Dan Goldman

Early career

Entering the film industry from the last class to graduate from University of Miami's Cinema Arts department before it went digital, Dan moved to New York City with an instantly obsolete analog skill set. After a year working on film sets, he grew all too aware of the long road ahead before anyone would take him seriously as a storyteller. But as an avid comics reader, his attention always returned to those low-budget drawn stories, where he could produce an entire work as writer, director, cinematographer, actor, etc. all completely on his own.

He created his first full-length comic Hairkut in 1999, and took it out to the San Diego Comic-Con, where he met many lifelong friends and interviewed for a job in the Marketing Dept at DC Comics, which he started upon returning to NYC. After 18 months at DC, he realized he was not, in fact, a Marketing guy. He had his own work to produce.

Finding Hyperreal Comics

After a series of meaningless temp jobs, Dan began working as a graphic designer, where he began experimenting with vector-based design programs and the Wacom Intuos drawing stylus. There he had an epiphany, seeing a new kind of storytelling workflow to create comic narratives digitally. His first night at home with his very own Wacom stylus, he drew until dawn -- realizing he could now draw whatever he could write. What began here is a still-continuing investigation into the limits of vector illustration and mixed-media storytelling that resulted in a new style of 100%-digital "Hyperreal Comics" that combined the medium's narrative language with an immersive feel drawing equally on the aesthetics magazine illustrations, cinema production, album artwork and video games.

Self-Publishing

With his brother Steven, Dan founded the boutique imprint FWDbooks in 2003, creating several titles as "the Brothers Goldman", including three issues of Styx Taxi and his first graphic novel, Everyman: Be the People. Under the credo Manga con Corazón (comics with heart), FWDbooks' releases featured consistently diverse characters of all genders and creeds, and their adult-focused stories addressed issues like mortality, the afterlife and electronic voting machines' subversion of democracy. Met with critical praise and distribution difficulties, FWbooks ceased to function in 2005, and Dan's jump to publishing his next works online was a direct result of this experience.

Webcomics

In early 2006, Goldman was recruited by Dean Haspiel to help found the "online laboratory for experimental comics anthology ACT-I-VATE. Originally a cabal of eight cartoonists serializing free online graphic novels, it was here Goldman began serializing his graphic novel "KELLY". A psychedelic NYC psychodrama about a jilted lover who taking emotional refuge with a stranger he meets on Craiglist, "KELLY" quickly becomes a meditation on identity, interior landscapes and love. Kelly was also a quantum leap with Dan's Hyperreal Comics style as he began incorporating more photographic elements and textured painted effects into his narrative art. Meanwhile, ACT-I-VATE grew from its initial eight member group blog on LiveJournal to become a New York Times-featured online anthology hosting long-form comics works by 50+ cartoonists from around the world. It was his work here that got the attention of journalist/producer Anthony Lappé.

In early 2006, serialization began on a collaboration with Lappé entitled Shooting War: a fiery dystopian satire of Big Media's perpetuation of the War on Terror. His work went on to garner an Eisner Award nomination for "Best Digital Comic" in 200, which was hailed as “the Apocalypse Now of the War on Terror” by Forbes. Published by Grand Central Publishing (US) with editions in Italian, French and Spanish, Shooting War was featured in publications like Wired Magazine and Brazil’s Folha de São Paulo to India’s Business Standard and Tokyo’s Daily Yomiuri.

Real World Politics

In the rollup to the 2008 presidential election, Dan collaborated with journalist Michael Crowley on 08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail, a nonfiction graphic novel. After traveling with Crowley during the early 2008 primaries, Dan returned home to Brooklyn to begin what would become an 18-month sprint through 160 pages of black & white comics, written and drawn as they happened. The evening of the 2008 election, while people danced on top of cars downstairs from Dan's studio in Brooklyn, he was in fact upstairs drawing the people dancing on top of cars. "08" was a singular achievement in comics journalism, published and on bookstore shelves the week Obama was sworn into office. NPR Books praised it as “strik[ing] out on its own to create a method of visual storytelling that owes as much to ’60s magazine layouts as it does to modern Web design. It’s largely thanks to Goldman’s singular graphical style that this book… feels so defiantly and refreshingly unconventional.” The week of its release, “08” was touted as “highbrow brilliant” by New York Magazine.

During this period and over the following years, Dan also contributed political portraits several times a month to New York Magazine's "Intelligencer" column.

Brazil x Hollywood

Moving from NYC to São Paulo to work on more personal and spiritual material, Dan's next comic project Red Light Properties actually dates back to his pre-webcomics self-publishing days. The story of a husband-and-wife-owned real estate agency in Miami specializing in exorcising and selling “previously haunted homes”, Red Light Properties launched in 2010 on Tor.com as the venerable SF publisher's first long-form comics commission with an innovative bespoke interactivity designed by Goldman himself. A critical darling during in its online serialization, the series was published independently in English, Spanish and Portuguese before being picked up by Monkeybrain Comics and ultimately published as a graphic novel by IDW Publishing.

During its three years of serialization, the series attracted many offers from Hollywood to adapt it into a film or television series. Upon his return to NYC, Dan began developing the comic as a cable series with a television producer, selling a development deal with a TV studio to write the pilot script, gaining him membership into the Writer's Guild of America (WGA).

Video Games & Transmedia

While in Brazil, Dan was contracted by the AMC cable network to write a Facebook-based RPG (role-playing game) based on The Walking Dead. Not shying away from the simple sprite-based graphics, he instead wrote dark and complex narratives for the user to navigate their characters through, falling in love in the process with writing games himself.

Upon his return to New York, Dan would work as an editor and creative on AMC's Story Sync applications- real-time second-screen content to be served during the live broadcasts of their flagship series Breaking Bad, Turn: Washington's Spies, The Killing and The Walking Dead.

More recently, he was contracted by Helsinki-based studio Next Games to write the iOS/Android game The Walking Dead: No Man's Land, which remained in the App Stores' top downloaded games for months after launch.

Priya's Shakti

In 2014, Dan met Ram Devineni in New York City, and the two created the hugely popular augmented reality comic book series, Priya’s Shakti. Funded by the World Bank and the Tribeca Film Institute, the series features the first Indian female superhero who is a rape survivor, and implements a layer of augmented-reality (AR) into every page of the comic. In the addition to the comics, the Priya's Shakti project has AR-enabled street murals in five cities in India and regularly updates an educational component that fosters discussion about gender-based violence in communities. Following its release, Priya was honored by UN Women as a “Gender Equality Champion.”

Priya’s Shakti immediately went viral on its launch, with over 500,000 downloads and over 400 news stories reaching over 20 million readers. The second chapter, Priya’s Mirror, finds Priya fighting for acid attack survivors. It premiered in 2016 at Lincoln Center in New York City as part of the NY Film Festival’s Convergence lineup.

The third book, Priya and the Lost Girls, is currently in production for a 2018 release.

Kinjin Inc.

While traveling extensively across India in support of Priya, Dan began to understand the potential impact of his work in a different light. Viewing the Priya experience as a prototype for a new model for storytelling, Dan founded Kinjin Inc., a narrative lab working across several media to pair socially conscious fiction with activist partners eager to use the work for a maximum impact in the world where it's needed.

Exhibitions & Talks

2017

2016

2015

2014

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007