Each October the team at Penguin Random House holds its Trick or Read campaign. In the spirit of the annual Free Comic Book Day, participating shops can giveaway comics to offer customers something spine-tingling to read for the Halloween season.
This year Dark Horse Comics is contributing cartoonist Dan Brereton’s Nocturnal: The Sinister Path #1 to the campaign. The four-issue series celebrates 31 spooky years of Brereton’s hand-painted supernatural-noir comic series on which he collaborates with letterer Lois Buhalis. Today we can exclusively reveal brand new cover art for issue #1 which will be available in October as part of the 2025 Trick or Read campaign.
Nocturnal: The Sinister Path #1 marks the first time the series will be available in single issues, as it was previously published in graphic novel format in 2017 by Big Wow Art. The first issue will include two pages of character introductions with every issue also featuring new pinups and two brand-new story pages.
A war is being fought for the soul of Pacific City. It’s a war fought by monsters, both human and supernatural. But luckily, some of the monsters are on our side. The Nocturnals—a band of misfit vigilantes led by Doc Horror, his supernaturally-gifted daughter Evening (aka Halloween Girl), and an armed revenant known as the Gunwitch—are all that stand against the eldritch criminal underworld of Pacific City.
The death of the mysterious Judge Hemlock opens a macabre power vacuum in the eldritch underworld. But when the Nocturnals investigate the occult-enshrouded Hemlock house, what they find will lead them down a twisted and deadly sinister path.
The standard release of Nocturnals: The Sinister Path #1 will be available in your local comic shop from September 3, 2025. The Trick or Read exclusive cover will available at participating stores across October 2025.
