Dan Goldman: Red Light Properties
Tags: Red Light Properties, Dan Goldman, Shooting War, Mala Fama
Dan Goldman is best known for “Shooting War,” a comic written by Anthony Lappe which he illustrated. It first appeared online at Smith Magazine before being collected into a book in 2007. Since then Goldman, a member of the online comic collective Act-i-vate, has crafted a number of comics for print and the web.
“Red Light Properties” is a project Goldman has been developing for years and since January he’s been serializing the book on Tor.com. It's the story of a small Miami Beach real estate firm - with a specialty - taking on haunted properties and exorcising the ghosts before selling them on. This isn’t ghostbusters, though. The plot's a lot stranger and more complex, as are the characters. There's no Bill Murray or Sigourney Weaver types at this ghost-busting agency, which is staffed up by the likes of Jude, the drug-addled would-be shaman who communicates with his dead father far more than his wife, Ceci, who’s the realtor and the brains of the operation. Drugs, family, ghosts and some incredibly trippy sequences have all been leading up to the final installment of the book which goes live this week. We spoke to Goldman by e-mail from his home in Brazil.
ALEX DUEBEN: You started posting the book in January and now it’s the beginning of September and you’re bringing it all to an end. How does it feel?
DAN GOLDMAN: I'm feeling very proud, very tired, a little winsome; doing 200 comic pages since November is a new personal record. I've had such a blast getting these characters out into the world after tinkering with them for the last nine years, and it's a little hard to let go, even for a few months.
Thankfully I'm already moving forward with further scripts, with so much more story to come (and soon), we won't have to be apart for too long.
Thankfully I'm already moving forward with further scripts, with so much more story to come (and soon), we won't have to be apart for too long.
AD:
When you started posting in January, how much of the book had been drawn and was finished by that point?
DG:
I'm ashamed to say, but the farthest I'd ever been ahead of myself was 3 chapters (~24pgs) in the beginning. The comic was running weekly then too (I moved to a biweekly schedule about 100 pages in), and drawing/coloring/lettering/exporting 8 pages a week was a heavy grind. Combining that with relocating from the US to Brazil, the initial disorientation of functioning in a new language and learning how to set up shop here while keeping pace with the deadline train, it all contributed to my never getting too ahead of myself.
I didn't (and still don't) think moving to a biweekly serial was a great idea — "every Tuesday" rolls off the tongue way easier than "every other Tuesday" — but the final book script was written with an 8-page syncopation, and halving those to create a 4pgs-a-week schedule would've made for a clunky reading experience. For the next volume Mala Fama, I'm going to rework the script with that tighter syncopation so I can keep the comic running weekly in 4 page installments.
I didn't (and still don't) think moving to a biweekly serial was a great idea — "every Tuesday" rolls off the tongue way easier than "every other Tuesday" — but the final book script was written with an 8-page syncopation, and halving those to create a 4pgs-a-week schedule would've made for a clunky reading experience. For the next volume Mala Fama, I'm going to rework the script with that tighter syncopation so I can keep the comic running weekly in 4 page installments.
AD:
How much has the book changed as a result of posting it in chapters and getting feedback from people as you went?
DG:
In all honesty... zero. With my past webcomics, reader feedback played a big factor... either to flip the audience's expectations back on them (“Kelly”) or tailor the storyline's veracity to current events unfolding at the same time as the comic (Shooting War).
RLP's script was capital-F-final before I ever started drawing, with a specific structure to the story that I believed in and didn't veer from. I tend to make tiny edits to dialogue at the end while lettering — sometimes you just think of something funnier or crazier while lettering at 4am — but the comic really remains the same as the final version of the script.
RLP's script was capital-F-final before I ever started drawing, with a specific structure to the story that I believed in and didn't veer from. I tend to make tiny edits to dialogue at the end while lettering — sometimes you just think of something funnier or crazier while lettering at 4am — but the comic really remains the same as the final version of the script.
AD:
Now the high concept of the story, a real estate company that handles haunted properties and cleans them up is a great one. I know you mentioned that your mother is a realtor. What was the origin of this idea?
DG:
There were definitely germs planted early; my mom got her realtor's license when I was about twelve, and I knew all these amazing and horrible characters in her 1980s North Miami Beach office who clearly stuck with me. I remember her telling me about this house in our neighborhood where the father had died while having sex with his wife, and how no one wanted to buy that house. It stood vacant on the market for years.
Even after moving away to New York, I've listened to her grumble over the years and experienced the sea changes in the market from her very South Florida perspective: from re-gentrification to over-building to reckless subprime lending to the Big Crash that fucked the world economy.
I didn't know it then, but I was subconsciously making notes, percolating these ideas, and the concept for RLP appeared to me whole-cloth a few years later when I was taking my first forays into writing new comics myself. I was living this broken shit-hole of a house I was renting in Brooklyn circa 2001. New Yorkers are real-estate-obsessed as it is; house envy is such a New York-specific kind of pornography, since people pay so much for so very little, it's all fetishized (especially if you're a poor artist/temp). I'd been living in the city for a few years at this point, steeping in real-estate-fetish culture and raised by a realtor to boot, while living in a house with a hole in the roof where the heat bled out all winter. There was a ghost there, not someone I could see but could definitely feel puttering around; I never felt alone there, toiling on comics at all strange hours of the night.
As I became more and more aware of it, I started piecing together facts about previous tenants by asking "lifers" who'd grown up on the block; it turned out that a painter who lived there in the 1980s died in the house. I'd never felt anything malicious from him/it... more curious if anything, the feeling of someone looking over your shoulder while working on my stories, etc. One afternoon, I was passed out cold on my glamourous futon mattress on the floor after working my night shift job, and my invisible roommate leaned into my skull and said "hello" into my eardrums, waking me up from REM sleep to a cold and empty room and heart palpitations. I went downstairs and poured myself a glass of rusty tap water, and the moment the water hit my stomach... there was this office called Red Light Properties, this exorcist named Jude, his ex-wife Cecilia (though she was Conchetta in that first version), the ghost of Jude's dad.
In fact, the original draft of RLP took place in Brooklyn and contained very Brooklyn-specific flavors (Italian instead of Cuban ex-wife for example). I'd had the pitch floated around to a few comics publishers already, but no one was interested in some no-name writer with no artist attached (I hadn't "gone digital" with my artwork yet, and thus didn't have the chops to draw it myself).
A few months later, these two planes knocked down the World Trade Center and nobody cared about acquiring anything for a while. My mother, like all Jewish mothers, was frantic that her boys were in New York, and once it was "safe" to fly again, I went down to Miami to visit her like a good son. We got lunch at our old favorite place and drove around Miami Beach together, specifically San Souci and North Beach, which were old "beats" of hers back in the early nineties, and she started rattling off all these memories again. Listening to her tales and looking at crumbly pastel Art Deco buildings, the new upscale condos and the still-rough parts of Overtown and Little Haiti... suddenly the Miami sabor was way stronger for RLP than just doing another damned New York comic. A few months after that I moved back down to Miami for about a year and soaked it up fresh, wrote and drew furiously every day, and developed the seeds of what would become my digital art style... so in both the writing and the artwork, Miami is very much in the series' DNA.
Even after moving away to New York, I've listened to her grumble over the years and experienced the sea changes in the market from her very South Florida perspective: from re-gentrification to over-building to reckless subprime lending to the Big Crash that fucked the world economy.
I didn't know it then, but I was subconsciously making notes, percolating these ideas, and the concept for RLP appeared to me whole-cloth a few years later when I was taking my first forays into writing new comics myself. I was living this broken shit-hole of a house I was renting in Brooklyn circa 2001. New Yorkers are real-estate-obsessed as it is; house envy is such a New York-specific kind of pornography, since people pay so much for so very little, it's all fetishized (especially if you're a poor artist/temp). I'd been living in the city for a few years at this point, steeping in real-estate-fetish culture and raised by a realtor to boot, while living in a house with a hole in the roof where the heat bled out all winter. There was a ghost there, not someone I could see but could definitely feel puttering around; I never felt alone there, toiling on comics at all strange hours of the night.
As I became more and more aware of it, I started piecing together facts about previous tenants by asking "lifers" who'd grown up on the block; it turned out that a painter who lived there in the 1980s died in the house. I'd never felt anything malicious from him/it... more curious if anything, the feeling of someone looking over your shoulder while working on my stories, etc. One afternoon, I was passed out cold on my glamourous futon mattress on the floor after working my night shift job, and my invisible roommate leaned into my skull and said "hello" into my eardrums, waking me up from REM sleep to a cold and empty room and heart palpitations. I went downstairs and poured myself a glass of rusty tap water, and the moment the water hit my stomach... there was this office called Red Light Properties, this exorcist named Jude, his ex-wife Cecilia (though she was Conchetta in that first version), the ghost of Jude's dad.
In fact, the original draft of RLP took place in Brooklyn and contained very Brooklyn-specific flavors (Italian instead of Cuban ex-wife for example). I'd had the pitch floated around to a few comics publishers already, but no one was interested in some no-name writer with no artist attached (I hadn't "gone digital" with my artwork yet, and thus didn't have the chops to draw it myself).
A few months later, these two planes knocked down the World Trade Center and nobody cared about acquiring anything for a while. My mother, like all Jewish mothers, was frantic that her boys were in New York, and once it was "safe" to fly again, I went down to Miami to visit her like a good son. We got lunch at our old favorite place and drove around Miami Beach together, specifically San Souci and North Beach, which were old "beats" of hers back in the early nineties, and she started rattling off all these memories again. Listening to her tales and looking at crumbly pastel Art Deco buildings, the new upscale condos and the still-rough parts of Overtown and Little Haiti... suddenly the Miami sabor was way stronger for RLP than just doing another damned New York comic. A few months after that I moved back down to Miami for about a year and soaked it up fresh, wrote and drew furiously every day, and developed the seeds of what would become my digital art style... so in both the writing and the artwork, Miami is very much in the series' DNA.
AD:
At what point did the character of Jude and his shamanistic efforts become such a big part of the story?
DG:
From the beginning; it's always been Jude's contribution to the firm (and the series) that makes RLP more than just a comic about a real estate office. The deeper I dug into his character, the more his struggle emerged, which drives the drama of the series; he's his own antagonist in many ways. Jude's heightened perception of the spirit world drives his need to be taken seriously, but his intake of hallucinogens works against that, and in the process he pushes away the people he's trying to be there for. He always seems to do the wrong things for the right reasons, and that misunderstood-schmuck quality about him makes Jude very real to me... and very easy to write.
Even though Jude and Cecilia were always intended to be our front-and-center characters, over the years of my obsessive script rewrites, I'm amazed at how present the characters of Zoya Pashenko (the firm's ghost photographer/receptionist) and Turi Tobin (Jude's non-biological son) are for me. It took me years to "know" them, but now future story elements are orbiting them as well as Jude and Ceci, regardless of my wishes.
Even though Jude and Cecilia were always intended to be our front-and-center characters, over the years of my obsessive script rewrites, I'm amazed at how present the characters of Zoya Pashenko (the firm's ghost photographer/receptionist) and Turi Tobin (Jude's non-biological son) are for me. It took me years to "know" them, but now future story elements are orbiting them as well as Jude and Ceci, regardless of my wishes.
AD:
Whas is a challenge to think about the book in satisfying chapter length chunks because you knew that people would have to wait between them?
DG:
I'm actually thinking about them simultaneously as both web-serial chapters and as invisible components of a print graphic novel, which is a real challenge. In a lot of ways, it's a continuation of the workflow I stumbled onto doing Shooting War, and always felt like more people should be doing.
Many cartoonists making long-form comics online just slap up a new page every week willy-nilly with no consideration that the web could/should be its own kind of reading experience, and tailor the experience accordingly. In crafting Red Light Properties (and "Kelly" and Shooting War), my metaphor has always been the Tasty Bite: that you're giving the reader a satisfying portion of something perfect and delicious but never enough to be sated, and moving the story forward enough to keep them coming back.
This idea furthers a sense of auteur-control here, which I look for myself as a story addict. When there's a film/comic/novel/whatever that forces you to take it on its own terms, there's a unique pleasure in surrendering yourself to a gifted storyteller and going along for the ride wherever it takes you. I try to tailor my own work that way, as a ride, and crafting serialized webcomics-as-shared-event is too sexy of an idea not to tickle it.
Many cartoonists making long-form comics online just slap up a new page every week willy-nilly with no consideration that the web could/should be its own kind of reading experience, and tailor the experience accordingly. In crafting Red Light Properties (and "Kelly" and Shooting War), my metaphor has always been the Tasty Bite: that you're giving the reader a satisfying portion of something perfect and delicious but never enough to be sated, and moving the story forward enough to keep them coming back.
This idea furthers a sense of auteur-control here, which I look for myself as a story addict. When there's a film/comic/novel/whatever that forces you to take it on its own terms, there's a unique pleasure in surrendering yourself to a gifted storyteller and going along for the ride wherever it takes you. I try to tailor my own work that way, as a ride, and crafting serialized webcomics-as-shared-event is too sexy of an idea not to tickle it.
AD:
I did want to ask about the interface, which I love but on some level I can’t help but feel is a cheat in some ways, because it forces people to read the page the way you want them but wouldn’t necessarily be how their eye would follow it. What was the thinking behind it and just how hard was it to pull together?
DG:
The click-through panels was something I'd created for another job that I (thankfully) didn't get, which left me with both a prototype and an open schedule to start RLP (for realz this time!), so I got to apply the click-through panels to my baby instead of a work-for-hire project. When I pitched RLP to Tor.com's former chief, he was excited enough about this aspect to put me together with his programmers to create a proprietary comic- viewer for their site that other comics may or may not use.
Over the last few years, I've done a lot of thinking and a lot of public speaking about what comics can become when you present them on a screen instead of a paper page, all the inherent new possibilities and the point at which they cease to become comics. With a new project and codemonkeys, it's something I had the chance to play more with... so I did. That's really the Why; I was curious and I wanted to try it out.
But here's the shitty part: I noticed a few months in that the readership had gotten very quiet, and I received a lot of complaints from friends and peers that the pages wouldn't load, chapters wouldn't navigate, that the fancy-schmancy experience was frustrating instead of cool. There were a handful of bad designs built into the player, and it was costing me my audience. It was the worst and most-urgent webcomic's nightmare imaginable, and since I wasn't running the site myself, I had no access to the back end to fix anything myself. I had to navigate nine circles of corporate inter-departmental who-gives-a-fuck just to find the person with enough pull to help sort RLP out.
After a few months of stamping my feet, the right person surfaced and was nice enough to help troubleshoot the hiccups and brainstorm solutions with me; together we made many front/back-end tweaks over the last few months so the comic ran much smoother as we moved towards the book's conclusion. I'm quite happy with how snappy it is now, here at the end of this ride.
As far as the click-through panels being a "cheat"... I think/hope it's something new, and as the creator, I like having the control over how you take in my work. But built into the player is also the option NOT to advance using click-through, instead using the plain-old "Next Page" buttons... but you can read it in the plain-vanilla webcomic version if you like, but what's sexy about that?
Over the last few years, I've done a lot of thinking and a lot of public speaking about what comics can become when you present them on a screen instead of a paper page, all the inherent new possibilities and the point at which they cease to become comics. With a new project and codemonkeys, it's something I had the chance to play more with... so I did. That's really the Why; I was curious and I wanted to try it out.
But here's the shitty part: I noticed a few months in that the readership had gotten very quiet, and I received a lot of complaints from friends and peers that the pages wouldn't load, chapters wouldn't navigate, that the fancy-schmancy experience was frustrating instead of cool. There were a handful of bad designs built into the player, and it was costing me my audience. It was the worst and most-urgent webcomic's nightmare imaginable, and since I wasn't running the site myself, I had no access to the back end to fix anything myself. I had to navigate nine circles of corporate inter-departmental who-gives-a-fuck just to find the person with enough pull to help sort RLP out.
After a few months of stamping my feet, the right person surfaced and was nice enough to help troubleshoot the hiccups and brainstorm solutions with me; together we made many front/back-end tweaks over the last few months so the comic ran much smoother as we moved towards the book's conclusion. I'm quite happy with how snappy it is now, here at the end of this ride.
As far as the click-through panels being a "cheat"... I think/hope it's something new, and as the creator, I like having the control over how you take in my work. But built into the player is also the option NOT to advance using click-through, instead using the plain-old "Next Page" buttons... but you can read it in the plain-vanilla webcomic version if you like, but what's sexy about that?
AD:
Now you’ve said that RLP is the first book in a series. Do you have this macro plot for the characters and this larger plot about the afterlife?
DG:
Yes and yes and yes. The next two novel-length books in the series, Mala Fama (Book 2) and Hurricane Melodie (Book 3) are already written, with about seven graphic novels in total on the table at the moment. There is a larger structure, a hero's quest, a company arc, to the whole series. I don't want to blow that load just yet, but I tend to chop big chunks of wood and then carve termite-tunnels through them until each component is beautiful and everything fits together just so.
I'm also planning some interstitial short comics that I want to draw in between larger volumes, to keep my knives sharp; they're little things I've written that didn't fit into the novels but I want to exist in comic form, stories from the past, from the future, from other characters points of view. Every one of them helps flesh out the world better, and together they could make a nice collection later.
I'm also writing a novel that builds out the RLP universe in a different direction; prose is my first love, and I'm really into the transmedia storytelling, building the gestalt story across multiple platforms. I think RLP is really suited to that.
I'm also planning some interstitial short comics that I want to draw in between larger volumes, to keep my knives sharp; they're little things I've written that didn't fit into the novels but I want to exist in comic form, stories from the past, from the future, from other characters points of view. Every one of them helps flesh out the world better, and together they could make a nice collection later.
I'm also writing a novel that builds out the RLP universe in a different direction; prose is my first love, and I'm really into the transmedia storytelling, building the gestalt story across multiple platforms. I think RLP is really suited to that.
AD:
So the deal with Tor is for a webcomic, which means you still have the print rights. Are there any plans for a print version of the book?
DG:
I fully intend on having the series in print in a beautiful format, but I'm still considering offers for the right home for the series. I've had a few experiences publishing comics in the book trade already, and I want everything to be just right with my precious baby this time. My literary agent's contact info is right on my site if interested parties would like to get in touch.
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