Dave Baker's Halloween Boy Vol. 1: Last of the Halloween Boys is a super-fun and clever mash-up of old-school pulp adventure comics, underground comix, and postmodern ennui, all brewed together into a single, satisfying draught. Oni Press is collecting the first five oversized issues of Baker's self-published underground into a hardcover edition arriving May 26, 2026.
If you read Baker's gloriously unhinged Mary Tyler MooreHawk, you already know "he ain't hooked up right" (as David Letterman used to say as a high compliment). Halloween Boy channels some of that same chaotic energy into a "two-fisted adventurer for the post-superhero age," complete with megalomaniacal villains, interplanetary warfare, occult high weirdness, and enough sincerity to keep the whole thing from collapsing in on itself.
The setup sounds deceptively straightforward: Halloween Boy is a star-hoping adventurer trying to live up to the legacy of his vanished father. Things soon spiral into Space-Operatic revelations, disturbing family secrets, and existential hero-myth reckoning. Baker describes the book as an attempt to "re-construct the heroic iconography" that originally made him fall in love with comics in the first place.
That may be the most interesting part here. A lot of modern comics have spent decades taking superheroes apart, poking at their innards, and exposing the neuroses and contradictions beneath the spandex. Baker seems more interested in asking what happens after that teardown is over. Can you still stitch something interesting together out of the disassembled parts? Halloween Boy appears to answer: Yes, as long as you're willing to get weird with it. And Baker is more than suited to that task.
Here are a few teaser pages from the book. Enjoy.
