The February 1988 issue of
Now Comics News announced that the popular film
Fright Night was being spun off into a
comic book series by
Now Comics, a small publishing company that licensed a variety of popular television and movie characters and which had a reputation for being plagued by various financial and creative difficulties. In the original announcement, the adaptation of the first film was going to be released as a high-quality "prestige format" book, issue #1 would be an adaptation of the second film, and that would be followed by new stories. What ultimately happened, however, is the adaptation of the original movie got split across the first two issues and
Fright Night Part 2 was issued as a stand-alone prestige format book featuring a story which was not canonical with the rest of the line. The main series endured a lot of growing pains both technically and artistically. The second issue abruptly picks up where the first story left off with no indication that a story preceded it except for the page numbering, which begins at 22. Eight of the first nine issues include short stories unrelated to
Fright Night, including six chapters of
Rust, the
post-apocalyptic tale of a disfigured cop which originally ran from 1987-1988, that the publishers were preparing to relaunch for the second of three incarnations. There was a revolving door of staff members, with only editor-in-chief
Tony Caputo and editor Katherine Llewellyn sticking with the book for its entire run from 1988-90. Llewellyn was credited and worked in numerous capacities, editing stories, coloring frames, checking continuity and writing scripts. Lenin Delsol penciled the adaptations of both films as well as some of the early issues, but presumably he got tied up with other works as three issues were credited as "guest-penciled by Doug Murphy." Neil Vokes agreed to come to work for
NOW Comics with the proviso he be allowed to work on
Fright Night, which he's cited as a favorite film, but he became disenchanted with the work environment and eventually quit. when NOW was forced to file Chapter 7 bankruptcy, so production of the line was halted and storylines were never tied up. After corporate restructuring, the comic label briefly returned and, in 1992 and 1993, four special "annual" 3-D issues were released. Three of these were merely 3-D reprints, but the 1993 "Fright Night 3-D Halloween Annual" featured a completed but previously unpublished story titled "Nightmares." In 2003, the company relaunched under the moniker Now Comics 3.0, and it was announced that they'd be releasing a
Fright Night graphic novel by Caputo and Vokes (presumably this would have been the previously published 2-parter "
The Revenge of Evil Ed!," the only story by Caputo & Vokes that wasn't reprinted in 3-D) but the book never came to fruition before the company folded again in 2005. ==Publications==