Dan Goldman: Red Is the New Hit
For the last few years, Dan Goldman has made a big splash in the comic book and graphic novel worlds. A one-man comic and graphic novel studio, Goldman writes, illustrates, and designs his own comic books and graphic novels. For example, Goldman is the creator behind the web-to-print comic Shooting War and also the nonfiction work 08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail.
Goldman’s latest, the tropical horror series Red Light Properties—focusing on a small Miami Beach real-estate company that exorcises and then sells the formerly haunted houses to victims of foreclosure—is currently generating positive attention in the graphic novel world. (Red Light Properties can be found online at http://redlightproperties.com/.)
Last time I saw you, Dan, was last November at the Miami Book Fair. What have you been up to since then?
During the Miami Book Fair, my wife and I were camped out in this little seaside motel on Dania Beach, Florida, for a month with our remaining worldly possessions before moving down to São Paulo, Brazil. I wanted to soak up a bit more Florida zeitgeist and spend Thanksgiving with my family before we split. We drove around lots, spent a lot of time by the ocean, and I drew the first twenty-ish pages of Red Light Properties there. That month flew by. Next thing I knew, I’m waking up in Brazil and staring out from my balcony onto a different city, a different country.
Because of the crazy schedule I’d built for myself for Red Light Properties, my main activities since the move have been essentially working day and night on the book, learning my way around my new home (literally and figuratively), learning to function exclusivamente em português, and spending the remaining downtime with my family down here. It doesn’t sound like much as a list, but it’s been eight days a week this whole year.
Red Light Properties is generating great interest with its totally engaging and creative narrative. What’s the origin story behind this project?
I’ve always been interested in paranormal research, but RLP actually arrived mostly formed from a glass of tap water.
Back in 2001, I was living in this cheap-ass house on a not-yet-gentrified street in Brooklyn with my brother, where we’d built a creative space upstairs to dream up many wonderful comic ideas together. There was another resident, though; I could feel him in the twilight hours when I was sliding toward sleep, lurking around and watching. After a few months of catching someone out of the corner of my eye from the drafting table, I asked some “lifers” on our street about our house’s previous residents. Annette-from-a-few-doors-down told me that back in the ’80s, there was an artist couple there, and that Charlie, a middle-aged painter, died in the upstairs bedroom (mine), and his wife moved out shortly after.
Charlie’s name immediately sank into my subconscious like an anchor. A few weeks later, I was snoring on my futon when Charlie leaned into my head and introduced himself properly with a “hello” that came from between my eyes and sounded as though it was played through blown speakers/eardrums. I sat up bolt-upright; of course the room was empty, but my sweat was cold. I went downstairs, heart racing, to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water from the kitchen sink…and by the time the water reached my stomach, there was something else there. A cast of characters, years of history, echoes of terrible things in the walls of buildings, and a realty office named Red Light Properties.
I’ve been exercising/exorcising my writing and art skills ever since, waiting for the right time to turn it loose. Which turned out to be this year.
In the background of RLP, readers will find South Florida, particularly Miami. As a reader, I felt as though Miami was not only a setting, but also a character. Your thoughts?
South Florida is definitely a character in the first volume, and even more so as the series continues into future volumes. Man, do I have plans for the Magic City! Miami is such a singular place, with a short but vibrant history and unique feel to anywhere I’ve been; I’ve done a huge amount of reading into the history of the places in the city that have always fascinated me, and it’s so interesting to peel back the layers of history to find out why that is. So much of RLP deals with the idea of places having their own memory that we perceive (mostly) subconsciously; when I twig to a place in Miami and bookmark it for RLP, my initial reactions are always validated by my research after I uncover crazy things that actually happened there.
As a teacher-educator, I am always excited to share your work with teachers and students alike, for your work continually highlights the power of print-text literacies and image literacies to tell contemporary stories. What is your particular writing process with both print/text literacies and image literacies like?
That’s a great question; in my mind, it depends on the design needs of the project.
Working on 08, because the typography was embedded in the page designs, the writing had to be terse and headline-like to have the intended effect on the reader. What I wanted to accomplish with the book was a hybrid comic/design narrative, which held its own challenges. Much of the final writing was over placeholder text once the pages were complete, everything existing in Illustrator as it did.
My writing process for RLP as a series is very different; because I’m writing and drawing the series solo, I’m working off my own very detailed scripts that are effectively a conversation between my writer brain and my artist brain, with each speaking to the other almost as collaborator. I don’t know how this evolved, but it’s certainly the best working relationship I’ve had to date (ha-ha).
I’m also a dedicated Scrivener and Evernote user, so everything I jot/think/read is culled into electronic binders that are infinitely reorganizable; I’m able to pull notes or whole scenes from one volume into another volume entirely. This allows me to work on the entire series structure in a single layered file and to step out, walk around it like a sculpture, and prune the whole as I wish.
I’ve also recently put up two large whiteboards in my studio in São Paulo, so my head is literally surrounded by multivolume notes and drawings of plotlines and character arcs while I’m working. It’s like a placenta of information that I straddle for my workday.
When I started reading RLP, I couldn’t stop. The character narratives are so intriguing, almost addictive. When you think about character development, what do you think is most important?
The characters have to feel real for the reader to connect to them. They have to sound like people, look like people, want and struggle and fail like people. There’s a lot of comics/books/TV/film that I just cannot grok anymore because those basic character ingredients aren’t there; you got strafed by concept, plot, FX and fast-editing but you’re never even halfway out of the corral before you realize you don’t to anyone the Big Things are happening to.
The deliberately slow build of RLP’s storytelling is me doing things my way, because I’ve got the space and the creative freedom to. It was important to me that the complicated situation existing between Jude and Cecilia is felt and understood from both their points of view (especially since neither of them is “right”), and then seen through the eyes of Turi and Rhoda and Zoya, since they’re all affected by its fallout. This is all laid out before any real “jobs” get investigated, though Jude’s abilities and the various supernatural presences around him definitely keep the slice of their life from being too mundane.
The way I write is by breaking my self into pieces and setting them against each other; I think all strong characters are ultimately facets of yourself that are ever in conflict with each other, dusted with details from other people to hide your tracks.
Along those same lines, with such intriguing characters, I just must ask you: Do you have a favorite RLP character?
I wish I had a pat answer for this, but I honestly love them all, and for different reasons. Zoya makes me happy to write; she's a fun person to hang out with. Jude cracks me and make me cringe. I've know a thousand Rhodas in my life, but the words that come out of her mouth are always mine. I’ve been carrying these people around in my head since 2001, and they’ve grown as I’ve grown; the prospect of us all “working together” for years makes me quite happy.
People are always asking me if Jude is my autobiographical cipher, given the (pudgier and balder) resemblance. He absolutely is not, but he’s very much a part of me, an older deleted version. If we play our cards right in life, we grow and change…and that “version history” you therefore contain is the best possible fodder for storytellers, because it’s the one completely universal aspect of the human experience: that your life changes you.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to do this interview! Along with RLP, what can GNR and its readers look forward to seeing from you in the near-future?
We’ve got three episodes left of Red Light Properties, and while this story will wrap up on September 7, it’s only just the first volume in the series. I’m going to step away for a bit to rewrite the script for the second RLP volume, Mala Fama, before I launch into drawing and serializing it online. I’m also looking forward to having some quiet time in between to work on this novel that’s somehow taken over whiteboard #2.
