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(Text)
Title: Blind Butcher
Client: Last Gasp Comix & Stories, 1998
Media: Pen on paper, Photoshop
Creative Process
Blind Butcher is a comic strip I drew between February
1997 and February 1998. As I remember, an art direc-
tor who called by phone and asked me to turn a very
complicated illustration around on an extremely short
deadline inspired the concept. From there, I didn’t need
to travel too far to arrive at “we want you to destroy the
world; can you do it by tomorrow?”
The story is also intended as an exploration of a
solipsistic notion that rattles around in my head from
time to time: in some sense, we are the world, because
everything we know about the world comes to us
through our senses. So the question is, when we set
out to destroy ourselves, is the world also destroyed in
the process?
Each panel in Blind Butcher was drawn and lettered
in pen and ink using a Rapidograph on a 9” x 12” (22.9
x 30.5 cm) sheet of drafting vellum. The drawings
were then scanned digitally as line art at 400 dpi and
assembled into pages using Photoshop, at which point
the gray halftones were added.
70
Creating Comics
D
anny Hellman has been making art for publi-
cation since 1988, and has worked for a wide
variety of clients, including Time, Newsweek,
Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal,
FHM, Guitar World, the Village Voice, New York Press, and
countless others.
As a sideline to his work as an illustrator, Hellman’s
comics have appeared in many venues since the early
1990s, including Last Gasp Comix & Stories, DC Comics’
Bizarro World and Big Book series, Fantagraphics’ Screw
Comics, and Hotwire Comix and Capers. Hellman also
edited and published the comics anthologies Legal Action
Comics volumes 1 and 2 in 2000 and 2004. Hellman lives
in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter.
Danny Hellman
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Job:05-19413 Title:Creating Comics
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(Text)
Title: Blind Butcher
Client: Last Gasp Comix & Stories, 1998
Media: Pen on paper, Photoshop
Creative Process
Blind Butcher is a comic strip I drew between February
1997 and February 1998. As I remember, an art direc-
tor who called by phone and asked me to turn a very
complicated illustration around on an extremely short
deadline inspired the concept. From there, I didn’t need
to travel too far to arrive at “we want you to destroy the
world; can you do it by tomorrow?”
The story is also intended as an exploration of a
solipsistic notion that rattles around in my head from
time to time: in some sense, we are the world, because
everything we know about the world comes to us
through our senses. So the question is, when we set
out to destroy ourselves, is the world also destroyed in
the process?
Each panel in Blind Butcher was drawn and lettered
in pen and ink using a Rapidograph on a 9” x 12” (22.9
x 30.5 cm) sheet of drafting vellum. The drawings
were then scanned digitally as line art at 400 dpi and
assembled into pages using Photoshop, at which point
the gray halftones were added.
71
Danny Hellman
Danny Hellman
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(Text)
Title: The Death of Baron Vapid
Client: 106U, 2005
Media: Pen on paper, Photoshop
The Death of Baron Vapid is a comic strip I drew between
November 2001 and March 2002. This story first came to me
in the mid-1990s; as originally conceived, Baron Vapid was a
much longer story in which our hero took various detours and
met with other strange characters before arriving at his ultimate
encounter with a murderous devil. It wasn’t so much a story as
an excuse to draw weird-looking creatures in a surreal situation;
after a few preliminary sketches I lost interest and moved on to
something else.
Nearly a decade later, I was invited to contribute to a collec-
tion of wordless strips and, after searching my brain for ideas,
I realized that a stripped-down version of Baron Vapid might
interest me enough to warrant the time and effort required to
draw the strip. I think the final version of Baron Vapid has some-
thing to say about the ambiguity of death, and its possible role
as the ultimate prison break, after all other means of escape
have met with failure.
I drew this using a tier system; each tier of panels—usually
two panels side by side—was drawn and lettered in with a Rapi-
dograph on an 8” x 16” (20.3 x 40.6 cm) sheet of drafting vellum.
I scanned the drawings as line art at 400 dpi and assembled
them into pages using Photoshop, at which point the gray half-
tones were added.
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73
Danny Hellman
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(Text)
Title: Mr. Pons
Media: Pen on paper, Photoshop
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