The following is an interview with Danny Baram on the upcoming release of the sequel comic book series, Halloween Team: Shadows #1. In this interview, Fanbase Press Editor-in-Chief Barbra Dillon chats with Baram about returning to the Halloween Team series and characters, why publisher Comicker has provided a great home to the series, and more!
Barbra Dillon, Fanbase Press Editor-in-Chief: You will soon be launching Issue #1 of the second volume of the comic book series, Halloween Team. For those who may be new to the series, how would you describe its premise, and where will returning readers find themselves with this new story arc?
Danny Baram: First off, I’m incredibly excited about the return of Halloween Team! We’ve got the first issue of our sequel series, Halloween Team: Shadows, releasing on digital retailers on September 30th. This will be the first of four new issues in this miniseries, and we’re kicking things off just in time for Halloween. For those that aren’t familiar, the first volume of Halloween Team was originally a self-published book, but it recently got re-published by Comicker Press, which is a really great, up-and-coming indie publisher that’s been putting out a lot of cool material of late. Now, Halloween Team: Shadows will also be published via Comicker – and the reason we were able to make this happen was because of their help and support.
So, what is Halloween Team? It’s a fun, spooky adventure in the vein of stuff like Stranger Things and Buffy. There’s action, humor, romance, horror – a little something for everyone. The story centers around a group of childhood friends who grew up together in the small town of Greenwood, MA. As kids, they banded together to solve mysteries and fight monsters. But eventually, they went their separate ways. A few of the team members stuck around in Greenwood, some moved away … and the friends sort of drifted apart. And twenty years later, when the team members are all in their 30s, they’re all at different stages in life, in terms of growing up, and figuring out who they want to be as adults. But in the first volume, the team’s founder, Tommy, is really longing to be back with his old friends again. He’s working at a soul-crushing tech job, and pining nostalgically for the days when he was part of Halloween Team. Eventually, he gets his wish, when a strange series of circumstances leads to the team reuniting, for the first time, as adults. They come together to help Tommy solve a mystery around the disappearance of a woman named Laura. But soon enough, things escalate, and the team finds themselves trying to defeat an evil cult that wants to bring about hell on Earth.
I’ll avoid completely spoiling what happens in Volume 1 (Go read it, if you haven’t already!) – but suffice it to say, just when things look cheerful and hopeful for the team … one of the members, Casey, drops a big bombshell that shakes everyone to their core. It turns out that there are some serious, unresolved issues from the team’s days as kid-adventurers, and a huge secret that Casey’s been hiding from them for a long, long time.
So, we kick off this new series with the team in a bit of a weird situation. They’ve reunited, and they have a very clear mission that they need to accomplish together. But there’s a lot of unresolved tension between some of the team members around Casey’s big reveal. And a big part of this next chapter in the story is seeing how these new dynamics play out, and seeing if the team can overcome all of these issues. It’s definitely a darker story, in some ways, than Volume 1 – and that’s part of the reason for the “Shadows” title. But there’s still a lot of fun and humor, and also, the story gets a lot bigger in terms of scale and stakes. We introduce some big new villains, and in general we really broaden the world of Halloween Team – taking things beyond Greenwood.
Hopefully, people will go back and check out Volume 1 if they need to catch up. But we also tried to make this new story fairly accessible, and fill new readers in on who the main characters are, what they’ve been up to, and what their dynamics are like.
But it was incredibly fun to have the opportunity to return to this world and continue the story we started. While I thought the first volume worked fairly well as a self-contained story, it was always intended to be Part 1 of a larger story, and it set up a decent number of questions that had yet to be answered until now. There will be a lot of answers in Shadows, a lot of world-building. And on top of that, this is sort of the big, “blockbuster movie” Halloween Team story that everything until now had been building towards.
BD: New to the series will be artist Buğra Batuhan Berah, and original series artist Matt Shults will be returning to contribute to flashback sequences. How would you describe your shared creative process in working with both artists to bring the story and characters to life on the page?
DB: It’s been a lot of fun, and extremely rewarding, getting to work with a new artist in Buğra – but then also continuing to have Matt onboard, as well. At first, we weren’t totally sure if Matt had the room in his schedule to contribute to the new series. So, I began searching for a new artist, and stumbled upon Buğra’s work online. It immediately jumped out to me as both visually striking and as a really good fit for the new story. Like Matt, Buğra’s art has a vibe that feels a little bit nostalgic, a little bit evoking of classic Saturday morning cartoons – but it’s also just a bit darker and grittier … a little more classic comic book, so to speak. And that felt like it fit the more blockbuster-y, almost superhero-y tone of the new story. Luckily, Buğra agreed to join our team, and it’s been amazing seeing his art come in. As I write this, I’m eagerly awaiting his art on the back-half of this series – as I can’t wait to see him tackle some of the big, epic showdowns that will happen as the story ramps up.
At some point, Matt let me know that he would be available to contribute in a limited capacity to the book. Which actually worked out perfectly, because as I was writing the script I realized that each issue would contain flashback sequences to the early days of Halloween Team, when these characters were still kids. That was something that I had really wanted to include more of in Volume 1, but in this story, the plot in the present day ties directly back to a lot of things that happened early in the team’s history. So, having Matt available to do those flashback sequences was a real gift. His art being there serves as important connective tissue to the first story-arc … plus, his art just inherently has that nostalgic, almost dream-like feel to it. I will say though, Matt’s art is really blowing me away this go-round. In Issue #1 of Shadows, he introduces, in flashbacks, a rival team of kids known as The Boney Boys. And the way he draws them is so fun – their big intro is one of my favorite panels of the new series so far.
It’s definitely been a challenge – but a fun one – working with two artists and trying to align on stuff like character design, storytelling, and then just overall timing. But we have a Slack channel set up by Comicker that’s been really helpful. And the great thing is that right there on Slack are a bunch of other talented artists working with Comicker – so they’re always right there if we need advice or feedback.
One other thing I’m really excited about, that I’m working on writing now, is a sort of supplement to Shadows – a bit of an epilogue, if you will, that we’re dubbing Tales of Halloween Team. The idea is to have three short stories that give a little more time to some of the supporting characters in Shadows, and also give some additional teases around potential future storylines. And part of the fun is that each short story is being written with a different artist in mind: one story for Buğra, one for Matt, and one for Lorry Jamison – a really talented artist who I worked with on a different short story, and who has a whole series of books out via Comicker, as well. So, it’s been really cool to make these connections with different artists, and to now have this little team of collaborators I can reach out to for different projects.
BD: Why do you feel that indie publishers like Comicker have been important to ensuring the success of today’s comic book creators?
DB:: I really admire the way that Comicker is assembling a group of creative, ambitious, enthusiastic writers and artists, and giving them a forum to tell their stories. And I am very, very thankful that Comicker took a chance on Halloween Team. It was fun and rewarding to self-publish initially, but then you sort of hit a ceiling. Because the costs begin adding up, and for most people there’s not really a sustainable path to continuously self-publish – especially if, like me, you’re a writer that would need to find funds to pay artists. And I know a lot of people go the crowd-funding route, which I really admire and of course we’ve seen some great books come out of that. But personally, I was really hoping to find a creative home that would allow me to focus more so on the writing and the storytelling aspect of making comics. So, it’s encouraging to see smaller publishers like Comicker that don’t feel totally closed-off to new or emerging talent. I hope we see more like them pop up, and I hope we see the bigger publishers looking more and more to this emerging indie space to find talent, too. I am all for anything that makes comics less of a walled garden for those trying to break in.
And with all that being said, I don’t personally really think of Halloween Team as an “indie” book, in the sense that I see this story as a pretty wide-appeal, mainstream sort of thing. A lot of my inspirations for this particular story and world are things like the classic Amblin adventure movies, Stephen King books, TV series like The X-Files, and then also comics like Invincible and Y: The Last Man. Books that you could hand to a non-comics-reading friend and really get them hooked.
BD: You have noted in the past that an important element of Halloween Team is the idea of diversity and inclusion within your cast of characters. How do you feel that this will be reflected in this new story arc for the series?
DB: One of the things that got me most excited about the chance to continue this story … was the opportunity to further flesh out the main characters and really dive deeper into some of what was hinted at in Volume 1. A big example, that you’ll see play out in Shadows, is Casey – as we finally get to explore more of who she is and how her backstory made her into the person she is today. Part of that is her sexuality, which is touched upon in Volume 1 but becomes a big part of Shadows. And I think those kinds of personal explorations fit in pretty organically with Halloween Team – because at the end of the day, it’s a story about a group of tight-knit friends that have known each other since childhood, and about how their dynamics evolve over time. So, with Casey, she is a character who isn’t always great at expressing her emotions or revealing a lot about herself (she’s sort of the team’s Batman, in a way). But that becomes a big part of the backstory around the sort of tensions that developed between her and others as the team goes from middle school to high school, and starts dealing with a lot of the usual teenage drama and angst. But it felt really fulfilling to finally write some of these Casey flashback scenes that had been swimming around in my head for years.
Another big them of Halloween Team in general is nostalgia vs. reality, and that manifests in a lot of different ways. One key thing is that the whole book is centered around this small, New England town of Greenwood. Having grown up in a small, New England town, I’m familiar with the ups and downs, you know? Because we glamorize small-town life and there’s stuff like, you know, Gilmore Girls that makes these small towns into these sort of amazing, magical places. But there can also be a darker side – and from the opening pages of Shadows, we sort of get into that. And because this story gets a little darker, I felt more comfortable dealing with some darker, more close-to-home subject matter. There’s a flashback scene in Issue #1 of Shadows, for example, where the character of Josh, who is Jewish, is the victim of some pretty rough bullying that is antisemitic in nature. And that’s part of a theme that looms throughout this story – that darker side of smaller towns or communities where, sometimes, bigotry or racism or intolerance can fester. There’s an interesting throughline, too, with the character of Tommy – who tends to view life in more simple terms, like he’s the main character of a comic book. And part of what Halloween Team as a whole aims to do is to peel back the layers of that nostalgia onion. The last line of Volume 1 sort of sets that up for Volume 2: “Maybe the good old days … maybe they weren’t as good as you remember.” And so then the question becomes: if that’s the case, then how do you move forward? Where do you go from there?
There’s a lot more that I hope to get to eventually. More character backstories to dive into, for sure. We also introduce some fun new characters in Shadows, that could be a big part of things going forward. There’s a new kid character, Cody, who is obsessed with Halloween Team and wants to be their new sidekick. If all goes well, we’ll eventually see a lot more of him. The world of Halloween Team keeps getting bigger, broader, more diverse, and more full of storytelling possibilities.
BD: Lastly, what would you like to tell readers who want to learn more about Halloween Team: Shadows and your other work?
DB: I’m hoping we can generate a lot of excitement around the first issue of Halloween Team: Shadows – especially given that we’re releasing it right in the midst of Spooky Season and the countdown to Halloween. We’ll have Issue #1 live, on September 30th, on major digital comics retailers like Amazon/Comixology, GlobalComix, Comix.One, and via the Comicker website – and we’re hoping to subsequently release Issues 2-4 on a monthly basis. We also still have Volume 1 of Halloween Team available, via those same retailers. It’s live now as a single graphic novel (available digitally or physically), and we’re also planning to re-release as individual issues to time with the launch of Shadows. It’s a great time to catch up! And of course, leaving us reviews – and recommending the book to friends who you think may dig it – is always a huge help as well.
I’ll also plug the fact that we’ve got super cool Halloween Team logo T-shirts available via Comicker’s website. Matt Shults designed an amazing, dare I say iconic, logo for us a few years back, and it looks awesome on a T-shirt. Perfect for Halloween parties or events!
Also, I mentioned the super talented Lorry Jamison earlier. The short story we collaborated on – a really fun vampire love story – is going to be out in October as part of the It’s A Horror Show: The Found Footage Anthology from Apollo City Comics. This was a Kickstarter project, and I can’t wait to go through and read all of the other included stories when I get my copy. Plus, our story even has a bit of a tie-in to Halloween Team, so definitely recommend giving it a look if you’re able!
Finally, you can find me on social media on BlueSky, Threads, X, Instagram, etc – all under “DannyBaram.” (I post the most to BlueSky these days.) Follow me for updates on Halloween Team news, release dates, and more (and apologies in advance for all the other random stuff I talk, joke, and occasionally rant about).
It’s been a longtime dream of mine to write comics, and it still doesn’t quite feel real to have my name on something that people can buy and read and enjoy. I’m so glad we got to continue this story, and I hope this is just the start. If nothing else, I hope that Halloween Team can provide a fun escape, a bit of enjoyment, and help to get you in the Halloween spirit.
