Creating Comics!

Title: From 718

Client: ACT-I-VATE (www.act-i-vate.com), 2006

Media: Photography, Illustrator, Photoshop

Creative Process

This setup sequence from the unfinished comic 718

establishes people in a New York City subway car,

one of whom is a magician. The use of the magenta

magical glyph to indicate both the spoken spell and

the possession on the characters’ faces lets the

reader see the transfer of the possession even though

there is no proper dialogue to speak of.

The overblown colors used here are Photoshop

tweaks on photos shot in the early morning on the

subway train; the early-morning colors are already

strange, but that feeling coupled with the sickly colors

of violence and blood captures the mood nicely.

D

an Goldman is a New York–based writer,

artist, and designer. His critically acclaimed

graphic novel Shooting War was listed among

the top graphic novels of 2007 in the Village Voice and

Publisher’s Weekly, and his illustrations have been

featured in GQ, New York Magazine, and Wired. He is

also a founding member of the online comics anthology

ACT-I-VATE, where he serializes the psychedelic psycho-

drama KELLY.

Dan is currently working with the New Republic’s

Michael Crowley on ’08: A Graphic Diary of the

Campaign Trail, a nonfiction comics memoir of the

presidential primaries published by Crown Publishing.

Dan Goldman

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Creating Comics

Dan Goldman

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Dan Goldman

In this sequence from my online graphic

novel KELLY, Max is being goaded by his lover,

Theresa, into striking her during lovemaking. I

turned that single punch into an elastic moment

of hesitation by breaking the motion of the

punch into several extra panels and stretching

out her purple word balloon so that it wove in

and out of the panels, creating the feeling of a

time-stretched audio sample.

Also, the movement of color through the mo-

tion of the punch reveals Max’s emotional build

and release, the brunt of the hotter colors striking

Theresa in the final panel.

The art here is created from a digital pho-

tograph of myself, rendered into line art in

Illustrator. Bringing the vectors into Photoshop, I

created collage-photo backgrounds using other

photos I’d shot, and then “lit” the background and

foreground to feel unified. After that, the slow

build release of the color change determines the

pacing of the sequences, with the color providing

most of the emotional context.

Title: Donkeypunch from KELLY

Client: ACT-I-VATE (www.act-i-vate.com), 2007

This sequence [opposite page] is one of my

favorites: the title character, Kelly, is beaten liter-

ally to death’s door as a teenager and leaves his

body to escape the pain of his injuries. Combin-

ing posed models and digital photography, this

“trip to heaven” took dark material and made it

beautiful, allowing me to visualize heaven in the

form of a Brazilian village I’d spent a few days in

that summer with my wife.

I intentionally mirrored Kelly’s bruised face with

the violent colors of the sky above the world of

men, letting it open into a warmer, almost womb-

like environment populated by glowing child-

spirits who speak their own language.

While the techniques used in this sequence are

the same as much of my other work, the bar was

raised on my own game here as I created a set-

ting of psychedelic mystery and beauty exactly as

I imagine a peek behind death’s veil would be.

Title: Kelly Goes to Heaven from KELLY

Client: ACT-I-VATE (www.act-i-vate.com), 2007

Media: Photography, Illustrator, Photoshop

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Creating Comics

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Dan Goldman