In our office, we have a whiteboard with all of our ideas and things we want to write on it - great ideas we have that we haven't had the time to get around to yet.
We're always attracted to characters who are people we could identify with and yet are put through incredibly tortured or difficult circumstances - the idea being that you don't really know who you are until you've been tested or suffered in some way...
We can't really make a living doing comic books, despite the fact that would be an awfully fun way to make a living.
Not all of our work is dark, but when we are working on a dark project, we really tend to go there.