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
56
Creating Comics
Dan Goldman
57
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
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