fueled by the power of the horror movie sequel, Solomon now protects the citizens of Solar City, Texas from otherworldly monsters as… Halloween Man!

Joined by his love, super-scientist and fashionable woman-about-town Lucy Chaplin, his randy sidekick Man-Goat, the bookish best friend Nickodemis and streetwise wizard Morlack, they fight a tireless crusade against evil in all its forms.

Halloween Man is a cult hit comic on the web and some of his greatest adventures will soon be collected in book form with the publication of Halloween Man: Superdeformed.

YourMomsBasement talked with some members of the HM creative team, including Nicola "Birds of Prey" Scott, about their involvement with the series.

So, how did you all start working on the Halloween Man comic and in what capacity?

JESSE FARRELL (colorist and letterer): My addictions had dragged me right into the gutter of human existence: the gutter. So starved was I for that elusive high that I was actually melting down and drinking crayons (a trick I'd learned in my youth to blank out the pain of grade school), I discovered a tattered, black and white ashcan edition of Halloween Man floating by me in the brackish streetwater. I lifted it to my reddened eyes; my fingerprints had left colorful impressions on the cheap newsprint. Soon, I found myself coloring pages, which I submitted to Drew Edwards (or rather his team of agents at Halloween Man Industries, LLC). Well, my story might have ended there had those good people not rescued me from oblivion.

Halloween Man saved my life. Halloween Man taught me to read.

RUSSELL HILLMAN (editor): Hi. I'm Russell Hillman, Editor.

I'm pretty sure that all three of us came on around the same time, or at least for the same story - it was late 2003, and Drew was trying to scare up some artists for his Christmas jam story, Faster Santa Claus! Kill! Kill! and had posted the script in the creative forum over at Millarworld. I was reading through the script, and two thoughts sprang to mind. The first one was "This guy is GOOD!", and the second was "Apart from his typing."

(Knowing Drew as I do now, I can tell you that he types about as fast as he speaks - which at times can be very fast indeed - and he comes up with new ideas even faster, so it's no wonder that his scripts are occasionally heavy on the typos.)

I offered Drew my assistance, and he accepted, so I went through the script and smoothed out a couple of the rough edges. Drew liked what I'd done, and asked me to take a look at another couple of scripts, and things snowballed from there.

As for what I do now - well, I often dismiss my contribution as minimal. My standard line is that Drew writes "A man enters the room" and I change it to "A man in a hat enters the room," but there's a lot more to it than that. I act as a sounding board when he's sketching out the plot, I cast a careful eye over the scripts, making suggestions for dialogue and visuals wherever they occur to me - but I don't want to suggest I'm anything approaching a co-writer. This is the house that Drew built, I'm just there to clean the windows (and occasionally suggest repositioning some of the furniture ).

I'm also one of the biggest fans of this book out there - the main reason I do this is so that I can read the stories before anyone else. Oh, and I'm a bigger fan of Man-Goat than anyone on the planet, probably even more than Drew. I can prove this with some kind of science.

NICOLA SCOTT (penciller): Yeah, like Russell said, I think we all entered Halloween Man Land on the same story, the X-mas jam. There were quite a few artists contributing pages, just one or two, and I seem to remember having pages 1 and 4. I was the first to finish, and Drew was happy with what I'd added, so he asked me to draw the epilogue, a last minute addition.

A few weeks later Drew asked if I'd be interested in drawing a three part story, Villain/ Icons/ Hero, and while working on that the opportunity came up to get a short HM story published and I ended up drawing that too. It was that series of events that kinda galvanized us as the core group. Obviously Drew writes faster than I can draw so the are many many stories penciled by other artists but over the years we've managed to build a pretty big body of work together.

You see tons of online comic collaborations that fizzle out after just a little bit of time. What is it about Halloween Man that made you guys want to commit to it? What engenders such loyalty? The characters? The concept? Drew himself?

RUSSELL: For me, it's a combination of all of those things. I knew Drew from the boards before I got involved, but that wouldn't have kept me around if I hadn't liked the characters... and they wouldn't have kept me around if they weren't in good, well-written scripts.

There are times when I'm reading one of those scripts, and I come across a scene or a character or a line of dialogue that almost feels like it was written for me. I stick around because I'm a fan, pure and simple.

JESSE: Drew has compelling personal style; onetime when my work was late he had a couple of "cowpokes" come over and "explain" what the "dead" in "deadline" really means to uppity Yankees like myself.

NICOLA: To start with, for me, it was definitely the characters. I didn't quite get it at the beginning but I knew I loved it. By the time Drew asked me to do the three part story, he and I had been communicating a lot more and were really starting to click. I'd also started chatting and flirting late nights with Jesse and it just seemed that we were all pretty jazzed about what we were working on and where it might go.

It was during that prep time for Villian/Icons/Hero that I went back to all the work previous artists had done and started really trying to define all the characters for myself. I was having so much fun and we were all really starting to gel.

So, let's get into the characters a little bit. Who's your favorite? And which character do you feel you made the greatest contribution to?

JESSE: Who's my favorite character? I've always been partial to Popeye.

RUSSELL: I make absolutely no secret of the fact that my favourite character is Ron Rollins, Man-Goat. When I read through a first draft of a script, I will actually cheer if he says his catch-phrase "The Power of a Man-Sized Goat!" - I honestly am that easily pleased.

Now Ron isn't the most admirable of guys - he'll drink you under the table, fight someone else over the table and then shag the barmaid on the table - but he's a stand-up guy and he's got Solomon's back. While I'm not like him in any way, he appeals to the most basic blokeish part of my brain. The main thing to me is - he's fun. He's Hercules meets Volstagg, with Ben Grimm's sense of humour and Ralph Dibny's sense of shameless self-promotion.

I don't know that I've made a greater contribution to any one character, just little moments here and there. I know that I've helped Drew develop more of a back story for Ron, but that's for a couple of upcoming projects. There's a story where we get to meet another of Ron's relatives (we've briefley met his father, Lord Pan), and something I'm actually writing myself (with much assistance from Drew) - THE SECRET ORIGIN OF MAN-GOAT.

NICOLA: For me, I suppose it should be Lucy but I actually had a slower time getting her right than any of the others.

It's actually Halloween Man himself, Solomon. After reading through some previous stories, and the scripts I was about to start on at the time, I starting to think of Sol as quite sexy, despite his disfigurement and undeadedness. He has a hard as nails facade and a soft gooey center. There was that brooding, swarthy quality that drives girls wild so I just drew him sexy. In fact I think that would be my greatest contribution. He's not Uba, just your everyday, swaggering around kinda sexy. And I gave him a jack 'o lantern baseball shirt!

Let's look at the short story "Necromantic" that you all worked on. While it's got your expected Halloween Man monster bashing, it also explores the relationship between "Solly" and Lucy. And it reads like it might be more personal story to Drew than your regular Halloween Man romp. What was the genesis off this story and your involvement? Why do you think it was important to tell?

NICOLA: Necromantic was one of those stories where there's character development and is quite essential to understanding who Solomon is, so I think Drew wanted his core group on it. It is a very pure and simple telling of Sol and Lucy's history and illustrates why they are such a strong couple. I think it's one of the best things Drew has written.

RUSSELL: To tell you the truth I don't really recall much of the creative process on that one - it may even have been one of those ones that came through to me fully formed, ready for final checks. When I came on board, Drew already had a whole load of scripts in various stages of development that he sent over. He's always quite a bit ahead of the stuff that you see as far as scripts are concerned - I'd say that if every script that I've edited so far was drawn, there would be enough to last at least a year.

As Solomon and Lucy's relationship is a vital part of the story, it was important to show how they met and what adversity they have to go through in their daily lives. It's not easy being an undead monster hunter with half a face, or being the girlfriend of one - for some reason, people seem not to like having Solomon around. He's kinda icky looking, and he tends to show up whenever weird stuff is going on. The fact that it's not usually there because of Solomon, and that he's actually the one that saves people's lives from the weird stuff doesn't seem to matter to them. They want the safe, clean-cut, normal looking superheroes, the Sentinels of Justice. To them, he's just as bad as the monsters he fights.

There are many other stories to be told about Lucy and Solomon's lives before Solomon died - some of which are already written, some have yet to be written, and others that exist only in Drew's head to inform other things. One day you'll find out about Solomon's parents, for instance, and why he came to work for his girlfriend Lucy Chaplin's family. Then there's Lucy's first experiments with super-science, or the various encounters between Lucy and Man-Goat's fathers.

Even if it weren't for the important relationship stuff, I'd love it just for the big panel of Solomon and Lucy fighting the clockwork vomit monkeys. That's super tight.

JESSE: I don't have an actual answer yet, I just have to tell Russell how much I am hating on him for that.

May all your hats be super tight, Russell!

RUSSELL: So they fit well and don't blow away in a strong wind?

Thank you Jesse.

I put super tight in there just to be annoying. Please change it to liquid awesome... unless you really want super tight to stay there...

JESSE: No, no... Keep super tight. It's the new "awesome." All the kids say so. Don't you want to be relevant?

RUSSELL: Rarely if ever.

What have been some of your favorite moments working on Halloween Man and working with each other?

NICOLA: Being so far away keeps me feeling pretty out of the loop and I haven't had the chance to really do much corresponding over the last couple of years. All I can say is that I do giggle to myself quite a bit as I get to draw some pretty outlandish things thanks to Drew's scripts.

RUSSELL: This goes back a couple of years. Wizard World Texas 2005, final day. Drew and I had spent the whole weekend selling comics, and doing fairly well. Then this girl walked by, and I pointed her out to Drew.

"See the bird over there with the tattoos? The psychobilly lookin' girl?"
"In the Munster Koach t-shirt? We have GOT to sell her a book!"
"Yup. She's our audience personified. If we can't sell to her, we're doomed."

So she came by. And she started to look at our wares. Drew complimented her on her t-shirt, and we started to give her the soft sell. What the book was about, the influences, why this comic had pretty much been written for her, and she had to buy a copy.

She wasn't sure. 2 bucks, 2 books? Ennnh.

So we switched up to the harder sell. Filling her in on all the background details. Who Solomon was, who Lucy was, what brought them together and what kept them together. Her boyfriend was getting kinda wound up, and she still wasn't biting.

She walked away.

We carried on selling books and chatting, and every so often, one of us would say to the other:

"Damn, why couldn't we sell to Munster Koach Girl? I can see us struggling to sell to (*points*) that guy or that guy, but she looked like she was BORN to read Halloween Man!"

It REALLY grated on us.

So much so that we decided to take some direct action.

I can no longer remember which one of us was the idiot that came up with the idea, and which was the idiot that agreed, but we scoured that entire convention floor until we found her. Then we approached her, and made our offer.

"Earlier on, we tried to sell you on our books, and you wouldn't go for it. Now, we're so ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that you'll like them, we're not only going to give you them, we're also going to GIVE you 2 dollars to take them off of our hands."

Her boyfriend looked bemused at the transatlantic weirdo squad that had effectively just hunted down his lady. She told us we were nuts, but she still took the books.

And the 2 dollars.

THAT is how far Drew and I have gone to get this comic into people's hands.

JESSE: Russell's answer is now my favorite thing about Halloween Man.

Halloween Man: Superdeformed will be available at your local comics shop in the near future. Meanwhile, check out the new www.HalloweenMan.com.