Dan Goldman

I was born in Detroit surrounded by large extended family on both sides: cousins, grandparents. Mid-70s Ashkenazi-American idyll: corduroy slacks and synagogue and Coney dogs.

After my father's business folded, my nuclear family (plus dog) calved forever from the larger tree, leaving very suddenly to South Florida in a diesel station wagon. My first time outside of Michigan, the South felt increasingly alien until its kettle-whistle whine peaked in a 55+ condo complex in Lauderhill.

A Detroit kid for my first seven years, a South Floridian for the next sixteen. A northern ghost eternally-sweaty, baking away years in the blazing sun. I grew up without finding my niche, my crew, my zone of comfort. Moving home or school every few years exacerbated that.

High school melted-off glacially, but instead of escaping to the wider world, my Shitty Therapist convinced my parents that it would better to stay close by so he and I could "continue our work," i.e. helping him buy a yacht.

During that work -- and despite Shitty Therapist -- I became aware of an older, original bright light I carried in me, one everyone else in the world – family, school, society – seemed intent on killing. My light responded by growing hotter, searing twin middle-fingers screaming fuck-you-all I'm gonna live in joy. Living got much easier the moment I stopped caring about about others' opinion of me.

After college, after spending a year working days in a book store on South Beach and nights dancing and drugging in clubs, reconnecting my brain and heart to my body, I hit the ceiling on Floridian possibility. It was time to (finally) move away, and the only destination for me was New York City. Lining up a retail bookstore that I quit after a month, I quickly began working on film sets for my first year in the city.

There followed years of feverish firsts: heartbreaks, jobs, travels, health scares, writing milestones. Slowly I was figuring out that nobody but me was interested in the films I saw in my head or the scripts of them I typed furiously into my my hand-me-down Macintosh Classic II. But as a lifelong lover of comics, it was clear I could translate my vision into words and pictures and point to THAT, communicate THAT.

Maybe. With time and sweat and practice.

I didn't do enough practicing, but I did finish my first xeroxed full-length comic HAIRKUT. That brought me out to my first San Diego Comic-Con, where I met everyone whose work I'd ever loved in that single weekend. A different version of me floated back to New York, landing with a job in DC Comics' marketing department, where I interacted daily with many of my heroes (the creators, not the characters).

But I was on the wrong side of the desk, so of course I didn't last there. Watching everyone else producing smart work and elevating craft and then having to sit on my own hands and write press releases about them reduced me to a dog whimpering outside a butcher shop. So I quit.

And I struggled. I stumbled around for a few years in Brooklyn, living sloppily but doing whatever the fuck I wanted to, for better or worse. Working temp design jobs, I learned Adobe software on an evil corporation's dime, which I parlayed into digital comic art. This meant I now finally had the ability to render stories I was previously only able to write.

After 9/11, I moved back to Miami for a year, leaned hard into developing a style and visual language for my own work and my hometown in service of a story I'd begun cooking. After returning to NYC humbled and hungry, after launching FWDbooks -- a small comics press with my brother not strong enough to survive our sibling mishegoss -- the solo art and comics I was posting to my LiveJournal caught the attention of local indie cartoonists.

I was invited to co-found the ACT-I-VATE webcomics collective – eight cartoonists in Brooklyn – which catapulted all of us into our proper careers. In the shadow of my feverish psychedelic webcomic "KELLY", I was tapped by a journalist to collaborate on SHOOTING WAR, a serialized dystopian satire of the War on Terror.

Supported physically, psychically, sometimes financially by my girlfriend-fiancée-wife, I became "the pink thing in the corner" for a year and a half, a Red Bull-rattled shambles. The pace, the stakes of going viral before that term had been coined, feeling the attention of what felt like the Entire Internet on me every week, the I-over-promised-and-am-terrified-they'd-all-see-I-had-never-had-any-talent circus in my brain nearly broke me.

But by the end of its run, SHOOTING WAR was nominated for an Eisner Award, set off a bidding war over graphic novel rights with the biggest mainstream book publishers in New York City.

In hindsight, those heady days would later be called "The Graphic Novel Boom". This incredible moment dovetailed into the Great Recession of 2008, along with "art industries" one used to be able to support yourself doing.

The attention I had garnered by then brought in regular high-profile editorial illustrations, including a near-weekly gig illustrating New York Magazine's "Intelligencer" column. Eventually I leaned harder into comics journalism with a long-form collaboration with journalist Michael Crowley: 08: A GRAPHIC DIARY OF THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL. An 160-page nonfiction graphic novel documenting the chaotic 2008 Presidential election – written and drawn in real-time – became a mutant hybrid of comics' visual narrative and magazine design that NPR Books called "defiantly and refreshingly unconventional." 🤗

By the end of 08's eighteen-month production cycle, I didn't ever want to draw another wrinkled white man in a suit ever again. I didn't want to touch U.S. politics with a sharpened stick. Actually, I didn't even want to be in America anymore.

So my wife and I moved down to her hometown, the Brazilian megacity of São Paulo. I'd just sold a webcomic serialization deal for my long-gestating passion project RED LIGHT PROPERTIES, the same one I'd moved back to Miami to focus on years earlier. Not only did I write and draw RLP, but I also managed its serialized publication in three languages as it moved from Tor.com to ComicPress to Monkeybrain/Comixology, was later published in print by IDW Books (US) and Plot! (Brazil).

After three incredibly prolific years in São Paulo, we both missed our friends and the oontz-oontz of New York and moved back. I'd spent years with Hollywood folks sniffing after RLP, signed with a manager, deals always pending, pending. In the meantime, I produced a handful of transmedia projects at AMC Television based on their flagship shows Breaking Bad, The Killing, Halt & Catch Fire, and worked on my first two video games, both based on The Walking Dead.

After attending a too-schmoozy-for-me "transmedia meetup" in NYC, I met a documentary directory who pitched me his big, beautiful ball of ideas. When we met up later and distilled it down, it became the augmented-reality enabled feminist comic series PRIYA'S SHAKTI, designed as art-activism that speaks against gender-based violence. With funding from the Tribeca Film Institute, Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, our teenage superheroine went super-viral and was honored by U.N. Women as a "Gender Equality Champion."

While my work traveled to many continents and cities I still haven't seen (yet), PRIYA let me criss-cross the Indian subcontinent several times, working directly with the young people who inspired these comic stories. Being out there was where I started to see the overlap of the Work and the World: I could see very clearly the purpose of the bright light I'd been digging into myself to release all these years. In that moment, Kinjin Storylab was born, even though it's still an evolving thing.

Back in the USA, my manager had brought together producers to develop RLP at a big, sexy Hollywood studio. I moved out to Los Angeles like an innocent lamb. The showrunner they'd paired me with was unstable, eventually our option expired. RLP was optioned again, then again. Everyone in Hollywood loved the series and then told me what they wanted to change about it. But it was clear nobody with the ability to say "greenlight" actually understood the greasy, teeth-grinding, paranormal bottom-feeder world of financial/marital desperation I'd created. They only compared its high-concept to other, weaker shows and stamped it "TOO SIMILAR."

A growing heaviness in gut, accumulating over these years: I needed to earn money with this writing and "the market" was its own constantly-shifting set of variables that weren't my own. The artist I was when I arrived from NYC had slowly become a contractor, a set musician, writing what I thought could could sell to industries where I wasn't taken seriously as a creator. To Hollywood and Big Tech, I was "a comic guy", I was "an IP machine" and also still "a baby writer" who hadn't written on shows TV execs would have seen. No juice, no power.

After taking a soul-nourishing family trip to Poland to explore our pre-WWII roots, I wrote a script for a graphic novel called CHASING ECHOES that dialled me right back into the magic of comics. Following the descendants of Holocaust survivors traveling across rural Poland in search of family land seized by the Nazis, it was published by the Parisian graphic novel house Humanoids in English and French.

By then I'd entered my fifth year of TV development on RLP (while developing and pitching horror and animation). I was teamed with the best alliance of producers and an ace showrunner this time, folks who actually understood RLP. Before our pitch meeting at AMC's offices, we chatted about the "novel coronavirus" being talked about on the news, joked about having to wash our hands for 20 seconds after the meeting. Days later, California announced it was locking down.

Months later, every inch of progress on every single project I'd been working on got cancelled.

There was no way that a global pandemic would last only two or six weeks, especially once people refused to wear masks in public. We decamped from our rental in LA and moved a condo in South Florida. The world was mutating into something else and I wanted to be closer to family. Our five-day travel from L.A.'s COVID-panic bubble across the American South was a fucking movie in itself.

Through the pandemic -- starting in Florida, then moving up to New York then Philadelphia -- I served at several game studios as writer and/or narrative designer. Learning craft, practicing narrative design theory, developing soft skills as a part of a large team. Fun work, none of it really bearing my voice.

To scratch that itch, I started a newsletter -- Dang Old Man -- writing to entertain myself and anyone who found/enjoyed it. It quickly became my favorite time of the week: sitting down and letting the past roll back out through my fingers.

By the time we turned back down to South Florida, with the video game industry in its third(?) year of mass layoffs, that lost artist piece of me had enough. I wanted to do this and only this, writing stories, returning to RED LIGHT PROPERTIES and other comics you don't know about yet.

So I followed my heart, did the only Sane Thing: I opened the cockpit of Kinjin Storylab and climbed in, buckled the safety harnesses, yanked on the flight-stick-thing. Because THIS is the virtual Gundam I've built to share all my work going forward with you, from now until the heat-death of the Universe.

Here we are. Right now. Together.

And a special thanks to YOU for reading all the way down to this last word, to this very last period -----------> .

WINNER
Oustanding Innovation in Emerging Media Programming
Creative Arts Emmy Awards (2024)
SILENT HILL: ASCENSION

WINNER
AI, Metaverse & Virtual Vest Features and People's Voice Winner
Webby Awards (2024)
SILENT HILL: ASCENSION

WINNER
Jury Prize
FilmGate Miami (2017)
PRIYA'S MIRROR

NOMINATION
Writer of the Year and Best Autobiographical Work
Center for Jewish Studies (2023)
CHASING ECHOES

FELLOW
Jewish Digital Storytellers Lab
Maimonides Fund (2022)
MONSEY BLUES

MENTOR
Civic Imagination Incubator
USC Annenberg School of Communication & Journalism (2022)

CORE ADVISOR
Civic Imagination Project
USC Annenberg School of Communication (2020-2022)

WINNER
Impact Prize
FIVARS Festival of VR & AR Stories (2017)
PRIYA'S MIRROR

WINNER
Jury Prize
FilmGate Miami (2017)
PRIYA'S MIRROR

OFFICIAL SELECTION
Convergence @ New York Film Festival (2016)
PRIYA'S MIRROR

WINNER
Gender Equality Champion
UN Women (2015)
PRIYA'S SHAKTI

NOMINATION
Best Interactive
Creative Arts Emmy Awards (2013)
THE WALKING DEAD STORY SYNC

NOMINATION
Best Digital Comic
Eisner Awards (2008)
SHOOTING WAR

WINNER
Underground Cartoonist of the Year
UGO.com (2007)