Cartoonist Dan Goldman made a splash with his work on the political graphic novels Shooting War and ‘08, but his webcomic Red Light Propeties is his real labor of love, the story of a Florida real estate exorcist told with cutting edge web techniques that mixes the supernatural with the current real estate crisis. The book was been serialized at Tor.com, and Goldman’s agent is now shopping for a publisher for the print edition. Goldman talked to PWCW about the origin of the project and the thinking behind the method.
PWCW: How did you come up with the idea for Red Light Properties?
Dan Goldman: I’ve always been into paranormal research as a kid. Between fourth and fifth grade I was obsessed with books on ghost photography and stuff like that. To me, it’s always been real, and it’s always been real to so many people and so many cultures. It’s a apart of their lives, but then, for some reason, in Western culture it’s a ghost story, or it’s a fantasy, and you can’t prove it with science, so its not real. I always thought that was so silly.
Then, I was living in this house in Park Slope, I guess in the summer of 2001, and there was a ghost in the house, a former resident. I didn’t speak to it, I didn’t see it but you could feel it. I worked at night, and I’d come home from my job at 3 o’clock in the morning. I’d been drinking coffee for hours so there was no way I was going to sleep, so I would write and I would work on comics. And, I could feel someone looking over my shoulder, and it wasn’t malicious or malevolent, but it was definitely a presence. One day I was sleeping in the afternoon, because of my schedule, and this presence woke me up, like out of a dream, it kind of spoke in my head. It just scared the living hell out of me, so I went downstairs to get a glass of water. I took a long drink, and when the water hit my stomach, the whole series was there. It went from zero to Jude Tobin. There were earlier incarnations; I have been working on Red Light Properties since 2001, since that glass of water. In that incarnation of it, [Tobin’s] office was in Brooklyn, but I’m so over comics in New York.
PWCW: You’ve also tied it in with current events with the real-estate crisis, was that something that developed over time?
DG: The reality dovetailed nicely into what I was already working on. In the process of doing my last two long form comics, Shooting War and ’08, everything was very topical and very rooted in current events, so, it seemed to me, in my own little experience, a good way to get things sold. The seams were starting to strain in real estate as early as 2007, and my mom works in the realty field. She does mortgages in South Florida, and I’ve been hearing stories for at least 10 years. As things started to get crazy, I was working on another draft [of Red Light Properties], and it [was] so perfect, so I just folded it in.
PWCW: Do you plan to continue in other volumes?
DG: Oh, yeah, it’s a much larger story. Red Light Properties is the first volume of a series of graphic novels called Red Light Properties. I’m also really thinking of it in a transmedia sense. I was thinking of it as prose novels and doing some additional media storytelling to build out the universe in interesting ways. But, at the moment the focus is on comics. The second book is called Mala Fama, and that one is really scary. The first three books were written before I started drawing anything, and I’ve got about seven graphic novels in the queue, 200 to 300 pages each. I’ve been working towards making these characters my daily job for almost a decade, and I could not be happier looking down the long narrow of all this work. Without being autobiographical, it’s definitely my most personal stuff.
PWCW: Why did you want to serialize Red Light Properties online?
DG: It’s been through so many different incarnations. When I first wrote the book I didn’t like my drawing at all, so I never had any intention of drawing Red Light Properties. It was always going to be for another artist. And, I was hoping to land it at Vertigo or something. When I was self publishing, it was my intention to self-publish. Then after my whole experience with starting Act-I-Vate and Shooting War and being spoiled with online distribution, then having a book come out in print and no one reads it. It was clear to me, if you want people to read your stories, which is really the point, I don’t do comics for the money, clearly the best way to reach anybody is to be online for free or cheap. I lucked out with Tor, where I was able to have this publisher fund the production of the first book, and I’m going to be doing the second and third and fourth, etc. books on my own site, redlightproperties.com, in the coming months.
PWCW: How did you originally get set up with Tor to serialize?
DG: The Tor thing was a happy accident. I met the former head producer of Tor.com at New York Comic Con about three years ago at my “Using Computers to Draw Comics” panel, and we wound up clicking and kept in touch. Ever since then, I had been bugging him, “When are you guys going to do some long form comics.” One day, he was like, “What ya got?” Of course, I had Red Light Properties in my back pocket ready to blast for forever.
PWCW: You were doing similar things back on your Act-I-Vate comic, Kelly.
DG: Kelly was a comic that I love so much. There were certain notes that I hid in Kelly that I wanted to bring into my more visible work, and there’s a direct line between Kelly and Red Light Properties that completely skips over the other stuff that I’d been doing.
PWCW: Speaking of layouts, how did you come up with doing the reader this way, clicking through the panels and dialogue?
DG: The way you click through, that concept was something I was doing for the digital side of AMC, the network, and I was pitching them, and thank god I didn’t get the job, for their reboot of The Prisoner. I wrote a whole graphic novel for them, and devised this click through delivery thing, and then at the last minute I didn’t get the job. I thought, oh great, I came up with this awesome idea, now I get to use it on my baby instead. So, when I sat down with Pablo from Tor to talk about all the different things I wanted to accomplish with this series, I talked to him about that, and his eyes lit up. It was really clunky for about six months, and I had to go back and redo a huge amount of work. I think, here at the end of the serial, it reads very nicely. It was scary, I could feel the audience drop out for awhile, and I knew it was because of the player. I feel I’ve earned back everybody’s good graces, so that’s good; I’m grateful for that.
I think there’s a lot of room [online], because you’re taking it off the paper page and into some other realm; you’ve got room to move around and play and experiment. Its interesting to me, even back when I was doing Kelly on Act-I-Vate, a lot of people I’ve seen in webcomics, don’t seem to have a handle on what makes an interesting reading experience, like you just throw up one page a week, regardless of the pacing or the reader’s experience. When I was doing Kelly, I was doing them in single panels, and I always wrote every episode so you jump into the story, move forward half an inch, reveal a little information, and left you with a holy shit moment that made you want to come back. When I sat down to write the final draft [of Red Light Properties], I broke everything down into these 8 page episodes. I don’t want to say they’re self-contained, some of them are, but they’re definitely satisfying chunks, designed to leave you wanting to come back and needing to know what happens next, rather than just throwing up a random page just because that was what was next in the script.
PWCW: How do you see all the spirituality fitting in with the story and the series over all?
DG: As we move forward, in the first book, Jude meets Paco, and Paco promises to introduce him into the great family of the Orisha. That is the beginning that is going to last with Jude through the course of the series, and in the process the secrets of Santeria, those stories that he will experience as he steps into the mystery, are going to resonate on a smaller real world, personal level. The faiths in Miami trickle up from Cuba as Santeria and here in Brazil, the same African religionism comes up through several different Brazilian permutations. I grew up in Miami, it’s always been around me, and at the same time I’ve always been an outsider, being a non-Hispanic Jew. So, that experience of you’re a magical creature in a different magical forest, I’ve always liked that feeling; I’ve always related to that, and that experience is a big part of who Jude is.
PWCW: Take out the paranormal stuff, and that is a very universal story of the American working family.
DG: Yeah, exactly. Somebody asked me in another interview I did, “so basically the story is all about death,” and I said, “No, it’s really all about family.” My wife is Brazilian, but her family is from Okinawa, and when I go to my in-laws house, they have little shrines for their great-grandmother and their grandfather. And, we go to people’s houses and they have these wooden cabinets with photographs, and when we have dinner, we bring them a plate of food and leave it in the alter. In my culture, we don’t do that, when somebody’s gone, they’re gone, and I really like the way her family keeps them around.
