Daniel Alan Brereton is an American writer and illustrator who has produced notable work in the comic book field including wok for X-Men, Justice League, and his own Nocturnals and Giant Killer. We discuss his childhood as a Marvel fan, breaking into comics at Eclipse while at art school, and eventually into DC Comics and Marvel working with Walt Simonson, James Hudnall, Len Wein and others. He also goes over meeting luminaries such as Gene Colan and John Buscema, discussing his influences including Jack Kirby, Frank Frazetta, Dean Cornwell and more, while also commenting on properties that he worked on of Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Edited & Produced by Alex Grand.
Interview segments from here are used in Dan Brereton’s Phantom Fatale art book:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nocturnals/phantom-fatale-a-new-art-book-by-dan-brereton
#nocturnals #Marvel #dccomics #marvelcomics #xmen #ComicBookHistorians #AlexGrand #DanBrereton #CBHPodcast #batmandarkknight #cbh
Timestamps of Interview above:
0:00 Welcome
00:53 Childhood comics
06:30 Letters to Marvel
07:38 Met Gene Colan & his wife
11:46 First editor Mike Carlin
12:04 Comic influences
13:33 Batman Legends of the Dark Knight, 1999
14:18 Gray Morrow, John Buscema
16:20 Met Jack Kirby?
21:11 Draw Comics Marvel Way; Late 70’s
22:23 Monster or Horror movies growing up?
24:13 Man-Thing, Son of Satan, War of the Worlds, Deathlok
27:23 illustrator influences
29:42 Heavy Metal, Epic magazine, Jack Davis
31:20 California College of Arts and Crafts, Illustration
36:28 West Coast Influence
40:42 Giant Killer
41:57 Working for Eclipse | Kurt Busiek
49:02 Kazuhiko Sano | Black Terror
51:40 Leaving the Art School
56:44 Painted comics | Lack of love, reality in illustration
59:45 Jack Kirby | Cartoon realism
1:01:20 Hudnall, Carlin, Andy Helfer | Psycho
1:06:48 James Hudnall | Psycho
1:09:30 Awards & nominations | Eisner Awards
1:14:39 Creature from the Black Lagoon, 1954
1:16:37 Nocturnals – Starfish
1:18:01 Mike Carlin as editor | Superman
1:20:22 Legends of the World’s Finest | Walt Simonson
1:23:52 Thought balloons, captions
1:26:05 Fan of Simonson in early 80s | Thor God Size Special – Beta Ray Bill
1:29:31 Legion covers – 1991, 92 era
1:31:41 Clive Barker’s Book of the Damned – Dread
1:34:31 How long take to illustrate one page?
1:35:05 Two Nightbreed covers
1:36:31 Caught up on Horror movies
1:41:45 Nocturnals – Halloween girl
1:43:45 Carl Potts | Conan covers
1:46:03 Mid-90s | Strange Agency, Venom mini-series
1:47:26 Harris Comics | Creepy, Vampirella, and Eerie, Rook covers
1:50:14 Favorite Creepy covers
1:53:24 Nocturnals & Malibu | Bravura
1:56:36 Ensemble of characters | Halloween girl
1:59:15 Dark Horse Pawn Shop | Nocturnals monsters
2:02:05 Clive Barker’s personality.
2:02:43 Various covers of mid 90s era | Specter
2:07:00 Batman-Legends of the Dark Knight covers
2:08:42 Best advice for freelancers
2:10:25 A whole year went by without a single job
2:12:41 Mars Attacks, Marvel Masterpieces covers
2:14:20 Neil Gaiman’s Lady Justice covers | Tekno Comics
2:15:22 Getting into writing | Nocturnals
2:19:49 Neil Gaiman
2:21:18 Heart Breakers covers – Dark Horse comics
2:24:30 ThrillKiller-Batgirl & Robin, 1997
2:28:19 Howard Chaykin
2:34:22 War of the Worlds cover
2:35:40 Giant Killer 1999 & Franken Castle 2010
2:37:14 Portraying colorful monsters
2:38:18 Giant Killer | Godzilla vs Biollante
2:45:43 Giant Killer rights
2:47:06 Buffy The Vampire Slayer | Dust Walls graphic novel
2:52:38 Did you feel some insecurity there?
2:54:21 Mike Allred | Madman
2:58:07 2002: SpiderMan & JLA
3:05:18 JLA’s 48 pages more than 4 months of work
3:08:11 JLA monster story
3:08:50 Nocturnals at Oni Press, 2003 | The Gunwitch
3:11:19 Nocturnals The Dark Forever
3:12:27 Oni Press changed 2003?
3:13:50 Troll Bridge book
3:15:41 Working for Moonstone Company
3:18:10 Pulp Fictions | Captain Satan
3:19:44 The Last Battle, 2011
3:24:02 Showing the editors what I could do
3:26:11 Hollywood Roman films are almost all wrong
3:32:21 Simpsons meet Cthulhu | Bongo Comics – Lein Wein
3:37:11 Legends of the Dark Knight digital story
3:40:21 Classic X-Men short story, 2020 | Alex Ross, Chris Claremont
3:48:36 Marvel’s new direction
3:49:31 Dave Cockrum | Recreating the characters
3:51:43 John Byrne, Chris Claremont
3:52:14 So many emotions in the last issues of X-Men
3:54:00 Giant Killer & Nocturnals reach
3:55:05 Commissions – Patreon | Kickstarter projects
3:56:26 New Nocturnals graphic novel
3:57:12 Closing
Alex Grand: [00:00:06] Well, welcome back to the Comic Book Historians Podcast. I’m your host, Alex Grand. Today we have a good friend and comic book illustrator painter Dan Brereton. Dan, thanks for being here today.
Dan Brereton: [00:00:19] Thanks for having me. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:00:20] So I have a comic book get together at my house every couple of months. Dan is one of the friends that comes over with Bud Plant. We had Steve Englehart over one time. Yeah. Tom Yates, Justin Greenwood, Kelly Jones. Right. And what’s great is when you guys talk shop, it’s so much fun for me. And, um, we have a good time. But basically, because he lives close, we can actually do this one without a webcam. Actually, more like, just kind of hanging out. We’ve been planning on doing something like this for a while. This interview transcript will also show up in a project of Dan’s that he’s going to publish coming up soon, which there’ll be some fun announcements for. Um, but, Dan, I wanted to get started, you know, kind of a little bit on your biography, your artistic approach to comic books. You’re an illustrator. You’re not from the East Coast, which is interesting. You know, a lot of comic guys, especially in the 60s, 70s were like kind of East Coast people. Then kind of the West Coast people started coming in kind of in the 70s, like Steve Englehart, for example. You’re more in the modern era of comics, and so you’re born more in San Francisco Bay area. Does that bring a different artistic sensibility? And also tell us a little bit about your kind of childhood in the Bay area?
Dan Brereton: [00:01:25] You know, I was pretty young when I got into comics. I was, uh, about eight years old. So we’re talking, um, spring summer of 1974, and I was eight years old and a friend of mine who was in my class, this kid named Eric, he lived in Pittsburgh, and he moved his family moved out to San Ramon, which is this sort of bedroom community, East Bay area. And, uh, that’s where I was introduced to comics by Eric’s collection. And he had an older brother who was probably in his 20s, and he had a collection that we weren’t allowed to look at. We weren’t even allowed to go in his room, but he had boxes and boxes of comics, and Eric had a few boxes of comics, and he introduced me to to the whole comic book thing, because to be honest, they really weren’t in my I didn’t really know about them because.
Alex Grand: [00:02:14] You didn’t know about them.
Dan Brereton: [00:02:15] Because they weren’t they weren’t all over the place. You I mean, you could go to 7-Eleven convenience store, and that was the only convenience store I could ever find them because we had circle K out here. They didn’t have comics. 7-eleven had comic books.
Alex Grand: [00:02:27] That’s true. I think I read my first comic book at a 7-Eleven. Yeah, that’s interesting that you say that.
Dan Brereton: [00:02:31] And I didn’t go into 7-Eleven a lot. It’s not like my parents took us to 7-Eleven to get Slurpees and stuff all the time. That was a new thing, too, that came with comics. And so it was like we’d see a 7-Eleven and I’d go, oh, can I go in?
Alex Grand: [00:02:42] And as part of the 7-Eleven experience was, hey, I want to see the comics on the rack, basically.
Dan Brereton: [00:02:47] Oh, so much of what I do and who I am is rooted in that time. And you try and talk to other people about it. Well, I don’t talk to other people about it who don’t share it because they wouldn’t understand. They think.
Alex Grand: [00:02:56] And this is the late 70s, you’re talking about.
Dan Brereton: [00:02:58] 74. So. So Eric’s got this collection of comics, and I’m pretty sure the first thing that really just hit me was looking at like, Jack Kirby’s Captain America, because I knew Captain America and I knew some of the other characters like Namor and here and there, because of the brief time I had watched the animated shows. Yeah, the Marvel.
Alex Grand: [00:03:22] Superhero shows.
Dan Brereton: [00:03:23] Yeah, really badly animated, um, stuff that you saw here and there. And usually by the time you’re in the 70s, those older cartoons would be shown at like 6:00 in the morning on a Saturday. So you had to get up really early if you wanted to see them. Yeah. You have to get up there while the Farm Report’s still on and turn the TV down really low so you wouldn’t wake up your parents and get yelled at. And so I remember him from that. And that’s, you know, that’s so seminal, the work that appears, you know, you’re looking at Don heck and probably Gene Colan and Jack Kirby, obviously. And so then to see the comics where they came from, to see the full color and all the storytelling and everything and the covers, it was just like it. It totally grabbed me right off the bat.
Alex Grand: [00:04:03] And Marvel.
Dan Brereton: [00:04:04] Basically. Yeah. Marvel. Yeah. Marvel DC. Not so much. But that gradually DC kind of worked its way in and in interesting titles like Doom Patrol, Metal Men. Yeah. Strange, strange sports. Because Eric would go check this out. You know, the golf ball hole that goes down into, like, you know, a spaceship or something like that? Yeah. Crazy stuff. There was instantly this delineation between Marvel and DC as far as style and content and where they’re coming from. And but it was mostly, you know, like Jack Kirby, you know, and then and then and I remember, you know, Steve Englehart. Speaking of Steve Englehart, I remember like the first time my friend sat me down and said, you have to read this, read this comic. I want you to read it. Yeah. So I sit down and it’s it’s an Avengers, written by Steve, and I’m reading, and he goes, you’re done already? I go, yeah. He goes, did you read the captions? I go, yeah, I read the caption. He goes, you have to read the captions too. So he was like, my mentor. That’s like how to read comics and how to understand comics. And and so I just got really into it. And I remember like, the first time my parents, you know, stopped at seven, 11, one one evening and, uh, on the way home. And I was probably given a dollar to go in and discovering, like, Conan the Barbarian. And that was one of the first books I bought. I think I had two copies of that Thor and some other ones, probably just for comics. Right. And those are like the beginning of my, my collection.
Alex Grand: [00:05:28] And so you were nine years old.
Dan Brereton: [00:05:30] Eight, eight years old. Yeah. I turned nine that year. But by the time I was nine, I was fully hooked in. Yeah. And and then I remember the following year, in 1975, you had all these things going on in comics. Um, you know, the first appearances of Wolverine, the new X-Men. Right? Um, oh, yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:05:47] All that Dave Cockrum stuff.
Dan Brereton: [00:05:48] Amazing. Captain Marvel was kind of a big deal in the 7475.
Alex Grand: [00:05:53] What? Adam Warlock and all that. The Jim Starlin stuff?
Dan Brereton: [00:05:55] Yeah, Adam Warlock stuff. Um, because that’s when I was coming in, when Starlin was doing the book and, um, Gil was was not doing the book anymore. I didn’t even know about that stuff. And then I discovered that you could buy back issues if you went to certain used bookstores. There was a place called Hooked on Books in Walnut Creek, which was where my grandmother lived a few towns over, and my parents would bring me in and go through this box. They had this small box and go, oh, look at this Fantastic Four Galactus. Who’s this guy? Gabriel? Yeah. Oh my God, I got to get this. And you could get him for, like, you know, a buck or two back then. Um, so that was just like this. Just explosion. Yeah. And you knew everything was taking place on the East Coast. You got the feeling that, you know, I in my mind, they all worked at the bullpen somewhere in Manhattan. Yeah. I dreamed about going there. I wrote letters to the bullpen. Um, I sent them, uh, designs for. For superhero characters. And, you know, here’s so-and-so. You can use them if you want. You know, all I want is just some, you know, sketches that maybe are going to throw away or something. Because I imagine that when they were drawing comics, all of them together in a big room, that they would maybe try stuff out on a piece of paper and then just. Oh, okay. And then throw it away if they didn’t like it. I thought there’s probably wastepaper baskets full of these just cast off drawings. Maybe I could get one. And that’s where your mind goes, you know. Right, right. When it comes to comics and just the whole explosion of the imagination. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:07:15] Visual imagination especially.
Dan Brereton: [00:07:17] Right. Oh, yeah. And they never I never got a response. Except that I did. Finally, after sending several letters and characters, um, I got, like a illustrated catalogue of Marvel merchandise. And this is probably in 75. Um, and, uh, I’m going to jump ahead real quick to tell, like, how to close that loop. Yeah. Um, so in 1992, I meet Gene Colan in San Diego. Yeah. His wife, Adrian. And and obviously Jean’s huge, you know, huge influence. He’s one of my heroes and such a sweet guy. When you meet him and he’s working away doing commissions and his wife does most of the talking. She’s very sweet and they’re funny. And Jean sees my work. I bring some of my my originals over to show him what I’m doing. And, um, at the time, I was probably working on legends of the World’s Finest of Superman Batman stuff. Right. And he he responded really positive to to it, and he really liked it. And then even later, when I was sitting at my table, Adrian came over, walked over to my table. This is back when you didn’t have to walk for miles to go to someone’s table, right? Right. Um.
Alex Grand: [00:08:22] Smaller convention.
Dan Brereton: [00:08:23] The convention center was literally not as big as it is now. Um, she walked over and she just said some nice things about that Jean had said after I left and and what an impression I had made. And I was just like, I couldn’t. I was so bowled over. So, uh, later I go back to say hello to them the next day and she he’s again. Jean is just drawing away, and she’s talking about some daredevil drawing that he started doing that didn’t it wasn’t coming out good. And she goes, he just looked like a jerk. I go, Daredevil. He goes, yeah, he just looked like a jerk. And so he started over. I go, oh, okay. And then like, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Bam! I said, where’s that drawing? And she goes, oh, it’s, you know, and it’s on the floor like it’s on Bristol board, but it’s like crumpled, right.
Alex Grand: [00:09:08] Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [00:09:09] No good. And I pick it up and I unfold it and it’s just drawing. It’s mostly there. It’s it’s not finished by any means, but you can see Daredevil and stuff and I don’t really know what she’s talking about. You know, I can see that maybe it’s not like his best drawing, but there was nothing wrong with it. I said, can can I have this drawing? Yeah. She says, oh no, honey, he’ll do you, he’ll do you a good one. And I said, oh, you don’t understand. So I told her the story about how I was always writing in hopes of getting something sent back. And she goes, oh, you have to have this. Oh that’s nice. And she and she gave it to me, and I still have it somewhere, but, uh. Yeah, I was like, that. Closed that loop for me. Yeah. That was so huge.
Alex Grand: [00:09:47] Yeah, it closed the loop of, like, being a young kid, writing letters to Marvel and finally getting something back. Yeah. But then also realizing yourself as a professional in the field at the same time it.
Dan Brereton: [00:09:57] Took it took getting there to get that to make that happen, I guess, in some weird way. But I mean, it also just my that person who I was back then who loved comics, that is still he’s still there. That’s still there. Yeah. All the time. You know, I mean, when I go to comic shops, I look at the racks of new stuff and I go, mhm. Competition. Mhm. You know. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:10:22] You know, I sense that when we were, when we were talking to Steve Englehart, we were both like kids listening to him tell his old stories and we were like on the same level, even though you were a professional and you know, you illustrate comics and you’ve hit that point. We were both like kids in the candy store, soaking in his stories.
Dan Brereton: [00:10:39] When he walked in, when he walked well, to the backyard. And he came in and you walked up and you introduced yourself to him. I had met him outside. Yeah. And you just. We were just standing there for like, an hour. Standing there for an hour. We were sitting we were right next to a table and chairs, and for an hour we stood there while you interviewed him. And your interview. You couldn’t help it. It started right away. Right. Yeah. And I was just like.
Alex Grand: [00:11:00] It was impulsive.
Dan Brereton: [00:11:00] Yeah. And then finally, after about an hour, Steve goes, okay, can we sit down? And we sat for another.
Alex Grand: [00:11:07] And we sat for like, yeah, like two, three, three hours. And then.
Dan Brereton: [00:11:10] Um, Bud and Kelly and most everybody else were looking at some doing some show and tell.
Alex Grand: [00:11:15] Them.
Dan Brereton: [00:11:16] Yeah, but it had brought and Kelly, they finally come over and then they all sit around and then it just opened up some more. Yeah. It’s just amazing.
Alex Grand: [00:11:23] It was amazing. Yeah. You could see that. That kid in you that loved comics, reading his stuff that was still very much alive. All the.
Dan Brereton: [00:11:29] Background. All the stuff. Yeah. The the stories about what they were up to back then and who they were. And they were just young kids, too. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:11:37] That’s right. Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [00:11:38] Walking around New York, tripping and coming up with ideas and just being allowed and giving all this tether and free rein to do what they wanted. And that kind of reminded me of when I was in my early 20s doing comics. And my editor on first two things for DC was Mike Carlin, and Mike was like that. Mike gave us a lot of a lot of leeway. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:11:58] Oh, yeah. And I’m and actually, I’m going to ask you about Mike Carlin as an editor later because he, he, he oversaw some of the stuff you did. Yeah. Some of the other comic influences I want to talk about. Um, now, I’ve seen where you’ve described John Buscema also as some sort of influence on you reading his Marvel stuff. Is that right?
Dan Brereton: [00:12:14] Yeah. So my sort of triumvirate is Jack Kirby, John Buscema, and Gene Colan. Right. And then if you. And if there’s a fourth one, it’s it’s not quite as, um, prescient in my mind, but it’s probably Gil.
Alex Grand: [00:12:27] Gil Kane, because.
Dan Brereton: [00:12:27] Gil was everywhere in Marvel. He was doing all those covers. He was drawing so much stuff. Yeah. Um, the cover work that Gil did didn’t always register to me as being Gill’s work, because a lot of times he’s being inked by someone else. But when you saw Gill do interiors, you knew exactly who it was, right?
Alex Grand: [00:12:43] Right. Totally. The nostril. The nostril shots.
Dan Brereton: [00:12:45] The nostril. Yeah. Looking up the.
Alex Grand: [00:12:47] Nose. Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [00:12:47] The nose. The the construction of anatomy. Right. Just, you know, so flawless. But also not a lot of, um, uh, illustrative touches in the way that you would see, like, say, John’s work or John or any of those other guys. Right. You know, like Gene Colan and Gil Kane. Miles apart. Right. You know.
Alex Grand: [00:13:06] Oh, yeah. Totally.
Dan Brereton: [00:13:07] Um, I think Gene and and John are much more in simpatico because of the organic nature of.
Alex Grand: [00:13:14] That’s interesting. Yes. Yeah. That’s interesting.
Dan Brereton: [00:13:16] Gene used a lot of, uh, photo reference and. Yes.
Alex Grand: [00:13:20] That’s right.
Dan Brereton: [00:13:20] Adrian told me. Oh, we had everyone in their underwear. And I was like, I knew exactly what he was talking about. Yeah, to.
Alex Grand: [00:13:26] Do the superhero.
Dan Brereton: [00:13:27] Stuff, that’s. You know, I had James Robinson in boxer shorts for a for a thing that we did together. Oh, really? We did a An issue of legends of.
Alex Grand: [00:13:35] The Dark Knight 114. That’s right, 1999. I’ve done my research. Yes.
Dan Brereton: [00:13:41] Uh, yeah. And James was the James. It’s a story about Batman. He’s. He’s chasing down this assassin, and he’s been he’s been gut shot. So he’s wounded and he’s wandering around wounded. Wounded. And he’s also kind of delirious because he’s losing blood. Right. And he’s getting weak. And this guy is, like, toying with him. And James is is Robinson, who wrote the story, is the bad guy. So I said, I’m going to use you as the bad guy.
Alex Grand: [00:14:02] Oh, really? Is that what happened?
Dan Brereton: [00:14:03] That’s great. And James didn’t have, like, a personal trainer then? Yeah. He was, you know, like a thin, pale British fella. And we. I had him in boxer shorts and, like, a little toy Batman utility belt and a toy Batman gun. Um, so.
Alex Grand: [00:14:18] You’re doing very much a lot of the same things that even your comic book idols were kind of doing. Like you were also having fun without realizing it. Without knowing it. Yeah. Yeah. Utilizing kind of the same material in a way.
Dan Brereton: [00:14:27] Someone told me. Gray Morrow. Yeah. He would you get all this photo reference together. And then he had an assistant who would kind of lay things out. And then I was told that, and then gray would just go in and gray Morrow eyes, all the faces or whatever.
Alex Grand: [00:14:39] Right, right, right. There’s so much more to it also. I’ve seen pictures of Gray Morrow wearing, like having a Buck Rogers ray gun in his hand.
Dan Brereton: [00:14:46] I have seen pictures of photo.
Alex Grand: [00:14:47] References.
Dan Brereton: [00:14:47] Frazetta, gene. Colan.
Alex Grand: [00:14:49] Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [00:14:49] Oh, yeah. I have no pic. I’ve seen no pictures of John Buscema, uh, doing anything. Yeah, right. Just drawing. I think that’s.
Alex Grand: [00:14:56] That’s. Yeah. Right, exactly. Now, Buscema. Do you ever meet him?
Dan Brereton: [00:15:00] I met him once. Thankfully, I met him once. Yeah. Uh, it was, um, probably what it was. It was the San Diego that he attended before he passed away. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:15:09] And I see, so 2001 or 2000.
Dan Brereton: [00:15:12] David Spurlock had put out his art book.
Alex Grand: [00:15:15] That’s right.
Dan Brereton: [00:15:16] And God, I wish there had been more art books. There’s just not enough stuff on John. And I said, oh, I’d love to meet him. And David goes, well, I’ll see what I can do. So he brings him over to my table. Uh, and John and I have like this half hour conversation and just like how I’m part, there’s like two people. There’s the there’s the artist, you know, the working artist talking to another working artist who’s, you know, obviously the master that, you know, of his of his profession. And there’s this kid who’s just can’t believe it. And he was so cool. He was just the coolest guy. And I asked him I got to ask him a lot of the questions I’d always asked him. I asked him questions about Frazetta and Conan. I asked him about this, that, and the other thing, and it got to the point where I felt comfortable enough with it that I actually said I wanted to work with him, like I wanted to write a story for him one day, and, um, which is ridiculous, but still. Um, yeah. So. And then later Dave goes, you owe me one.
Alex Grand: [00:16:11] Yeah, yeah. Connected with the hero for sure.
Dan Brereton: [00:16:13] And I did a cover for him for Space Cowboy.
Alex Grand: [00:16:14] Oh, there you go. Oh, you did for Space Cowboy.
Dan Brereton: [00:16:16] I need a space cowboy cover. I go, that’s right.
Alex Grand: [00:16:18] Yeah, that’s his thing. Yeah. That’s great. Yeah. And then did you ever meet Kirby by chance?
Dan Brereton: [00:16:22] I wish that I had, because I did attend San Diego for the first time in 89 when I was still in art school.
Alex Grand: [00:16:28] And he was probably.
Dan Brereton: [00:16:29] There. Yeah, I’m sure, I’m sure he was there the next few years, but I never, uh, I for me, walking up to one of your heroes and introducing yourself is not an easy thing to do. So when Frazetta was there in the early 90s, I didn’t have the nerve to go up. Oh, really? And talk to him. And yeah, there was one year I was at a convention in, um, in, uh, Atlanta in the early 2000, and Jeffrey Jones was there. Oh, yeah. And this is after gender reassignment? Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:16:58] Catherine. Catherine. Jeffrey Jones.
Dan Brereton: [00:16:59] That’s right. Catherine. Jeffrey Jones. And, uh, I just didn’t have the nerve to go up and say hello.
Alex Grand: [00:17:05] Amazing illustrator. Amazing.
Dan Brereton: [00:17:07] Just too shy, I guess, to say. Yeah, I missed out on meeting Frazetta, and I missed out on meeting, uh, you know, quite a few people, but. Yeah, from what I hear about Jack, Jack was just loved to talk to. Just the neighborhood kids.
Alex Grand: [00:17:20] Yeah, yeah, yeah. He liked young people, and he liked knowing what? The finger on the pulse of young people.
Dan Brereton: [00:17:25] Yeah, I think that’s just amazing. It’s so great. It is great. And he’s not the only one. You know, um, when I meet kids at conventions who are interested in comics, I always have questions for them. You know, I want to know what’s going on, and.
Alex Grand: [00:17:37] You want to know kind of what what the new kind of stuff. What do you like? Yeah. What do they like? Yeah, actually their stories. Mort Weisinger, son one. I interviewed him. He said Mort was always having his son’s friends over, asking him, what would you like Superman to do? And he was listening to him, like, every weekend. Yeah. And he would use some of those ideas. And I think that’s why he liked Jim Shooter, who was a young kid writing for him too, you know.
Dan Brereton: [00:17:56] Right, right.
Alex Grand: [00:17:57] So now, um, let’s talk about, okay, you’re reading comics. We’re seeing Marvel was kind of a early Marvel was kind of an explosion for you with, you know, Buscema, Kirby, Colan. Were you also drawing? Were you doodling? Were you drawing the characters, or were you already drawing before you were reading comics?
Dan Brereton: [00:18:16] I started drawing, I think, before kindergarten. When I went into kindergarten, I was still four years old. My mom is an artist, and she got me painting with watercolors. I think 18 months. The first painting I did was 18 months old or something.
Alex Grand: [00:18:30] 18 months old. So that was your first painting? That’s incredible. Okay, so there it was.
Dan Brereton: [00:18:34] I don’t know what kind of painting was, and it was blue and yellow and red on it or something. You know what I mean?
Alex Grand: [00:18:37] Right. Sure. But still it’s working with paint from a super young age. Yeah. Which is what you still work with is paints. Yeah. For the most part, you pencil stuff too. But paint is a big deal here for drawing.
Dan Brereton: [00:18:50] For me was always number one. Uh, the painting at a young age makes sense because my mom was probably doing a lot of painting and. And setting up the watercolors. It’s not like setting up oils or acrylics. You know, your kid can just. And I’ve done that with my children. Um, but, uh, by the time I was in, I was in kindergarten, four years old. I was drawing monsters. Yes. And, you know.
Alex Grand: [00:19:15] Four years old.
Dan Brereton: [00:19:16] So big eyes.
Alex Grand: [00:19:16] You liked monsters since you were four.
Dan Brereton: [00:19:19] Even the thing about monsters is that no one can tell you that they’re wrong.
Alex Grand: [00:19:24] Oh that’s interesting.
Dan Brereton: [00:19:25] You can’t you can’t mess it up and say, oh, that monster’s not working. Um, and I remember one of the highlights of kindergarten was an afternoon when the teacher probably had, I don’t know, half hour or more left in the day and says, what do you guys want to do? And they never asked us what we wanted to do. They usually had the day planned, and I shot my hand up and said, let’s draw monsters. She goes, okay, yeah, yeah. And I was just like, on it. I was like, couldn’t believe it. You know? And so we all sat at this table, the whole class, and she put out the paper and the crayons and everything, and we sat and we drew monsters, and some kids actually came up to me and said, this is how is this? Is this a good monster? You know, asking my opinion.
Alex Grand: [00:20:08] Oh, really?
Dan Brereton: [00:20:09] That’s cool. Oh my God.
Alex Grand: [00:20:10] So you’re the monster connoisseur? From an early age?
Dan Brereton: [00:20:13] Well, that kind of imprinted me. And it’s funny because now I look at people who draw monsters in comics, and they’re. They’re not even considered monster people. And their monsters are amazing.
Alex Grand: [00:20:21] Oh, interesting. Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [00:20:22] But, um. Yeah, that was that sort of cemented me as, like, kind of a monster kid. And I remember my mom even saying later on when I was really into comics, she goes, you’ve always been into monsters. Even the superheroes are like monsters. And I understood what she meant by that. Yeah. The sort of the fantastic nature of a of a Captain America costume. And I remember learning how to draw his costume and memorizing how to draw all the things. You know, when I was pretty young and it was, I think, easier for me, though, to come up with my own ideas rather than try and copy, because I did do the copying. Everyone does that. But but it was just drawing stuff free form a lot, and I drew very quickly too. I remember someone in seventh grade, some girl in seventh grade saying, there’s just all these lines you’re doing, and but then it turns into something when you’re done. Yeah. And that was kind of how that sort of sketchy thing. And I remember when I got my first copy of How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. Oh, yeah. And the way in Watching.
Alex Grand: [00:21:17] By Stan Lee and John Buscema. Yeah. Yes.
Dan Brereton: [00:21:20] Based on John’s, uh, classes that he was teaching.
Alex Grand: [00:21:22] That he was teaching in the late 70s. That’s right.
Dan Brereton: [00:21:23] Which I saw the ads for. And I so wanted to be in that. Yes. Even, I don’t know, ten years old or whatever. So, um, John, you know, the construction of how he does the figures, you know, draws the oval and which is a pretty, you know, general way of doing it. But I had never seen that. And not everyone draws that way. Yeah. Not everyone does the draw through in the, in the, um, the, uh, the contour of the body and the and the motion and and kind of sketching things out that way. Some people just draw like, you know, they construct it, you know. Um, but he did a lot of draw through and that was what I was doing. I was doing a lot of draw through. And so I was very comfortable with that idea. And when I saw that he was doing that, I, I took heart. I thought, well, maybe, you know, maybe there is hope for me. Yeah. You know, because I knew I wasn’t going to ever be as good as these guys, but that was kind of the goal. By the time I was in high school, I thought, well, my goal would be to try and be as good as John Buscema and Frank Frazetta, but I know I’ll never get there, obviously. But maybe somewhere along the way I’ll be okay. I’ll be good enough.
Alex Grand: [00:22:23] Another aspect of influence. You know, we always talk about comic influences, but there’s other things in pop culture, too, especially when you’re a painter like yourself. Now there’s another dimension of influence. So first monster movies. Horror movies. It was that. Were you watching that stuff growing up?
Dan Brereton: [00:22:39] No, because I had a really overactive imagination, I guess. Or just, you know, I got nightmares and I got scared at night real easy. So when the lights went out in our room, um, the half light, uh, creates this landscape. Yeah. And I was very susceptible to to how my my brain would sort of turn everything into something scary. Right. And I don’t know if that’s childhood stress. I think there’s a lot of childhood stress. Um, now that I’m a parent, I can see it in my own kids. Sometimes when, um, one of them will have some nighttime stress. Um, my 12 year old, when he was ten, 9 or 10, had a lot of that. And that was during pandemic when things were stressful. Yeah. And, you know, the monster in the room. And I’m afraid there’s a monster in my room. That was me all over the place. I mean, I would get so scared I couldn’t even go down the hall to use the bathroom at night, and, um, I.
Alex Grand: [00:23:26] Got like that. That’s funny.
Dan Brereton: [00:23:27] And not everybody. Yeah. A lot of people. Oh, I you know, I remember having conversations with Rob zombie about about, you know, because we’re close in age. Yeah. And he was allowed to watch everything when he was a kid. Right. And the things that he was allowed to watch, I wouldn’t even have wanted to watch. You know, like, I remember in fourth grade, a kid describing the plot of The Exorcist to us in class while we were working on some. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:23:48] And Exorcist and Omen are legitimately scary movies, and a kid.
Dan Brereton: [00:23:51] At that age in fourth grade should not be told that movie. Should not have seen that movie.
Alex Grand: [00:23:56] Right, right.
Dan Brereton: [00:23:56] It’s just not. I just disagree with that. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and I was hearing things that I thought were made up some of the, some of the details that I heard about that film, and I was like, no, that’s not real. Um, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with that stuff. And that’s why I liked superheroes, because they win when they fight them, right? Yes. My monsters, like, were friendly monsters. The ones I drew were my monsters. And so the one the monsters I did like as a kid were Man-Thing, right? Because you could imagine that he wasn’t a bad guy. Yeah. If you were a jerk, Man-Thing was not going to be on your side.
Alex Grand: [00:24:28] So, yeah, he burned things, but they weren’t like he was trying to burn them. It was almost self-inflicted by the bad person that was.
Dan Brereton: [00:24:34] Afraid of them. Your fears are what are going to hurt you.
Alex Grand: [00:24:36] That’s right. Yeah. Not so much. Him. Yes.
Dan Brereton: [00:24:38] Right. And he just wanted to be left alone. And I understood that sort of the the the monster that’s going on wants to be.
Alex Grand: [00:24:43] Like the 70s. Marvel monsters were fun comics that you were reading.
Dan Brereton: [00:24:47] Not the magazines, but like, not, I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t interested in Dracula. Interesting. Frankenstein. Because I didn’t really understand because, you know, he was a bad guy. So why would I read that comment? Right? Werewolf art works.
Alex Grand: [00:25:00] Amazing. Werewolf by night.
Dan Brereton: [00:25:02] Uh, yeah. A little bit of Werewolf by Night, man. Wolf. Like I said, Man-Thing, son of Satan. Big fan of Son of Satan. Yeah. Uh, ghost Rider. In 1974, eight years old. Killraven in War of the worlds.
Alex Grand: [00:25:14] Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. Those are.
Dan Brereton: [00:25:17] Hardcore books. Yeah. They are. I mean, my mom took a look at one issue and went, what is going on in this comic? Yeah, I just like that he has a serpent stallion, right?
Alex Grand: [00:25:25] Yeah, yeah. Thongs and aliens. And it’s all very, you know, pink dystopian horse things.
Dan Brereton: [00:25:30] Yeah, it’s fantasy and science fiction. And then the other book that was huge again, probably not appropriate for an eight year old was Deathlok, the Demolisher. Rich Buckler. I remember they were, like, advertising it in the, you know, the bullpen page or whatever. And I couldn’t wait to get that. And I remember we went on a camping trip that summer, and we went into this little general store up in the mountains, um, a town called Grey Eagle on the way to our camping ground that we would go to every year. It’s the first time I’d read comics. It was in the comics, so I’d never looked. But I go in the general store and I see there are a few. There’s a smattering of comics with the magazines in the store, but really there’s basically one comic book there sitting basically by itself. And its. And it was like it was there for me. And I got that book and and that was, you know, everyone was having their doing their camping thing and I was just like immersed in that world. Interesting. And, uh, yeah, way too young for it. But. But you like it? It spoke to me.
Alex Grand: [00:26:22] Yeah. It spoke to.
Dan Brereton: [00:26:23] You. He was a monster.
Alex Grand: [00:26:24] So he was a superhero?
Dan Brereton: [00:26:25] Yes. It was very dangerous, you know? Weird time. Just like Kill Ravens world. You know, I still want to do a story with those two characters. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:26:33] Oh, yeah. I guess in a way, RoboCop is a monster, too, in a sense. Um, another question I have is the. What was the first age that you were when you watched your first scary movie, then?
Dan Brereton: [00:26:45] Um, I remember, uh, you know, Mega man. So when it came on TV. There you go.
Alex Grand: [00:26:51] 75, 76. Okay.
Dan Brereton: [00:26:53] And that gave me nightmares for, like, a year.
Alex Grand: [00:26:55] Interesting. Really? Okay.
Dan Brereton: [00:26:57] The another one was, uh, I remember when the trilogy of Terror came on TV, uh, with Karen Black and the three stories and the the little headhunter doll, and I couldn’t watch that. I went and took a bath. Yeah, while that was on TV. And then my mom tried to tell me about it later. I said, don’t tell me. I don’t want to hear that. That’s so interesting to watch it, because I couldn’t I just couldn’t wrap my head around this little tiki doll hunting you at night that was already going on in my head. That’s true.
Alex Grand: [00:27:22] So now, um, American illustrators, classic illustrators, the painters, because you’re a painter. So that adds another dimension of influence. And I’ve heard some mention that you were inspired by illustrators like Dean Cornwall, Gustav Klimt, Gil Elvgren, Frazetta. You mentioned N.C. Wyeth, John Singer, Sergeant. There’s so.
Dan Brereton: [00:27:45] Many. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:27:46] So how did you start getting involved in those kind of visuals? Like, when did they start making their imprint?
Dan Brereton: [00:27:51] Well, I think when it comes to illustration. Illustration. Yeah. Which I consider all of this illustration comics. Right. Sure. It began with children’s books. My mom took us to the library a lot. We had a school library. I was a pretty avid reader, very young. Um, so it was illustrated children’s books was was a big deal for me. So, uh, some of the illustrators that were my favorites were Mercer Mayer, Wallace Tripp, Maurice Sendak, um, and Bill Peet. And Bill Peet is a guy a lot of people don’t know about. But he was he was a story man, an animation guy at, uh, at Disney for years. He worked on so many, so many different, uh, films or going early on all the way up to, um, 101 Dalmatians. And Pete became a children’s book illustrator. After he left Disney. He did at least 40 books in his after that over the next, you know, several decades. And I remember, uh, I was in kindergarten when I was introduced to his work, a book called The Wump World. And if you haven’t seen Bill Pete’s stuff or his books and you have kids, or even if you have kids, check it out. Because he was amazing. Very animated style pen and ink with colored pencil. Yeah. And, um, always, you know, like, you can find it in hardcover here and there.
Dan Brereton: [00:29:04] But most of these things are just like a series of paperbacks, and I have them all now, but huge for me because it had a Disney feel to it. But it also had like animals and fantasy characters and trolls and dragons and creatures and farms and circuses and just he drew everything and he did everything so well and everything was so alive. And so I think when I saw comics, I there was that sort of Disney, but then Bill, Pete and even Mercer Mayer, because they’re all strip. There’s they I’m sure they all read comics when they were younger. Um, so that was the that stuff is still with me. Then you then you get into comics and, and then later you’re like going into high school and it’s heavy metal magazine. So you’re exposed to like, Moebius and even, you know, William Stout, which more because of his dinosaur book coming out. Right. And then discovering what he did us other stuff. And then epic Magazine number one comes out when I’m in high school. Frazetta did the cover. I don’t think that was the first time I’d seen Frazetta’s work, but I started to really pay attention to the guy. Um.
Alex Grand: [00:30:10] How about like, the Warren magazines?
Dan Brereton: [00:30:12] Were those the Warren magazines came a little later in high school because I started getting into Bernie’s stuff. There you go. Getting into Bernie Wrightson and trying to figure out where he came from. So then it’s Swamp Thing and then all the Warren stuff and creepy. And I’m looking at that. And then you’re discovering all these other artists that were in there, uh, Jack Davis. I’m like, wait a minute. Jack Davis was drawing monster comics. Yeah, that’s so cool. I didn’t know that he.
Alex Grand: [00:30:31] Did, like, movie posters, all sorts of stuff.
Dan Brereton: [00:30:33] You knew Jack Davis in the 70s. If you were coming into Jack Davis in the 70s, it was because of all his commercial stuff. Tv guide covers, right? Magazines. And then you see that he had this whole illustrious career as a comic book guy doing all kinds of stuff. Yeah, like in.
Alex Grand: [00:30:48] The EC comics.
Dan Brereton: [00:30:49] Yeah, but Frazetta was huge back then, Bernie. Um, I mean, there’s so many others that I’m just, you know, blanking on, but, uh, but those two very, very important for me. The fact that Bill stout was doing this pen and ink and doing watercolor and doing paintings, and that that dinosaur book really, really was a huge. Oh, yeah. Beautiful. Oh, yeah. Um, as far as in terms of color and what you could do, uh, and the Golden Age illustrators, that’s more art school. You get into art school. There you go. It’s 1986, and.
Alex Grand: [00:31:24] You went to the California College of the Arts and the Academy of Art College in San Francisco.
Dan Brereton: [00:31:30] Yeah. So I first went we called it was cSAC back then. So it was called California College of Arts and Crafts. They dropped the crafts part, uh, when I’m 20 years ago or something. Uh huh. Um, so yeah. So I so I’m going to school in Oakland, Ccaeac, and I haven’t even been there like a week, and I’m already sort of like, I kind of knew about N.C. Wyeth, but I’m getting more into that. There you go. And someone said, oh, have you checked out Dean Cornwell? No. Who’s Dean Cornwell? Oh, yeah. The dean of illustration. And then you’re like, okay. And that’s that stuff starts to, you know, start to jump out at you. Yeah. And I remember I was also in a bookstore in Berkeley in my first year of school, and I found these two oversized hardcovers with the name what looked like Clay. Clay. It’s clay. The two clay books that were huge when they first came out in the States. And so I got those for like 15 bucks each. And I remember going through all those painting drawings and just like, whoa. And then you start to realize, oh, I bet Frazetta saw these. And obviously, you know that the one sequence in Fantasia is definitely, you know, Clay influenced. And so all these things start to kind of bubble up when you’re in art school, you’re exposed to all these new, um, illustrators and styles and, and so I’m also taking classes in drawing and painting and taking illustration classes.
Dan Brereton: [00:32:52] So I’m painting, I’m learning how to paint. I’m learning how to use watercolor in a way. I never used it in high school because in high school it’s just coloring stuff in with my watercolor set. Yeah, didn’t really understand painting quite yet, but sitting outside with the model or sitting in painting a landscape. Yeah. And you have 20 minutes to do it, or a certain amount of time to do it for the light and the shadows change. That was an eye opening thing to to draw from the figure for the first time and have a minute or 2 minutes or 5 minutes to capture something. And I took to that like a, you know, I just took to it. It was it was not a hard transition to do that. And I loved it. It was like being set free to draw from the figure in life drawing classes. Um, and I remember there were times when people would say, hey, did you see the Frazetta girl who was our model today? That was a thing that people would say, that’s great. No one ever said, did you see the, you know, the Dean Cornwell girl? They always said there was a Frazetta girl. There was a Frazetta girl.
Alex Grand: [00:33:49] Yeah, right.
Dan Brereton: [00:33:50] Um, but yeah, that was, uh, Frazetta. You know, Frazetta is ubiquitous, so he’s everywhere. I mean, the first time I ever walked near an art school, a guy was walking out of the the the Academy of Art College. This is before I was even in art school. I think I was still in high school visiting with a friend. This guy comes walking. He’s this big drawing under his arm, and I’m noticing the drawing is made up of all these rips of, like, Frazetta figures, which I recognize instantly because I had all those books in high school. I was like, oh my God, this guy’s an art school. He’s ripping off Frazetta. This is snap. This is going to be easy. I thought they were all like, you know, you know what I mean? You think that everyone’s supposed to be doing, like, original work, which people were doing, but it was just it’s hard to get those influences.
Alex Grand: [00:34:36] But for, like, for, like, assignments, basically they were doing that.
Dan Brereton: [00:34:39] I mean, I hope he wasn’t trying to pass off Frazetta for an assignment, this guy, but I never saw that when I was in class. I never saw someone try and pass off Rossetti. I see when I saw that I had to laugh because I was like, that guy, is he? He was definitely too old to be in high school, but that was a definite high school move. Yeah, you know, I actually had a friend, one of my best friends in high school who was who hung out in the art room with me. He had this little, like, uh, like the academy sketchpad you can get at the store with the picture of the hand drawing with the pencil and that paper that I just. It’s good, it’s good. It’s a good tooth for pencil drawings. He would take, um, he would fill every page of his pad with, uh, pencil, kind of, um, studies of, I call them studies, but he was swiping Frazetta paintings, and he was drawing them, and he was. But they’re studies, you know, it’s kind of how you learn to draw, uh, one way to learn. And I remember he would take a lot of the credit because girls would come up and go, did you draw that? Yes, I did, and I go, isn’t that from the Death Dealer painting? Yeah. He’d go, yes. I couldn’t help it. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:35:43] You knew I was.
Dan Brereton: [00:35:44] Such a jerk. Yeah. But, um. Yeah, but we, you know, that was our mutual. That was how we became friends. Our mutual love of Frazetta. And yeah, because there was a time when I. There were times in my life when I would stop reading comics and go back to them. And when I was in high school, Derek and I would sometimes walk on our lunch break down to this comic shop in Modesto called Bonanza Books and Comics. Yeah. And we we would ask Terry, the kid working there. His parents own the place and we’d say, can we look at the Frazetta portfolios today? And I’d pull them out and let us look through them. Wow. He signed it. That’s his. That’s his. His autograph. Yeah. I have all those now. But back then they were like, you know, it was like, way out of your reach. You know, 100 bucks a pop or something. Just impossible dream.
Alex Grand: [00:36:27] Oh, yeah. To finalize a quick point that I’m curious about, we’ve talked about these different influences, whether they’re comics, you know, or movies or illustrators, you know, the degree of learning you did in your more college phase. But location does being more of a West Coast person create a different visual sentiment than being an East Coast person, and I’m wondering that more from your perspective? I can imagine it. I think it.
Dan Brereton: [00:36:58] Has to, because I think depending on no matter where you were brought up, um, you know, the surroundings and the place where you where you have lived your life, those, those things have to make it into your work somehow. Huh? Um, I mean, maybe not for everybody, but, I mean, if you’re drawing, if you’re drawing a story that’s set Metropolis, you’re going to try and and make it Metropolis. But I remember when I was doing stories, whether Gotham or Metropolis or wherever I was set, I was trying to, um, something Mike Mignola said to me when I was still in art school. And I met him and he was obviously, you know, working professional. And he said, when you’re drawing buildings, don’t just make them a bunch of lines. They’re not just a bunch of vertical and horizontal lines. They’re buildings. Yeah, they’re architecture. And I took that to heart and started to really pay more attention to the fact that I liked architecture. I liked looking at buildings. My parents had an appreciation for that stuff when I was a kid. We used to take us on these drives and stuff. Look at that old Victorian house. And um, so I when I anywhere I would go, I would take pictures. I mean, when I was in the offices of, of DC, they took me up to this one office that had this beautiful view of penthouse apartments along. Right. So I took a bunch of pictures and I used those in my stories.
Dan Brereton: [00:38:11] And, um, when I, when I was in San Francisco as a student, I was taking pictures all the time. And, and when I was in Glasgow, uh, you know, taking pictures of the architecture and wanting to work it in to. Because Glasgow looks like Gotham City. I was like, this is Gotham City. This is perfect, you know? And before he was even doing, um, a Batman story, I had all this stuff aligned. So. But when it comes to your surroundings, you know, living in, like, California. Yeah, you’re definitely, I think, going to have an aesthetic that is different from someone who grew up in, um, you know, in Brooklyn or something, right? And so much of the comic stuff, you know, that you accept that Marvel, that Marvel Comics world is kind of an East Coast world. Yeah. So many of the stories take place there, and it becomes this sort of the fabled land of, of Manhattan. And, you know, and even though you don’t I don’t know anything about it. I had a feeling for, you know, this. Oh, Daredevil’s in Hell’s Kitchen and, you know, uh, but I really I really wanted to, um, capture something about where I came from in some of my stories, like with Nocturnals, I imagine, um, the town and the surroundings where that takes place is definitely California.
Alex Grand: [00:39:22] Right, right. Very clearly California and giant killer. Right? It was West Coast. Wasn’t that, um.
Dan Brereton: [00:39:28] Giant killer takes place in the Mount Diablo Valley, which is San Ramon’s in the mountains.
Alex Grand: [00:39:34] That’s what I mean.
Dan Brereton: [00:39:34] That’s my old stomping grounds. You grew up in the shadow of Mount Diablo.
Alex Grand: [00:39:37] And I felt that very much. I was like, this feels like a West Coast. Oh yeah, kind of thing. And then also there is that Asian influence with like, the samurai swords and stuff. Yeah. I just thought, wow, this, this feels West Coast and and that’s what I mean is and there is an expanse of, like exploring this large area of land and what monster is around the corner. Whereas in the New York Marvel stuff, it’s all very crowded, like there’s cars and buildings and there’s Doctor Octopus. It’s like Spidey can barely find room to do anything. Right. Yeah. So it’s like there was a different corridor.
Dan Brereton: [00:40:09] Of buildings that they’re finding. Yeah. It’s like it’s very narrow. Yeah. The last scene in The Avengers, they’re just finding this corridor of buildings. Yes. And and that.
Alex Grand: [00:40:17] Narrowness. Right. That feels West coast.
Dan Brereton: [00:40:19] Yeah. For sure. No, definitely. Because even in stories like if you watch a lot of movies that take place in San Francisco now, like Godzilla and whatnot, um, and they don’t have that necessarily that up and down vertical building corridor feel necessarily, you know, they’ll throw the action over on the the Golden Gate Bridge and things like that. And so when I was doing Giant Killer in the late 90s, um, I kept it in the, the territory around the volcano, which is Mount Diablo, which is not a volcano, by the way. But when we were kids, we were told it was a dormant volcano. It’s not. I found that out when I went to Mount Diablo to shoot a bunch of reference for the story, I. We ran into a friend who was with me, and we ran into, um, a park ranger, and and she wanted to know if we were taking pictures to sell for postcards. I gave you the lowdown.
Alex Grand: [00:41:13] Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [00:41:13] I said, I’m doing a comic set here. And then I asked her and she goes, oh, no. She goes, all volcanic activity formed the mountain. But it’s not a volcano, right? Right. I was like, okay, well, in my story it will be a volcano.
Alex Grand: [00:41:24] Um, and who knows, maybe it’ll be one one day.
Dan Brereton: [00:41:26] Went all the way to the top, and I’d been there before and took pictures and imagined the final scene and how it would take place. And I could sort of, like, map out some things. And that was amazing to be able to. It’s like going to location, finding a location for you and I had friends. When they found out what I was doing, they said, can you can you like, destroy my old high school? You know, everyone wanted things destroyed from their life, which was hilarious.
Alex Grand: [00:41:47] Well, that’s what happened in the new universe, right? John Byrne destroyed Jim Shooter’s town, Pittsburgh.
Dan Brereton: [00:41:52] And.
Alex Grand: [00:41:53] New Universe. Right. So, yeah, I guess this is what happens. You know, now you’re starting to become a professional in the late 80s in comics, and you’re working for eclipse. Is that that’s was that your entry?
Dan Brereton: [00:42:04] That was my first. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:42:05] Merchants of Death, number one.
Dan Brereton: [00:42:07] The first publisher to hire me. And they’re a California company and they’re.
Alex Grand: [00:42:11] Based in California. Yeah. That’s what I was going to say, right?
Dan Brereton: [00:42:13] Yeah. Even though Cat and Dean, who ran the company, husband and wife were New York people. Right. And they had that sort of New York sensibility, but also kind of a little hippie ish sensibility. There you.
Alex Grand: [00:42:24] Go. Yeah, kind of San Francisco. And they were living in California at the time.
Dan Brereton: [00:42:27] Uh, yeah. The it was Guerneville. And then it was Forestville, which is. Yeah, kind of Santa Rosa.
Alex Grand: [00:42:32] Santa Rosa, which it says it on the indices of that comment. Yeah. Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [00:42:35] I did a short job for them. A penciling job, uh, that was going to go was going to go nowhere. I mean, the stuff came out and and I was told, uh, by the editor who’d hired me that, that they were mildly unimpressed with my work. That was.
Alex Grand: [00:42:49] Okay. There you go.
Dan Brereton: [00:42:50] I’ll never forget. But it.
Alex Grand: [00:42:51] Was penciling. It wasn’t painting, it was penciling.
Dan Brereton: [00:42:53] It was penciling. And I was inked by Rich Howell. There you go. And it was a backup story in a, um, so it was a four issue or maybe I think it was four issues. It might have been six, uh, magazine called Merchants of Death, and it was breccia reprints of breccia. That’s right, that’s right. And so Curt Buziak, a young newcomer.
Alex Grand: [00:43:12] He wrote that story.
Dan Brereton: [00:43:13] He wrote the ransom character called Ransom backup.
Alex Grand: [00:43:17] And that was, uh, lost causes.
Dan Brereton: [00:43:19] That’s right, that’s right.
Alex Grand: [00:43:20] Lost causes, chapter one through four. That’s right. In Merchants of Death, one through four.
Dan Brereton: [00:43:25] Um, Alex Toth did the last cover, and which is really cool. Um, and they and he the character was described as a kind of a mercenary who will do a job. He doesn’t get paid, he just takes whatever booty or treasure there is to take along the way. Right. And he’s described by Kurt as looking like Sam Shepard. So he dove into Sam Shepard.
Alex Grand: [00:43:46] Did you guys talk on the phone at all about it? Did you just get a script? How do you not.
Dan Brereton: [00:43:49] Think we talked on the phone? I think I just worked from a script. You got.
Alex Grand: [00:43:52] The script, and I.
Dan Brereton: [00:43:52] Penciled the first issue in my grandmother’s or my grandmother’s kitchen table, because I was. I got the job just as art school for that semester was ending. And so I spent a week at my grandma because my grandmother lived not too far from where I was in Walnut Creek. And I sat and I drew the whole thing on her kitchen table. And the first, I guess it was six pages. Yeah. Yeah. I went home and finished it that summer.
Alex Grand: [00:44:15] Like anthology, you know, comics write basically. And each each one is a different little story. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s what each. And you did one sub story. They wanted one.
Dan Brereton: [00:44:25] Backup. That was new material. Yeah. Which. And, um, and I was. That was all new to me, you know? Uh, and but it was great because I was, I they put me through the paces. I was drawing horses. Yeah, I was drawing Romanians. I was just drawing, you know, whatever. Romanians and Romanians and horses and this and that. And the other thing and, you know, battle scenes and stuff was like, um, things I’d never drawn before. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:44:50] A little more in the realism aspect of things.
Dan Brereton: [00:44:52] Very much. Adventure kind of. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:44:54] Adventure, right?
Dan Brereton: [00:44:55] Yeah. Almost kind of a, um, very European sort of feel to it.
Alex Grand: [00:44:59] Yes. That’s right.
Dan Brereton: [00:45:00] And Kurt was Kurt’s stuff was very easy to work from.
Alex Grand: [00:45:03] Mhm.
Dan Brereton: [00:45:03] He had what. He had the good chops. I mean even even then as a what were his scripts.
Alex Grand: [00:45:08] Kind of pretty visual. Like you could visualize it pretty well then from I had.
Dan Brereton: [00:45:11] No I have no recollection of anything that was difficult or hard to understand. It was it was very, very straightforward and very easy to work from. So I feel like I was almost, maybe in a little bit spoiled and, um, because there were no difficulties, like maybe I might have had later on with some other writers or something.
Alex Grand: [00:45:29] Mhm mhm.
Dan Brereton: [00:45:30] Mhm. Um not necessarily difficulties but uh you get a script sometime and you don’t quite follow. You have a harder time maybe visualizing things, but for the most part comic book scripts are not, you know that hard to suss out. And I think one of the things is with writers is that some writers are much more visually oriented and, um, and really understand that, like, you know, you can’t have two different things happening on the panel. And some writers will describe things. I think it’s writers who are new, you know, maybe a little greener. They’ll describe more than one thing happening in a panel. And you’re like, no, I have to break that up. I can’t have the guy pick something up and sit down. Occasionally you get the flash.
Alex Grand: [00:46:11] The flash can do that because you’re draw him five times. Yeah, I.
Dan Brereton: [00:46:14] Would draw that, you know.
Alex Grand: [00:46:15] Right, right.
Dan Brereton: [00:46:15] Um, uh, but, uh, you know, just little things like that. But there was never no, I remember there were some scripts I got early on and some other jobs where I would read the stuff to my friends out loud, and we would all laugh and go, what the hell is this? You know. But then I just do my best to.
Alex Grand: [00:46:33] To make it happen.
Dan Brereton: [00:46:33] Yeah. To make it. To make it happen and.
Alex Grand: [00:46:35] Tell me if I’m wrong. But you turned the art in on time. They wanted to use you again for the Black Terror limited series.
Dan Brereton: [00:46:41] Didn’t want to use me again. They were pretty much done with me. I remember I showed up as my second time in San Diego. I’m still in art school. I go there, uh, with a couple of my art school buddies and who wanted to do comics and everything. And, uh, I’m sitting in the eclipse booth and talking with Fred Burke, who’s the editor, and he’s telling me that they were mildly unimpressed and mildly unimpressed. Mostly unimpressed with the job I had done, and it didn’t seem like I was going to be offered any work. Now. Fred knew had seen my color samples from my work in art school. There you go. So I remember the same day. It was probably the Friday of Comic-Con. The second day I meet, uh, Dave McKean, George Pratt, Kent Williams, and J. Muth are all sitting in a row in Artist Alley. Back then, Comic Con was three rooms, a big hallway, and then two rooms, a dealer’s room and an artists room. That was it.
Alex Grand: [00:47:33] And this is 1989.
Dan Brereton: [00:47:35] This is 88.
Alex Grand: [00:47:38] 88. Okay.
Dan Brereton: [00:47:39] 88. So I meet them. They’re working on various things. Their pages are huge. They’re all painted. Jay Muth is showing his, uh, he’s working on, um. He’s working on a thing with Kent. Kent had blood pages there. Jay had moons. Uh, Moonshadow pages there. Dave McKean was working on Black Orchid, so he had some of those pages there. George Pratt was working on enemy A, so he had some of those, and I was just blown away. And I remember asking Kent Williams, I said, so you’re doing all these paintings on one big board, right? What if you screw something up? What if you screw it up because you just work on it until you, you know, you paint.
Alex Grand: [00:48:18] Over the.
Dan Brereton: [00:48:19] The air. Keep working on it until it’s. And I go, what if you can’t fix it? This is the insecure art. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:48:23] Interesting.
Dan Brereton: [00:48:24] He goes, he’s got to let it go then. And I was like, wow, he’s got to let it go.
Alex Grand: [00:48:30] How do you do that?
Dan Brereton: [00:48:31] And I remember thinking, this is really what I want to be doing. I want to be doing what they’re doing. Eclipse doesn’t want me. The next day, my friend, we all get up to go down to the show, and I say, I’ll meet you down there. Yeah. And I was so depressed and dejected that I called the airline. I got a flight home that day. I wrote those guys a note, and I flew home.
Alex Grand: [00:48:52] Wow.
Dan Brereton: [00:48:52] So depressed. And told my parents, you know, because when I, you know, when I wasn’t in art school, I would go home for the summer and live with my folks back home. And so I go back to school. I’m in this class with Katsuhiko Asano, who’s a very well known illustrator. He he painted the The Return of the Jedi movie posters.
Alex Grand: [00:49:13] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dan Brereton: [00:49:14] Book covers. You know, uh, Spenser For Hire book covers. He did everything. He was a he was a working. Very busy working. There you go. Illustrator. Right. Not in comics. Right, right. Movies. Books. Whatever. Publishing. Editorial. Whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing artists. I wish there was a book of his stuff out there. You can find it here and there on the internet, but. Amazing artist. Um, he was our teacher for that semester. And that was the beginning of what would be my last year in art school. My fourth year in art school. Okay, so illustration for was what it was called. And one of the things that he had us do was a semester long assignment that we work on, on our own, a personal assignment, whatever we wanted to do, work on it on the weekends. And at the end of the semester you’ll bring it in. So I thought, well, this is my chance to do painted comic book story. So I had been told by Fred and, um, Beau Smith, who was the sales guy for eclipse, who lived in Virginia, uh, that they wanted to revamp this Golden Age character called the Black Terror.
Dan Brereton: [00:50:10] Black terror. And so I looked at the Black Terror, and I thought, maybe I can make him into something because they told me they kind of want to do something like the Punisher with him. So I did this story with the Black Terror. I redesigned his look, uh, and I had him fighting vampires in the sewers, because that’s what I wanted to do. Yeah. And it was just something that I thought in the back of my mind that maybe I could have these show pages. So by the time the first semester was over, it was December. I had about seven pages done, and I would bring them in every week when I had them done, and show the teacher and show other, you know, friends and people at school. And I got a lot of good feedback on them. And I was there acrylic and watercolor, and I and I got my brother and my friends and some other people together, and I would shoot some reference and throw that together. And, um, that ended up being the first seven pages of the Black Terror number one.
Alex Grand: [00:50:56] Okay, there you go.
Dan Brereton: [00:50:57] Fred saw the stuff. He said, can I take these and show them the cat and Dean? And it was sometime before Christmas. I go, yeah, sure. And then like, two weeks later, he calls me up and he goes, they want this done yesterday. Okay. I go, what? He goes, yeah, they’re going to do it. They green lit the book. I see. And but but Beau had been trying to get the Black Terror going for a long time. So Fred was the editor, Beau Smith and Chuck Dixon wrote the script, and I was doing the art. And I’m still in art school my last semester. And the weird thing was, here I am working as a professional in comics, getting paid a rate that nothing like you’re getting paid is when you’re just a working part time guy, right? At the movie theater where I worked and, um, in, in, in, in school, they’re trying to teach us and raise us to be these, uh, mold this to be these, like, editorial illustrators. And none of my stuff really fit that mold. And I remember I was in the, um, I had there was an illustration show they do for third year illustration students.
Dan Brereton: [00:51:57] So even though I was in my fourth year of art school because of the transfer, I was still considered 33rd year illustration. So they did this spring show. That was a juried show. So you didn’t just get in what you put in, you had to be chosen by a judging panel. And I put in some pieces that I had done. A lot of the stuff was my personal stuff or things I liked that I thought were me. Yes. None of it got accepted into the spring show. I didn’t have a single piece in the spring show. Yeah. I was really upset. And I had teachers who said. Why didn’t you put in that painting of the homeless guy? You did this painting of a homeless guy sleeping in a doorway, and he’s wearing, like, a Come to California shirt. Is it something I’d done for an assignment an hour before class? Literally. And I said, that’s something I did an hour before class. That’s not indicative of what I can do or who I am. I said, well, that’s the kind of stuff they’re looking for.
Alex Grand: [00:52:45] I see. Content wise.
Dan Brereton: [00:52:46] And they all could have picked something to put in. Yeah. But they were thinking about other things. It wasn’t about my career. They were thinking about. It was about this. It was about representing their school and what they’re about. Yes. And comics were not what they were about. So I had friends and teachers that were all very sympathetic. They couldn’t understand. And I was like, I don’t care. I’m done with this place. I don’t need them. I have a job, I have a job. I’m working on this comic. Yeah. And so I left school. And did you finish the school? I did four years of art school and then I left, so I know I didn’t get a degree. Okay. I had a portfolio. Yeah. And that’s the thing is, you can get a degree in Bachelor. You get a Bachelor of Fine Arts, you can get a degree in illustration or whatever it is, but it’s the portfolio that gets you the work. That’s right. Not the degree. That’s. And I already have the work. Yes. So by the time I was 1990, while I was working on Black Tear, I’d already lined up the psycho. Right. So I think by the time I was done with high school or not high school with art school, I think I was already about to be working on the psycho with DC comics the following year when I finished Black Terror, so I was well on my way. Yeah. And so it was okay. I was I was alright with that. You know, so when Black Terror number one comes out at the end of 89, I get some copies, and in January I mail a copy to the head of the school of illustration, Barbara Bradley, who was an old school illustrator who was very talented, and she created the Dole Pineapple Kids. Okay. She was not a fan of comics. She liked Bill Sienkiewicz work, not a fan of comics. I remember trying to show her Kevin Nolan’s stuff and just like, look at Kevin Nolan. Yeah, she’s like, oh, this coloring, like.
Alex Grand: [00:54:22] Really is coloring is great.
Dan Brereton: [00:54:24] Yeah. Didn’t didn’t get it. Didn’t understand it. Thought it was junk. Thought it was a waste of someone’s talents.
Alex Grand: [00:54:29] That’s crazy. Okay.
Dan Brereton: [00:54:30] It is crazy. Now what’s what’s really cool, though, is I send in Black Terror number one, this fully painted comic. I send it to her, and I wrote a little note saying, this is what I was working on. This is what I want to do. I still feel like I have a lot to work to, to learn. And I do want to come back to school one day. And here it is. And so nothing, you know, like, don’t hear anything for a while. And then it’s just before Christmas, that December that there’s a call on my, my, you know, on my answering machine and it’s Barbara Bradley calling me, which she didn’t call students. She calls and she leaves a message saying, it looks beautiful. I get what you were trying to do. It’s wonderful. I don’t think you need to come back. I think you’re well on your way. Good luck. Excellent. I mean, very nice. Wished you didn’t have to do that. And that. And I heard from people who are still going to school that they took the book and they they tied a string to it, and they pinned it up in the main floor of the illustration classes. So everyone with the little explanation of who had done it and what it was, so everyone could flip through it and look through it.
Alex Grand: [00:55:34] Yeah. Amazing.
Dan Brereton: [00:55:35] It was a few years after that that they started a comic book department comic book.
Alex Grand: [00:55:40] So you may have opened their eyes up to that as an art form.
Dan Brereton: [00:55:43] There were a couple of others, like John Estes was a fellow who was doing comics. He got into comics around the same time, and there were a few other people, and it started to become more of this sort of seen thing. And then and then you had like Barron Storey, who was teaching at the school, had he knew some of these guys. So his connection to because he when he was teaching at um, at Pratt back east, he had a connection to like Bill Sienkiewicz and Kent Williams. Not necessarily that there were there were students of his, I think Kent was, but not Bill. He knew of these guys and he was. They were kind of they were those guys were always in the upper echelon of painted guys. I never got into that echelon. Mhm. Um, which, which is fine because I always feel like I, I always felt like I did my own thing, you know. Um, and uh, because of that, that helped create more of a, um, a friendlier attitude toward comics and that there was this, uh, this segment of illustration where you could get work. Yeah. Because painted comics became huge then. Yeah. They did. Anyone who could hold a brush they were going to hire to.
Alex Grand: [00:56:42] Do a book. So. Yeah. Right. There you go. And that that obviously helped. Then there was a demand there created then a demand for it.
Dan Brereton: [00:56:50] There were too many painted books and not all of them were great. One of my classmates ended up doing a couple of things for, for for Marvel. Yeah. That were painted, that were very beautiful. But he didn’t have the I think some of the stuff lacked the the love of the medium I see. Um.
Alex Grand: [00:57:08] The love. That’s an interesting point. Um, yeah, because I guess you could argue that the Marvel’s, you know, by Alex Ross, you could feel like a certain love toward that 60 to the 60s. Marvel is is is.
Dan Brereton: [00:57:20] Highly realistic, is highly detailed, as illustrative as it is, it has deep roots of love in comics and not all the pain and stuff did. And some stuff. It was just it lacked that, you know that. Like that. How to draw Marvel comics? Yeah, it’s not just drawing like John Buscema. It’s this feeling that you have. That’s right. I, I’m not saying I had it in my stuff, but I tried to put something in there that was of comics, a certain.
Alex Grand: [00:57:45] Kinetic.
Dan Brereton: [00:57:46] Going past reality to a certain point. Yes. Um, that’s.
Alex Grand: [00:57:50] Interesting to transcend the reality of it.
Dan Brereton: [00:57:52] I always felt like the way I, when I would talk with Alex or when we talk, I would say, you’re trying to conform comics to reality. What’s in your head to reality? Right. And I’m trying to conform reality to what’s in my head. There you go. So it comes out looking this way and yours comes out looking that.
Alex Grand: [00:58:10] That’s really interesting.
Dan Brereton: [00:58:11] I always felt like if I, if I was trying too hard to be photorealistic or ultra realistic, it would lose something. Yeah, there’s something of that and that I think that might go back to just, you know, obviously being a comic fan, looking at Jean style and, and everyone had a specific style and Jean’s work in particular, and Jacques had this unreality to it. Jean pushed everything and he did. And he exaggerated things much more than John, sure, but he also had the illustrative qualities of John’s work that say, Jacques didn’t have. And that’s why those three for me are so important, right? Because they all have.
Alex Grand: [00:58:45] They they have a different aspect of, of a similar.
Dan Brereton: [00:58:48] Thing. And, you know, you go out from there to other artists, obviously, you know, it’s.
Alex Grand: [00:58:51] And that’s interesting. And that’s where the stylized versus non stylized realism in comic illustration. Right. You have stylized realism. Realism which is like a Neal Adams thing. There are some exaggerations. It transcends the reality. You have stylized realism. That’s like a Hal Foster Prince Valiant, where it’s all very exact, but maybe it lacks a certain life.
Dan Brereton: [00:59:11] Stuff is so interesting because he’s not in my triumvirate, but his work is illustrative. Yeah, his the rendering of form and faces and stuff. And obviously he’s, you know, he’s paying attention to life. But then he was able to stretch it out in the way that, you know, like Jacques or Jean Wright or even John would.
Alex Grand: [00:59:30] Throw some foreshortening in that and.
Dan Brereton: [00:59:32] For sure. And well, you know, he was a student of Gill’s as well. So Gill is.
Alex Grand: [00:59:36] You know, Gill was doing.
Dan Brereton: [00:59:37] That. You see so much of Gill in the way that Neal constructs figures and, and plays with the space in there, in the way that, you know, you feel this sense of space. And I think.
Alex Grand: [00:59:46] Kirby was almost more in that Milton Caniff cartoon realism, which is like a different category where they’re using cartoon figures to almost emulate the action. But then there’s some something about it that you feel the punch in the face when you look at that stuff. Yeah, but it wasn’t as it wasn’t like a stylized realism. Like like you. Or maybe.
Dan Brereton: [01:00:04] He really knew how.
Alex Grand: [01:00:05] To.
Dan Brereton: [01:00:06] Capture. I mean, especially when he’s working on the Fantastic Four and he started to come into his own. Right. The style that we all think of, you know, the way that he was able to sort of just like pull you in and that’s right smack you in the face.
Alex Grand: [01:00:18] That’s right. There’s something about that action, science fiction. He’s just so perfect.
Dan Brereton: [01:00:22] The Fantastic Four stuff. I feel like the Fantastic Four when Kirby was at his height with that book. Yeah, it’s the greatest comic. It really is the world’s greatest comic. Oh, yeah. You know, for the story, the art, the character. You know, the character of Ben Grimm alone is such an insanely great character. Amazing. I mean, the way that the melding of those two minds to create that that that that guy is perfect. Oh, yeah. For sure. There’s just no more perfect character written by those two. You know, and they really did write him, you know. I mean, it’s it’s definitely a marriage there. It’s just there’s nothing better. You know, I go back and read those and.
Alex Grand: [01:00:58] Yeah, I think, um, yeah. I mean, in, uh, in my thinking, as far as the anti-hero, the Anti-superhero, uh, I think like E.C. Segar’s Popeye, uh, Kirby Lee’s thing. And then something about Chris Claremont’s version of Wolverine. Yeah. And you feel like, you know, these characters, like you feel like they’re real or something. Yeah. Okay. So you also did some work for eclipse on the Espers, and I think James Hudnall had something to do with that. Then after that, you guys are working on psycho together at DC. So is that how you met Hudnall? Was it over at eclipse? Were you guys now join in on the DC thing?
Dan Brereton: [01:01:37] Jim approached me in 1990 at WonderCon, so this would have been like what, 8th March or April of 1990? I was still working on Black Terror, and he saw my work and this big, tall, kind of soft spoken guy. Um, and, uh, he really liked what he saw. And at the time, what he had seen, he would have seen the first two issues of the Black Terror. And I think I was finishing up the the last issue. I’d finished the last issue and he said, I got this, you know, I just did this Lex Luthor book at DC, The Unauthorized Biography of Lex Luthor.
Alex Grand: [01:02:14] Oh, yeah.
Dan Brereton: [01:02:15] And I got this other pitch in with them that they want to do. What? We’re looking for an artist, and it’s called. It’s called the psycho. I go psycho, and I’m obviously the first thing I think of is the movie, and he starts to explain what it’s about, about a world where, um, you can take this drug and if it doesn’t kill you, it gives you powers and you become a super powered being, like a walking, you know, sort of weapon. And and they’re called Fcos freelance costume operatives. The nickname is psychos. And he goes, I, you know, I think you’d be great for it. And so I look at the pitch, uh, and while that’s happening, I, I put together some like, uh, color xeroxes of some pinup paintings I’d done, like Catwoman, Joker, Batman, you know, and some other stuff, color xeroxes of acrylic paintings. And Jim sent those to his editor, Mike Carlin.
Alex Grand: [01:03:10] Mike Carlin. Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [01:03:11] So I forget all about it. A week goes by, two weeks. I get a phone call one afternoon, and it’s Mike Carlin, and he’s in his office with Andy Helfer. Andy Helfer happens to be in there. Yeah. Looking at my stuff and, you know.
Alex Grand: [01:03:25] They worked on the Superboy TV show together. Those two Carlin and Helfer.
Dan Brereton: [01:03:28] Okay. Oh, they were definitely. Yeah, yeah. Uh, so they’re just, like, really excited to look at my stuff and and definitely want me to do the psycho. And I remember at one point he goes, yeah, Helfer. Helfer wants you to do a Justice League graphic novel. He’s not doing a Justice League graphic novel. He’s doing my thing first. Then he can do your thing. Yeah. I never did do the Justice League graphic novel with Helfer, but, uh, but, it was just like these two guys who are comic book editors are like, they want to hire me. Dc comics it was just insane. Yeah, that is great. And the funny thing was is, again, Mignola tells me later that he was in the offices when this stuff gets opened up and they’re looking at it and, you know, I met Mike a few times and, um, because he’d gone to DC as well. But that was, you know, after I’d been there. But he said they were looking at all this stuff and, and he’s like, wow, who’s this guy? And, and he looks at the name and he goes, and it hits me. Bong. Hey, I know this guy. Like he remembered me. You know, this this just this student that he had met. And, uh, that was just, like, amazing. That just this sort of full circle thing. And. And you’re dealing with these guys who are in New York. It’s not the same time frame as where you’re at. It’s three hours ahead there at the end of their your their day and you’re like, wow, I’m talking to two guys in New York who want to hire me. And then that’s when you start to feel connected to that, that place that you dreamt about when you were a kid, that, you know, faraway Manhattan and all the stuff that’s going on, you know, because that’s where the superheroes are, you know, that’s where all these things are happening and they’re making the comics, and that’s when you really start to feel like you you’ve you’ve entered into this, the real world of comics, right?
Alex Grand: [01:05:18] Of course.
Dan Brereton: [01:05:19] Because working for a California company is great, obviously. Yeah. But now I’m with, you know.
Alex Grand: [01:05:24] Yeah. The big two. One of the Manhattan. Yeah. The Manhattan. Yeah. There you go.
Dan Brereton: [01:05:28] Yeah. So, um, so Jim and I, so Jim and I start kind.
Alex Grand: [01:05:31] Of sounds very much like the Jeffersons, right?
Dan Brereton: [01:05:34] Yeah. Moving on up.
Alex Grand: [01:05:35] Moving on up. Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [01:05:35] So Jim and I become friends. Um, he’s kind of an odd duck, but that’s for another time. But, uh, interesting guy. Knew a lot of things. Had worked for eclipse. He was, um. He made his money, uh, as, like, a computer. Um, sort of got come in and put all your computer systems together. Oh, okay. And he actually financed Espers. Espers. Oh, okay. He he wanted to do it with them, and they weren’t going to put the money up. But he put the money up, hired the artists that he wanted. There you go. I helped put him on the map. Then he pitched a Lex Luthor book to to DC, and and he was very ambitious. And he thought the cycle was going to be like the next watchmen. And I said, please don’t say that. Let’s just do our own thing and and just enjoy what we’re doing, and let’s not try and be the next anything. Try to ride.
Alex Grand: [01:06:20] A wave of.
Dan Brereton: [01:06:20] That. Yeah. It’s silly. No one’s going to.
Alex Grand: [01:06:23] Well, because in the late 80s and early 90s, there was very much of the realism of superheroes and superheroes being in the real world. And how would that be and what the modern take on that?
Dan Brereton: [01:06:33] And I understand that. And I loved Watchmen. It’s still one of my favorites. Yeah. And even The Legend of the Dark Knight has that feel to it, right? I remember there was a British comic called the New Statesman that was very Watchmen, like, um, uh, there’s a lot of that stuff that was very big deal for a while. So we’re doing this thing that’s that’s like, again, what would it be like to have super powered individuals in a world where there’s terrorism and there’s espionage and all this stuff? And that’s very much in James’s wheelhouse. So James is thinking that this main character, the psycho, would be this techno ninja who would have all this sort of body armor and stuff, and that he would wear a, like a helmet that had like a mirror image mask. So when you were looking at him, you were looking at your face, and that’s really spooky and stuff. And I just thought, I want to make this guy look like a psycho. But I come up with this guy, this crazy, creepy, scary, weird guy who’s wearing all this strange, like overcoat, and he’s got a gun and he’s got claws and something that, um, they think there might even be a drawing in there. My first drawing of something that doesn’t even look like anything. Like a superhero. It looks like, uh, some deranged guy in an alley. And Jim liked that idea that he was almost scary.
Alex Grand: [01:07:45] Um.
Dan Brereton: [01:07:46] Yeah. And the three bad guys in the first issue ain’t make it on the cover which another which kind of another interesting thing you can do if no one knows your character you can just put whatever on the cover. Right. Um so I think he’s only the psycho is only on the second cover. The other ones are some of the more colorful villains that that I got to sort of design. And I had a lot of, um, I had a lot of freedom from Jim to kind of go in different directions. I was creating like a world of superheroes. So I get to name them, get their powers, what they look like. They were, you know, Jim had his his, um, directions here and there. Right.
Alex Grand: [01:08:17] Did you guys talk on the phone a lot? Oh, yeah.
Dan Brereton: [01:08:19] We became friends, and there were a lot of shows we were going to and we’d hang out and stuff. I remember calling him up one time. I was at the very end, the last final confrontation, and I said, you know, I call him up and it’s like one in the morning. I said, Jim, he’s killed everyone he’s come up against. Could we just maybe do one fight where he doesn’t kill the guy? Yeah. And maybe if we are going to do, you know, a follow up, at least one character could come back who wasn’t killed. And he goes, what did I write? I go, yeah, you have him killing this guy. He goes, I just want to, you know, not kill him. I want him to realize that he’s outmatched. And he goes, he runs away to fight another day. And he goes, okay, we can do that. And, uh, but he was, you know, he was he was pretty easygoing on that kind of thing. And and DC dug it. They they put a lot behind it. They did some variant covers with, uh, different colored fluorescent because I was using fluorescent, um, some actual fluorescent paints that don’t they don’t print fluorescent, but they’re still very bright. So this bright pinkish red that’s in there. I love it and stuff. And that was something that people, I guess hadn’t seen too much of then. I don’t know, but they made a big deal out of it. And they did these different colored logos and they’re sort of like 3 or 4 variants and stuff. And the book did okay. And I think I was nominated for, I don’t know if it was my first Eisner nomination or if it was some other comic book.
Alex Grand: [01:09:37] Well, I saw that that you got like, what, a Russ Manning Award, is that right?
Dan Brereton: [01:09:41] I got the Russ Manning Award after Black Terror, so that was nice.
Alex Grand: [01:09:43] It was after the Black Terror.
Dan Brereton: [01:09:45] So I was working on the psycho. And, uh.
Alex Grand: [01:09:48] And you’ve been nominated for an Eisner, um, like, five times. Yeah. And I know that, um, from what I understood from researching you, was it was more for Nocturnals, um, in 1995. Right? So I was.
Dan Brereton: [01:10:01] Nominated for Thrillkiller twice. There you go. Yes, I was nominated for Nocturnals once. Psycho might have been a nomination. It’s just that I wasn’t aware. I see. It might. It might have been. There was. I think Dredd was the thing I did for eclipse. I think I got nominated.
Alex Grand: [01:10:14] Right, right.
Dan Brereton: [01:10:15] I never quite won. But I also realized that getting a nomination is pretty great. It is? Yeah. You got to pick one winner. And the thing about Eisner is, is it’s I’ve had people come up to me who are nominated for an Eisner and say, hey, I got nominated for an Eisner. Will you vote for me? I said, well, I haven’t seen your book. Oh, well, you could buy a copy or, you know, whatever, get a copy. Um, I said, well, I also haven’t seen the other books. You’re nominated.
Alex Grand: [01:10:39] Right, Right. Yeah. Because it takes votes to finalize the winner. Yeah, because judges pick the nominees. But then it’s votes from people that determine.
Dan Brereton: [01:10:47] So it’s it’s people in the comic book industry who vote. But you’re supposed to be voting based on who did the best job. And nine times, not nine times out of ten. I couldn’t say that, but I think a large number of the votes are based on I like that guy over that guy, or I like that person’s work in general. I didn’t even see this other stuff, but I liked that. So I’m going to vote for it. And I don’t feel like that’s representative of what’s the best. Sure, everyone has to feel like if you’re going to watch, if you’re going to if you’re going to pick an Oscar for a film, you should watch all the Oscar films. Yes. You know, and then say, which one was the best? Don’t say, well, I like, you know, Clint Eastwood so. Or, you know, I’m going to vote for his. Right.
Alex Grand: [01:11:26] I totally get that. Yes.
Dan Brereton: [01:11:27] And that’s where I feel like it fails, you know, um, also, I, I remember one time complaining. I think it was years and years ago. Yeah. The nominee never won an Oscar, an And Eisner. And then my friend Kieran Dwyer goes, I’ve never even been nominated for an Eisner. And I go, oh, man, I’m sorry.
Alex Grand: [01:11:45] If you’ve been nominated.
Dan Brereton: [01:11:45] And you’re so good. And Kieran Dwyer, if you know his work, he’s so good. I can’t believe that he’s not been nominated for at least, let alone not one, because he’s amazing, right? And I realized how ridiculous it is, you know, to even care about that stuff to get an award. It’s great to win an Eisner is a great thing. It’s definitely a badge. But to have lost five times, it’s not bad either.
Alex Grand: [01:12:08] That’s not bad either. To be nominated five times is awesome. Oh, yeah.
Dan Brereton: [01:12:11] And I stopped getting nominated after a while. Um, but when the same people keep winning it over and over and over again, that’s when, you know, it’s kind of lost its power. Yes. And that’s kind of what happens because there’s so much new talent coming in. Now. The one that I vote on every year is the one I won, which was the Russ Manning Award in 1990, which is the most it’s the Promising Newcomer award.
Alex Grand: [01:12:31] There you go.
Dan Brereton: [01:12:31] And I never met Russ Manning, but the fellow who was good friends with him, who kind of took over and, uh, and ran the awards, he and I became friends and, well, friendly, uh, because I became a judge. So when you win, you become a judge. Yeah. So you’re being judged by your peers. So when I won the award, I was being judged by people like Steve Rude, Dave Stevens, you know, um, and Dave Stevens actually handed me the award, which I didn’t even know I was nominated for until about ten minutes before I walked in the room, because eclipse said, here’s a ticket for the eisners and there’s a dinner. And then there’s the award ceremony. Don’t be late. And I was an hour late, so I missed dinner. And they said some things you can’t be late for. And I go, what’s the big deal? Who am I? And he goes, you’re nominated. So it meant a lot to them. But they, they they failed to tell me why they wanted me there. And then, um, they’re reading off names, and then Dave Stevens says my name, and I go up there and I’m speechless, you know? And he said to me, when I walked on the stage, he goes, I voted for you. Oh, that’s that was all I needed to hear. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [01:13:34] And Dave Stevens. Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [01:13:35] The great Dave Stevens. And yeah.
Alex Grand: [01:13:37] Dave Stevens and Russ Manning are both also West Coast dudes as well. That’s right. Like you are exactly right.
Dan Brereton: [01:13:42] Yeah. Yeah. Um, and even though Steve Rude didn’t start in the West Coast, he he, he became a West Coast guy, for sure. But yeah. So that was a big deal. And I kind of used to think, wow, I wonder if I’ll ever win another award or if this will be the only one watch. This will be the only one. And, you know, I think I won a gaming award for a nocturnal thing years later. Oh, cool. But it is kind of come true. But the thing is, is it doesn’t really matter. I mean, it’s not the totality of everything to win awards. It becomes important for a while, and you get a little obsessed with it and you kind of let it go. Interesting.
Alex Grand: [01:14:11] Yeah, that makes sense. And then at that point, you just do the work you enjoy doing and and move forward.
Dan Brereton: [01:14:16] I’ve done so many things that I’ve been proud of. Not so many things I’ve done, things I’ve been proud of and that haven’t been recognized. And that’s okay because because other people recognize them, I recognize them. They made me happy. Yes. And that’s where nocturnals and Giant Killer come from, is me wanting to do a comic that I want to do that you want to do. I would want to.
Alex Grand: [01:14:34] Read and it shows. You could see the love, you could feel the love in that stuff. Um, there was an amphibian humanoid in, uh, in psycho. Did you watch that? Reminded me of creature from the Blue Lagoon. Did you watch that stuff? So, I mean, I was. Were you a fan of those 50s films?
Dan Brereton: [01:14:50] I didn’t watch it when I was a kid. Um, but I was always fascinated with the idea of the creature from the Black Lagoon. From the, I don’t know, at least high school. Yeah, I remember I was part of student government, and we were supposed to do some special thing. And my idea for the special thing to do for the whole school was to watch The Creature from the Black Lagoon in 3-D with 3-D glasses out in the football field. And that idea stuck for about 15 minutes before somebody else came up with something I really wanted to do. But I was like, so excited because I was like, going to be able to see that movie for the first time. And it wasn’t until I got it on VHS, and I think I bought it on VHS. And you know how much VHS costs back in the 80s? Oh, yeah. And I saw for the first time and I was just like, so happy to have finally seen it. And then I started, you know, getting into the universal stuff and watching all those movies.
Alex Grand: [01:15:37] So what what age were you when you started watching those then?
Dan Brereton: [01:15:40] Oh, my 20s. Yeah, in the 20s.
Alex Grand: [01:15:42] Right. So I had seen any of them. Yeah, yeah. Because you’re. Yeah. So it’s more in the 20s and later where you’re now you’re really digging in allowed.
Dan Brereton: [01:15:50] To stay up late right, to watch creature features. And I kind of didn’t really want to when I was a kid. The only time I ever stayed up late to watch Creature Features was Bob Wilkins is an Oakland came out Oakland KTVU was when Stan Lee was a guest on the show.
Alex Grand: [01:16:04] Oh yeah, this.
Dan Brereton: [01:16:05] Would have been in 75 when he was going out and promoting. Oh, that’s Marvel Comics. And I got to stay up on a Saturday night to watch that, which was amazing. And there’s no there’s no copy of that of that.
Alex Grand: [01:16:17] Yeah. I got to find that, which is really sad.
Dan Brereton: [01:16:19] There’s no copy to watch it because a lot of those shows were, um, they had some videotape or they had some. Yeah. Um, yeah. They weren’t.
Alex Grand: [01:16:26] Digitized. Yeah, a lot of things were not digitized, but not that one.
Dan Brereton: [01:16:29] It’s really it’s too bad because I remember it just helps. And plus they had these big standees of Marvel characters and like the set, which was like exciting.
Alex Grand: [01:16:36] So then so then when you’re saying like in your early 20s, so this is like the late 80s, early 90s, now you’re catching up on monster and horror movies at that point.
Dan Brereton: [01:16:44] So I like the idea of like this sort of amphibious character, because in the psycho, these, these most of the characters who have been changed by this drug deal that makes you superhuman, they’re human, more or less. I thought maybe this one guy they call that James called killer. And he was supposed to be a big, hulking brute of a strong guy. Yeah, I thought, what if he was just monstrous? What if he was, like, this fish man? And he’s like, yeah, in a suit. So. And. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [01:17:09] And the suit.
Dan Brereton: [01:17:10] And then later on, I do Nocturnals. And one of the characters, starfish, is an amphibian girl who looks like she could be his his sister. Um, so it’s just one of those things that I was interested in doing. Starfish came about as a comic book friend, was going to put together a book of pinup art, and he and he actually paid Page several artists to do these pin up pieces, and I had this idea for a pin up that I would do like a I got 50 sci fi pinup, but as if it was on an alien world with an alien girl. So I had this fish girl like a ray gun and she’s underwater. Had this kind of Andrew Loomis sort of mermaid feel to it. And that was starfish. And then I ended up putting her in Nocturnals later on, because Nocturnals was kind of like, I had a couple of ideas for some main characters, and then I had some other characters that had been floating around in my sketchbooks and stuff, and I put them in there to kind of round things out, and she was definitely one of them. So later on she she ended up joining the roster.
Alex Grand: [01:18:00] Now, how is working under Mike Carlin as an editor then? Like, was he supportive? Did you talk to him a lot or was he kind of keeping his fingers out of it while you guys were doing it? I mean, what kind of feedback were you getting from him in that early period?
Dan Brereton: [01:18:13] He was a great teacher and he was a friend, and he was super funny guy, uh, very, very much a company man, Which sometimes was a little, uh, you know, like, okay, dude. Okay, I get it. You work for the company, but for the most part, he was he was a cheerleader. He was always very supportive, very organized, very clear and concise about about, you know, if any questions you had, there was no ambiguity, you know, ambiguity in anything. And he made things actually much smoother and easier than, than maybe another editor might have. So he was he was a he was a great editor, especially like, you know, my introduction to like the, you know, the bigger world of comic book publishing. So yeah, he was I feel really lucky that I was able to work with him on as many projects as I did. In fact, when the cycle was over, he was like, what do you want to do next? And I said, I want to do Batman. He goes, well, if you’re going to do Batman with me, Superman’s got to be in it. And I was like, okay, because I wasn’t a huge Superman fan. My, my, my love of Superman is like George Reeves Superman TV show. That’s my favorite Superman, more.
Alex Grand: [01:19:26] So than Christopher Reeves.
Dan Brereton: [01:19:27] Yes, for a couple different reasons, because he was kind of a smartass.
Alex Grand: [01:19:31] And George Reeves was. Yeah, yeah. He was this. There’s something a little more mischievous in what he was doing, bemused.
Dan Brereton: [01:19:37] At the other people. And it’s like this idea that, I mean, it didn’t really delve into the idea that he was an alien, but it had to be on his mind as an actor, that he’s watching these humans scurry around and be silly. Yeah. And he has the two silliest humans, the three silliest humans of all creation that are his friends. You know, his boss and you know his partners. That’s.
Alex Grand: [01:19:58] I never thought of that. And he’s.
Dan Brereton: [01:20:00] Just like, come on, Jimmy, you know, it’s like, you know, they’re.
Alex Grand: [01:20:03] Silly. Yeah. He’s a he’s a he’s a superior being and he knows and.
Dan Brereton: [01:20:07] All all the bad guys are silly too. They’re all dimwits. Yeah. And he’s just, like, the smartest.
Alex Grand: [01:20:12] Guy in the weird mob guys, and he’s.
Dan Brereton: [01:20:13] Not even human. And you forget that a lot. You forget that he’s not a human being. They don’t, like, make a big deal out of that. But it had to be on his mind somehow. But yeah, there is just this, and that’s who I was thinking of. Interesting. When I was doing Legends World Finest, and that was my touchstone at first. But then I started thinking, all these, all these artists and writers and creators have come before me to make Superman what he is. And I don’t want to, um.
Alex Grand: [01:20:36] Okay. I want to.
Dan Brereton: [01:20:37] Honor that and.
Alex Grand: [01:20:38] Respect that. There’s a certain tradition with Superman.
Dan Brereton: [01:20:40] And so when I did Superman, I. I kind of had to fall in love with Superman and had to. And it created this appreciation for the character and, and really wanting to do well. So it wasn’t just, I’ll do Superman because I’m trying to get to Batman. It wasn’t like that at all. I was definitely locked in and and Carlin said, who do you want to work with? And I said, um, um, um, Walt Simonson.
Alex Grand: [01:21:00] Yeah. He goes.
Dan Brereton: [01:21:01] Perfect, right? Let me talk. And I had met Walt and Wheezy like a year before or two years before in Scotland. I had gone to Scotland in, I think, 1990 or 91.
Alex Grand: [01:21:11] And this is 1994, a legend of the world’s finest. The idea of it and the concept of it preceded Walt’s involvement. It sounds.
Dan Brereton: [01:21:18] No, no, no, it was definitely. It was definitely after Walt and I got together. I see. And we actually I came out to the offices sometime after that. I had characters I wanted to be in it. I wanted Silver Banshee to be in it because I really liked that character a lot. I wanted I thought it’d be cool to have Man-Bat in there.
Alex Grand: [01:21:33] Right, right.
Dan Brereton: [01:21:34] I love that, and I had this idea. I guess I had an idea for, like, this villain character who was kind of like an ancient sorcerer. Yeah, like maybe a Celtic sorcerer. Right. And so I brought that stuff to to Walter because Walter said, you know, what kind of things do you want to draw?
Alex Grand: [01:21:50] Yeah. There you go.
Dan Brereton: [01:21:51] We’ll come up with a story that’s based around the things you want to draw on that, which is great. So yeah, we came up with this idea, and the idea that that Walter came up with was probably more in tandem with Mike than me was the idea that Superman’s dreams and Batman’s dreams were were becoming intertwined, were becoming switched. So, in other words, Batman was having nightmares about his his planet being destroyed. Yes. At Krypton. And Superman was being plagued with nightmares about his parents being murdered in front of him. And that was messing them up, because the influence or the influence of this sorcerer in their dreams was. And they were totally off their game because of it, and it was screwing them up. And so they they band together to fight this, this presence. And, um, this guy named Tullus and, uh, it worked. It was really cool. It made sense. It was specific to the characters. You know, that was another thing I learned from working on that book, which is you don’t just say, well, I want to throw this character and this character in because I like them. The story has to be specific to.
Alex Grand: [01:22:52] For that situation.
Dan Brereton: [01:22:53] These characters, and there needs to be a reason why they can be the only characters that this story fits. There you go. Not interchangeable.
Alex Grand: [01:23:00] Yeah. You know, and it sounds like did you learn a bit from wall to on like story structure? Oh yeah.
Dan Brereton: [01:23:06] You can’t help it when you’re working with people who are good and even people who aren’t so good. You can’t help it. You have to learn. You have to learn something. You have to come away with it, having learned either what not to do, what works. I mean, when I wrote Nocturnals for the first, you know, that was the first time I’d written a full six issue thing. I learned about what I wanted to do differently the next time, you know? I remember making this sort of, uh, having this idea that I early on, not not after I wrote Nocturnals, but I didn’t want to do thought balloons. You know, captions are okay, but I wanted the characters to when they spoke that they were speaking, and they weren’t just doing thought balloons, you know? And the thing is, you can do thought balloons with a caption, you know, it’s like narration.
Alex Grand: [01:23:48] Yeah, yeah. I think Frank Miller really popularized that concept.
Dan Brereton: [01:23:52] There’s this great scene in the movie The Hand, which is, uh, Michael Caine movie. Yeah. And Michael Caine.
Alex Grand: [01:23:56] Is Barry Windsor-smith was involved in that.
Dan Brereton: [01:23:58] So the strip that he does is basically Conan, but it’s called Mandrill. Right. And Barry Windsor-smith was hired to draw to draw these strips. And which if you were a comic fan, you knew right away.
Alex Grand: [01:24:09] That it was his.
Dan Brereton: [01:24:10] Stuff, even even though you’re watching a movie. Right. And there’s this great scene where he’s he’s sold the strip and this other artist is is drawing.
Alex Grand: [01:24:19] It for him.
Dan Brereton: [01:24:20] This young artist is drawing it for him.
Alex Grand: [01:24:22] Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [01:24:22] And he’s just sitting back and collecting the checks, and he sees the work that this guy has done. And he gets really upset.
Alex Grand: [01:24:29] That they ever thought.
Dan Brereton: [01:24:30] Balloons. They were thought balloons. Yeah. And and.
Alex Grand: [01:24:33] He’s like, Metro doesn’t think.
Dan Brereton: [01:24:34] It’s based on a book. But the script was written by Oliver Stone. Oliver Stone’s first. I think it might be his first.
Alex Grand: [01:24:38] Yeah, yeah.
Dan Brereton: [01:24:39] Script. And but it was based on the book that I actually read. It’s pretty good. But he says, what are these thought balloons? Mandro doesn’t think he acts.
Alex Grand: [01:24:47] Yes.
Dan Brereton: [01:24:48] And I was like, yeah.
Alex Grand: [01:24:50] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Conan very much. Conan doesn’t doubt anything. He does.
Dan Brereton: [01:24:54] No thought. Well, it’s it’s basically Conan. There’s no thought balloons in Conan. Yeah. And Oliver Stone, you know, obviously a big fan of Conan. It’s like John Milius. Yeah. Right.
Alex Grand: [01:25:03] Right.
Dan Brereton: [01:25:03] And I and I, that’s such a great lesson. You know, I’m not saying that you can’t have thought balloons, but is a great lesson the carrot because that is in screenwriting. That’s very important.
Alex Grand: [01:25:12] Character. If it’s like a kid or a teenager, they kind of could in a way. But if it’s like a well actualized warrior person, well.
Dan Brereton: [01:25:19] I mean, all characters act, they they take action. And that’s what fuels the storyline. Not sitting around thinking in a.
Alex Grand: [01:25:26] Room, oh that’s interesting. You mean like a play or something? Like in a play? It’s action and speaking. There’s no thought.
Dan Brereton: [01:25:32] Balloon in a three act structure, any story structure, the character that the story is moved along by the actions of the character. Yes. Um, you know, maybe something they say or what they do, but they make they make a decision and they act on it. And that’s what propels the plot in the story. And, um, it was all encapsulated in that. And I was and I didn’t realize that at first when I first heard it, but I was like, oh, yeah, Conan doesn’t really have thought balloons. But then later you realize what genius that is.
Alex Grand: [01:25:56] Yeah, it is genius. Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [01:25:56] You’re right. There’s characters that sit around moping and thinking all the time he actually does something. Yeah, he takes action of whatever. Yeah. You’re right. Yeah. And that propels story. Yes.
Alex Grand: [01:26:05] Something I really liked about legends of the World’s Finest was you also depicted, like some of Batman’s rogues gallery, you had Catwoman, Riddler, Joker, Penguin, but you also have like, monsters and demons, and it’s like a real visual hodgepodge. Yeah. Where you’re getting, you know, this kind of funny, I’m.
Dan Brereton: [01:26:22] Going to call it that. We’re going to call it legends of the hodgepodge. No.
Alex Grand: [01:26:24] Just kidding. And but I noticed. But you, were you a fan of Simonson, like, in the early 80s when he was doing Thor and stuff?
Dan Brereton: [01:26:31] Yeah. In fact, Thor, his run on Thor is what brought me back to comics in 83. There you go. Because I was in my kind of like, well, it wasn’t that I was in the comics, but I was into, like, Warren comics and Bernie stuff and. Yeah. And, you know, heavy metal stuff.
Alex Grand: [01:26:44] He brought you into, like, mainstream superhero again.
Dan Brereton: [01:26:47] And then, yeah, somehow I, I might have just gone into a 7-Eleven in Truckee. This is like I was out of high school by this time. And I knew Walt’s work from other things he’d done. Yeah. And I saw this alien dressed like Thor.
Alex Grand: [01:27:00] Yeah. Beta ray. Bill.
Dan Brereton: [01:27:01] Yeah. And my brother, too, who wasn’t a big comics fan. We both just were like, what the heck is this?
Alex Grand: [01:27:06] Right. Right.
Dan Brereton: [01:27:07] And we just got so into it. And that pulled me back into comics. Oh that’s.
Alex Grand: [01:27:10] Great. Because and I asked that because you did a bit of a visual homage to him in Thor Gods, oh, Gods Special 2009 The Death and Life of Skurge the Executioner.
Dan Brereton: [01:27:22] I did a retelling of the story. Well, it was written as a retelling of the story, and then it was put in this God sized Thor. So it’s in context of this larger story. But the thing I didn’t realize, and they didn’t tell me, was that I’m retelling this story. So I’m taking visual cues from, from, from Walter’s work to kind of imbue that and pay homage to that. But then they didn’t tell me that they were running Walter’s original story in the book as well.
Alex Grand: [01:27:46] You would have maybe done a different they might have.
Dan Brereton: [01:27:48] Taken some more departure from, I didn’t, like, take whole panels and just copy them. I tried to do as embellish. No.
Alex Grand: [01:27:54] You did absolutely.
Dan Brereton: [01:27:55] The thing that was interesting about that was the way it was colored was back then, the coloring was very simple in 83 interesting stuff. And and even that story, it’s just very primary. And so I was going and doing that too, to try and again pay homage to, yes, what he had done to to say this is how you should be feeling about this when you’re looking at it. Not like knowing that you could just see it like, you know, a few pages later, you know? But that’s okay. It was still kind of cool.
Alex Grand: [01:28:20] No, it’s a beautiful story. And you also penciled beta Ray Bill in the Green of Eden in that same year. And you had some involvement with beta Ray Bill.
Dan Brereton: [01:28:29] I was working with Warren Simons, who was the editor at the time. I got a lot of work from him. It was a Secret Invasion aftermath story. Beta Ray Bill was the main character, and he was worshipped as a god by these Skrulls, kind of gentle Skrulls that thought of him as a god. And yeah, I penciled the thing and, um, didn’t get the didn’t get the cover, didn’t get to paint the cover. Which always annoys me when you do all the work in the interior because you.
Alex Grand: [01:28:52] Penciled the interiors, but you didn’t paint the interiors on that one, I think, right?
Dan Brereton: [01:28:56] No, I in fact it was inked by three different inkers, right.
Alex Grand: [01:28:59] There you go.
Dan Brereton: [01:28:59] And that’s something that Warren would do when the book was late, because Warren is a You know, I don’t know if you want to call him a frustrated writer or just a writer who was frustrated in that he wasn’t writing comics, he was editing them. Let’s put it that way. And so he spent a lot of time with the writers trying to get things right. It was important to him, but it was sometimes the books would go over schedule because of that. Okay. And then it would fall to you to hurry the hell up, and then it would fall to several inkers to finish it up. So the book would be on time.
Alex Grand: [01:29:28] And letters too, I guess.
Dan Brereton: [01:29:29] Probably, yeah.
Alex Grand: [01:29:30] Back to the kind of that Mike Carlin like, kind of 91, 92 ERA. Was he the one that hooked you up with the Legion 91, 92 covers or or did you just kind of through word of mouth work with other editors?
Dan Brereton: [01:29:41] So there was another editor. There was another editor there, Dan Raspler, who was editing a Legion and some of the titles, and he liked my work. And, you know, he was, you know, I’m just down the hall from Mike. And so he had seen my stuff. So he was hiring me to do, to do covers for, for Legion here and there. And I did some pencil and ink stuff, and then I did some blue line colors, but mostly I did painted covers for Legion. And there was even one year, I think it was in 92 when I was the second time I was back there visiting the offices, and I was about to leave on a Monday and Raspor calls me into his office. I came, I went to, you know, say goodbye to everybody and hello and goodbye. I’m going to go fly home. And I’m in the offices, and Raspor calls me into his office and he says, hey, you want to you want to do a Lobo cover? I go.
Alex Grand: [01:30:20] Yeah, Lobo. Yeah, I love that cover.
Dan Brereton: [01:30:22] This is a one shot. Dennis Cannon was supposed to do the cover, and he got he fell behind or whatever. I need it. Like Friday, I go, what? It’s Monday. Yeah, I need a Friday. Can you do it? And I’m like, okay, I fly home on Monday, start working on a Tuesday, painting on Wednesday, Fedex it on Thursday. He gets it Friday. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It’s two grand, you know.
Alex Grand: [01:30:43] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, sure. Yeah, sure.
Dan Brereton: [01:30:45] It’s Lobo. Why not? Okay. And he goes, yeah, it’s Lobo on a pile of women. What? Yeah, it’s a pile of women that he’s just. He’s just, you know, satisfied a pile of women cover. Not just Lobo looking badass that you need in three days or two days or whatever. I go, okay, fine. So I go home and I do it very clear. There’s a lot of Klimt in that cover.
Alex Grand: [01:31:05] Yeah, yeah, not.
Dan Brereton: [01:31:06] On Lobo, but the women, they’re very Klimt. They’re very rosy.
Alex Grand: [01:31:09] Huge. Interesting.
Dan Brereton: [01:31:10] Yeah, yeah, it’s almost like a collage sort of effect. It’s not a mountain of women with him standing at the top. I didn’t do that. I finished it, but I wasn’t able to get it out. Fedex until Friday, not Thursday. So he got it on Monday. Yeah. And for several years after that, he would say, remember you were late on that one assignment. And I was like, I was not late. I saved your ass.
Alex Grand: [01:31:31] Yeah. That’s right. He liked to bust chops.
Dan Brereton: [01:31:33] Yeah.
Alex Grand: [01:31:34] When you have to add a pile of women, that’s a lot more details you have to add.
Dan Brereton: [01:31:36] It’s one of the most smarty pants guys, let’s put it that way. It’s very, very smart alecky.
Alex Grand: [01:31:41] You did some work also with Marvel’s epic line. You with Clive Barker’s Book of the damned, Hellraiser with some. There were some internal illustrations. Um, it seemed to be a project that appealed to kind of your horror monster kind of sensibilities, visual sensibilities. How did that project come about?
Dan Brereton: [01:31:59] Um, Clive Barker became very, very popular. There was the Hellraiser book, but then eclipse had took out the license to do the Books of Blood stories and illustrate those. But Hellraiser comes out. Mark McLaren or Markus McLaren? Mclaren was the editor. He was friendly and liked my work and liked the work of quite a few other painters. And they’re hiring, you know, different people to do stuff. I never got hired to do a story, but I did get hired to do a cover and I think a pinup or something like that. Yeah. And so which is fine, you know, so they have a pinup in one of the issues, which should I would have been cool if it was a cover. And then I did a cover which has been reprinted several times. And um, and that character, who I did in both, I did the pinup has 3 or 4 characters that I created, Cenobites. And then the girl, the female is also on the cover. So she became her own character. That Marvel sent me a thing to sign saying she’s now this character. She’s called this if she appears on any cover with her name on it. You’ll get a royalty, which never happened. Signed her away. It was interesting then.
Alex Grand: [01:33:01] Because that was for epic. So epic had that additional incentive. Plus.
Dan Brereton: [01:33:05] You know, I mean, it’s Clive Barker’s, you know, work and he owns it, you know. Just before I got into crime fiction really heavily, I was reading Clive stuff. The editor, Fred Burke, had worked with Black Terrorist. Said, do you want to, you know, do a story. I said, yeah, I think the story I’d like to do is Dredd, because I like that story. Um, the guy locked up his girlfriend with a big piece of cooked meat, and she’s a vegetarian, and he wants to see how long it’s going to take before she breaks down and eats it, which is. And then his other friend, he does a thing. He does a number on his other friend who goes crazy and then ends up going after him with an axe. You know, he just. This guy is just a what a creep.
Alex Grand: [01:33:39] Clive Barker’s Dredd you illustrated the interiors and the cover and the clown with the axe.
Dan Brereton: [01:33:45] That’s the cover of the Harpercollins edition. Eclipse edition has this, but it’s a little square with blue and peach. It doesn’t look at all like a horror. It’s the worst design horror cover. And then later on, uh, clips in Harpercollins did this one, which is how it was supposed to look. Right? And that’s my sister who modeled for. Oh, really? That’s great. She has this painting up on her wall. So that’s that’s a cover. I’m pretty, pretty happy with. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alex Grand: [01:34:09] It really captures the.
Dan Brereton: [01:34:10] And I could have done stuff like that for the next ten years, but I just, you know, um, ended up doing superheroes and stuff for DC.
Alex Grand: [01:34:17] Right, right.
Dan Brereton: [01:34:18] Sure, sure, sure. But, uh.
Alex Grand: [01:34:20] And, uh, and the clown with the axe in it. Yeah. I mean, that’s scary.
Dan Brereton: [01:34:23] Yeah. It turned out that the main character who was putting his friends through hell, that was his fear. Okay. The murderous clown.
Alex Grand: [01:34:31] And at this point in your career, how long does it taking you to, like, illustrate one page? Like, fully paint one page?
Dan Brereton: [01:34:37] In the 90s, when I was doing painted stuff, I had, um, basically it was supposed to turn in 12 painted pages a month. That was my. And that was a lot of work. But I did it.
Alex Grand: [01:34:45] 12 painted pages a month. Okay. That was.
Dan Brereton: [01:34:47] My quota.
Alex Grand: [01:34:48] Yeah. So it’s like one page every 2 to 3 days.
Dan Brereton: [01:34:51] Yeah. And then, of course, you might have a cover or 2 or 3 and then you push or some other little.
Alex Grand: [01:34:55] So you push a little harder.
Dan Brereton: [01:34:56] Never, never, never to sequential art jobs going at the same time can never do that. That’s just crazy. Too much to pull your head out of one story and put it in another.
Alex Grand: [01:35:04] The cut. You also did the cover for Clive Barker’s Nightbreed 14, 1992. Round two. Nightbreed covers two.
Dan Brereton: [01:35:11] Nightbreed covers. Now the funny thing is, one was my favorite character from Nightbreed. Because Nightbreed was a movie. I loved this guy Peloquin. So I did a Peloquin cover, and then the second one was a specific cover that the editor asked me to do because the story they needed. Um, Markus were doing the story to figure out why a guy who got killed in the movie is still alive in the comic, and this is the story, and we need you to make sure that this guy’s head is being held by another character on the cover. Right? So I do that. It’s the best of the two covers. It has several characters on it, and then they don’t do that story. So when the when the when the when the cover comes out, Um, there’s two people standing behind and one person kneeling down holding the head, but they put this like, uh, you know, this. What do you call it when it’s like a, you know, a a graphic. Yeah. A, you know, like a burst graphic that says something on it that’s about the story, but it’s covering the head of the guy. Yes. So it just ruined the whole point of the cover. They just. Oh, we don’t want. That’s not the story. So we’ll cover it up. And I was just like, oh my God, I’m never going to work with these people ever again. I was so upset. I mean, that’s not necessarily true. They didn’t do that. But I just that’s the kind of thing that’ll happen sometimes. Yeah. You know. Um, but other than that, I really liked doing that, uh, that cover.
Alex Grand: [01:36:30] And you were fully caught up on the horror genre of movies at this point as well. I mean, you were you were you basically kind of like, did you just kind of like, make up for lost time and just watch a bunch of that stuff?
Dan Brereton: [01:36:41] I when I bought my VCR, yeah, I made up for lost time. There you go. Everything.
Alex Grand: [01:36:46] That’s what I was kind of wondering about. Everything.
Dan Brereton: [01:36:47] So in other words, being not being an art student. Well, I worked in a movie theater for about a year or so before, you know, quitting and going full time with comics. And I was still. Yeah, I saw a lot of movies. There you go. And we were able to see movies in other movie theaters around the area for free. So I didn’t pay to see a movie for three years, and I watched a lot of movies, and then I got my VCR because I, you know, when I got a check from whatever job, I could afford to buy a VCR. And then I was just like, not like I hadn’t rented movies before with other friends, but I didn’t have a VCR. I don’t even know if my parents had one. They might have, but yeah, I was catching up on everything.
Alex Grand: [01:37:25] There you go. Yeah. So. And that you you caught up on, like, 50 stuff. 80 stuff. Whatever. Well, I mean, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, nightmare.
Dan Brereton: [01:37:34] On Elm Street was something that I’d seen, but I’m not a big 80s slasher fan. I mean, I’ve seen all those now, but you’ve seen them now.
Alex Grand: [01:37:42] Yeah, but Rosemary’s Baby.
Dan Brereton: [01:37:43] Yeah. You know, um. There you go. Wow.
Alex Grand: [01:37:46] The 70s?
Dan Brereton: [01:37:47] Yeah. 60s. 70s. Yeah. Yeah. Um, the. And, you know, and there was.
Alex Grand: [01:37:53] Definitely, like, a satanic interest in the horror movies of the 70s. Yeah. That’s a pretty funny thing.
Dan Brereton: [01:37:59] The guy who really hit me really hard as far as the movie, that was one of my one of my favorite movies. It might be my favorite movie is The thing. John Carpenter’s The Thing.
Alex Grand: [01:38:07] Oh, I love that movie.
Dan Brereton: [01:38:08] And, you know, I got caught up on the original thing. Yeah. But then the there’s these three movies I saw, um, one afternoon with some friends in 1982, summer of 82 was visiting a friend in the Bay area, and, uh, we saw three movies in one afternoon. We hopped from one movie to the next. We we went to see The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek The Wrath of.
Alex Grand: [01:38:27] Khan, which was great. That’s amazing.
Dan Brereton: [01:38:28] Yeah, it’s like the first and maybe the best Star Trek movie. Yeah, I think it was the next two films. It just blew me away. And one was The Road Warrior, which I had never seen anything like that.
Alex Grand: [01:38:38] Yeah. Mad Max. Amazing.
Dan Brereton: [01:38:39] And then this movie called The Thing. Yeah, with that John Carpenter, the guy who had done escape from New York and other films we’d seen like how? Like I hadn’t seen Halloween yet. Yeah, that blew me away. 82. That was huge. And then the same in the same year. You know, you have so many super important films come out as far as I’m concerned. Blade runner. E.t.. Oh, yeah. You know, just it’s a huge. And there’s many, many more. It’s a huge year for for movies. And so I so my love of films was completely cemented probably in that afternoon. Not that I didn’t love going to the movies before, but just that was like there were so many things that just game changing, things that happened in that afternoon. That’s true. And the thing was definitely one of them was like, I was like, wow, there’s no women in this movie. And yet it was just the things that the choices he made. Like, there’s no female characters.
Alex Grand: [01:39:27] Yeah. You’re right. I never thought of that.
Dan Brereton: [01:39:28] There isn’t. There are in the original, but It’s All Men takes place in this. Basically. It’s like a weird play in a way.
Alex Grand: [01:39:35] You know what I mean? Yeah, it’s a weird play with.
Dan Brereton: [01:39:37] Crazy special effects, crazy hard boiled dialogue, you know, um, is there’s a lot of things in that film that encapsulate I love, like, hardboiled crime fiction, uh, and that kind of dialogue and, and spare, um, kind of, um, stripped down storytelling, which you get in, in, in crime fiction and film noir and then monsters and weirdness. Right.
Alex Grand: [01:40:04] And yeah. And there’s almost like some Lovecraftian sense that totally that that an alien is an is a very ominous thing to be frightened of, and it’s ghastly.
Dan Brereton: [01:40:15] And how many tens of thousands of years buried in the ice? Yeah, it’s. It’s what? You know what I mean? That’s. And the.
Alex Grand: [01:40:21] First thing it does when it’s awake is it consumes us and it.
Dan Brereton: [01:40:24] Doesn’t care what we look like. It mashes us all together and some Lovecraftian, you know, nightmare horror thing. Yeah, yeah. It’s amazing. And Lovecraft was another writer I came into, like, so I was, you know, reading Stephen King in high school and then, um, you know, other some other horror writers. And then someone mentioned it was probably Stephen King and mentions, you know, Lovecraft. And I was like, oh, I gotta check out this Lovecraft. Oh yeah. And you read that stuff and go, you know, the stuff doesn’t read as easy as Stephen King. It’s written in this other vernacular and everything.
Alex Grand: [01:40:54] The Call of Cthulhu is so easily readable.
Dan Brereton: [01:40:57] The ideas are so holy. Like I remember.
Alex Grand: [01:41:01] The one the way he verbalizes things. It’s like you can imagine it, but you can’t imagine it at the same time because it’s just so bizarrely written.
Dan Brereton: [01:41:08] And there’s this it taps into this part of your brain that’s sort of the dream imagery that’s kind of that’s like amorphous and ever changing.
Alex Grand: [01:41:14] That’s right.
Dan Brereton: [01:41:15] He taps into that so directly that no other writer had ever.
Alex Grand: [01:41:20] Been able to do that. It’s incredible.
Dan Brereton: [01:41:21] I don’t know, and like that. And just with this turn of phrase, or like a character who’s wearing a mask of a human to cover up what it really is, that is such a nightmare. And I think maybe that might be what it is, is just like tapping into your nightmares. Tapping into whatever his dreams and his fears were. Because he was afraid of everything.
Alex Grand: [01:41:42] He was afraid of everything.
Dan Brereton: [01:41:43] And, um. Yeah. So. So, yeah, Lovecraft was like an eye opening thing. So when I finally did do the Nocturnals in like the mid early to mid 90s, I wanted to do something that was a melding of like, say, Dashiell Hammett with Lovecraft. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [01:41:57] Crime horror.
Dan Brereton: [01:41:58] Black lizard crime fiction series with. Yeah, with this sort of Lovecraftian thing and then Halloween thrown in and just some other, you know, Marvel Comics idea, you know, here’s an.
Alex Grand: [01:42:09] Ensemble team of competing personalities, in a.
Dan Brereton: [01:42:12] Way. And I didn’t make a shopping list out that I checked all the boxes on. It was just stuff that was of interest to me that I wanted to throw into one story. I mean, I wanted to tell a hardboiled crime fiction story, but I didn’t want to draw a bunch of hard boiled guys. I wanted to draw monsters, you know, and I wanted it to have this. And so the idea of the stories start to come together. You know, you have interdimensional travel people from other worlds, you know, creatures, monsters, this, that, and the other thing and then somehow meld it into one story. And, you know, to be honest, I thought that everyone was going to hate Halloween Girl because she’s this little girl character who acts like a little girl, just like my daughter Lindsey. You know? I mean, she’s based on my daughter Lindsey and my daughter Audrey, and not a not a little sort of, um, a little girl who’s who’s actually like, a, like, an adult in a child’s body. You know, the way a lot of characters are written, you know, they’re smart. The smartest person in the room, written like a child and in with all these really dangerous, scary people around her. What’s she going to do? Was she kind of goes into this Halloween world to cope with it? Yeah. You know, um, and all that kind of stuff. I thought, well, they’re going to hate Halloween girl. She’s a little girl character. You know, there’s weren’t really any in the early 90s. There weren’t any little girl characters in mainstream comics. The closest was Kitty Pryde. She wasn’t a little girl.
Alex Grand: [01:43:28] Yeah, she wasn’t a little girl. No. Teenager. Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [01:43:30] And, um, that stuff kind of came after there were a lot of little girl characters. Adventurous little girl characters afterwards. Um, just seeing these things sprout up afterwards and going, okay, so, you know, I don’t know what that means, but but I know that people who read that comic, that was one of their favorite characters.
Alex Grand: [01:43:44] Now, a question I have about the Marvel era. Were you in any contact with Carl Potts at the time? He was Epic’s executive editor while you were doing the Clive Barker stuff?
Dan Brereton: [01:43:54] Yeah, I did. I did some Conan covers when Carl Conan. So they, they, they launched a magazine called Conan the Savage, and I, uh, Carl and I had met Carl and Carl, and I had, um, we had a, we had a connection through Vincent Perez, who was one of my teachers at cSAC and and he taught, among other things, he taught the artistic anatomy, a year long course that most of us.
Alex Grand: [01:44:15] Have to take. And he was friends with Carl.
Dan Brereton: [01:44:17] He knew Mignola, he knew Steve Purcell. And Carl had taken a short course with him. So he knew Vince. And that’s how when we met each other, we kind of had that Vince Perez, sort of like, you know, thing in common. Connection. Yeah, yeah. And, uh.
Alex Grand: [01:44:31] Because Carl himself teaches too. So yeah.
Dan Brereton: [01:44:34] So Carl’s a great artist and he’s a writer and he’s very.
Alex Grand: [01:44:37] Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [01:44:37] You know, he’s a very talented creator. And I love Carl. He’s a gentleman. Um, and I wish I had worked with him more, you know, because I put him up there with Archie and and Mike Carlin, Archie Goodwin, Mike Carlin. But, uh, so I did two covers of Conan the Savage. Um, what’s kind of cool is I think one of the issues had a John Buscema story in it, which was really cool, and I was going to do more. And there was this idea, I think there was a story that had either come out or was going to come out where Conan fights in Hyborian Age version of Iron Man. This armored guy, all in armor. Yeah. Yeah. And I said, that’s a great idea. Like, what about, like, a Hyborian Age, like Spider-Man, you know, or this, that and the other thing. I said, you know, so we start kind of throwing ideas around. And so the idea came up with for a cover was it was Fin Fang Foom around the Hyborian Age. Yeah. He goes, oh, that’s an idea. So I did this drawing of Conan with, like, a woman. You know, it’s always like some gal. Poor gal.
Alex Grand: [01:45:36] Yeah, yeah.
Dan Brereton: [01:45:37] And Fin Fang Foom is looming above them, and I penciled it. I still have it in my flat file somewhere. And I remember Karl was like, I like it, but could you do him, like, on horseback with the girl? And he’s fleeing, and Fang Fang Foom is coming. Oh I see. Calling him out. And I was like, that’s a lot of work. Yeah, I guess I could do that. And I wasn’t that enthused, but I was kind of busy, you know, because you’re doing these covers when you’re doing.
Alex Grand: [01:46:00] Your regular.
Dan Brereton: [01:46:01] Sequential work. And I never got around to doing it. And then there was this round of firings where Karl was laid off when Marvel.
Alex Grand: [01:46:08] Was going through the whole bankruptcy deal. And it was.
Dan Brereton: [01:46:10] The first round of.
Alex Grand: [01:46:12] That stuff. Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [01:46:13] Because then again, there was another round later on, right? Because I remember I was I had done thrillkiller for in the mid 90s, 96 or so for DC. I mean, I pitched this idea to epic, you know, um, Mark McLaren again, the idea was it was this thing called the Strange Agency. And so the idea was that Doctor Strange was operating in like the 30s or 40s, and he was a detective. And his agency is the people who worked with him. His operatives were all sorcerers, and that’s how they solved their mysteries and crimes or whatever jobs they were given. A rival agency called the Xavier Agency they come into contact with. And so there are all these mutants that are like detectives. So you have Wolverine, you have Doctor Strange, and, you know, these sort of like 30s 40s counterparts of the Marvel characters. And we were going to do this as kind of like an Elseworlds, but for Marvel. Yeah. And then like a week later, and Howard was going to write it and then and then Markus got fired. So that ended. Yeah. And I remember, I remember some other editor, like a week later, another editor called me and said, do you want to do a venom mini series? Yeah. And they’d never done a painted venom mini series. Yeah. I don’t think they’d even done a venom mini series.
Alex Grand: [01:47:16] I totally look at that.
Dan Brereton: [01:47:17] I was like, I’m not a crazy big fan of venom. But yeah, okay. He got fired a week later.
Alex Grand: [01:47:22] I see. So just so this is all happening in the mid 90s. So covers for creepy, Vampirella, and rook. These are basically revivals of the Warren magazines.
Dan Brereton: [01:47:32] Harris Comics got the rights for Creepy and Vampirella. There you go. I don’t know if it was the rights or if they just took out an option or, you know, licensed. So they made Vampirella, they creepy, eerie. And I did covers for all those.
Alex Grand: [01:47:49] And rook. Yeah. Vampirella and eerie. Okay.
Dan Brereton: [01:47:52] So then Harris Comics, which was a company that published like Guitar World magazine.
Alex Grand: [01:47:57] Yeah. Okay.
Dan Brereton: [01:47:57] So they were they. And then this gal named Melanie Crawford. Chadwick, who became Melanie Crawford because she got divorced from Jim Chadwick, I guess. And they were they were a couple. And she was the, you know, the editor in chief for the Harris comic line. Super great to work with. Great lady. And I knew Jim. I knew Jim Chadwick because he was working at Malibu and he.
Alex Grand: [01:48:20] Jim Chadwick.
Dan Brereton: [01:48:20] Jim Chadwick was helping on Nocturnals. He was doing design work on Nocturnals and doing awesome job there. Yeah, super nice guy. So, yeah, I got to work with both of them. Um, so they hired me for, um, a few covers, and then I think someone else who was working there wasn’t a huge fan of my stuff, so I didn’t really do a ton. I didn’t keep doing more. I did a there was a creepy four issue mini series. I did four covers. There was an eerie. And then I did a like a they called a fear book, which was the cover has Vampirella, Cousin Eerie and Uncle Creepy on it. And then, um, and then what happened was they those books ended up what happened? Um, there was a Vampirella magazine. So Vampirella went into a magazine. Vampirella magazine. Yeah. With it was almost. It had a few. It had a few short comic stories in it, but then it had articles and stuff, and I had done four issues worth of covers for Vampirella mini series that never came out. And they took those four covers and they they used them as covers for the magazine. So they did see print. Um, but as far as working with people on that Warren stuff, I didn’t interact with anybody because I was only doing covers.
Alex Grand: [01:49:35] Yeah, right. Because Steve Leialoha worked on some of that. Yeah. Gene Colan, Tom Sutton. Yeah. Peter. David. Joe Duffy. Like these kind of Marvel. Kieran Maguire. Kieran. Dwyer. Dwyer.
Dan Brereton: [01:49:45] Now, I knew Kieran. Uh, not super well yet, but I did know him. I had Steve Leialoha I’d met before, just before I got broke into comics. And he was, you know, and Gene, by that time, obviously, I think I don’t know if I’d met Gene yet by that time. Early on. And I never really met Peter David or Joe Duffy. But I didn’t work with any of these people like directly on it. But what a great line up of talent to put.
Alex Grand: [01:50:12] Forward with.
Dan Brereton: [01:50:12] These books.
Alex Grand: [01:50:13] That’s right. Was there any sense of like when you did Marvel, when you did DC or when you did Warren, that you were like, man, these are these are things that I was looking at when I was younger, and I’m finally doing stuff for that stuff. Or was it more.
Dan Brereton: [01:50:26] Like, totally. I mean, I got my first creepy cover when I was working on The Psycho, and it was one of the first freelance covers I was hired to do outside of what I would normally go on the cover of one of my books. So I had done the covers for like Black Terror and Psycho and. Right. And, you know, but I think the creepy cover might have been one of the first where some outside person had come in, and it was Rich Howell who had inked me on ransom was the editor of of this, of the creepy book, and I’m not even sure if that was Harris at that point. That might have been someone else. But I get hired to, to work to, to do these covers. And yeah, the first cover of creepy that I did. Yeah. Was very much in mind of the first cover that Jack Davis did, which is, I think, my favorite creepy cover. Yeah. Even though Frazetta did a bunch of them. It’s just something about the monster sitting around listening to uncle. Uncle reading the story. And then I find, and I have two copies of it. I have one on my wall with.
Alex Grand: [01:51:25] Oh, that’s 1964, I think, when that pretty.
Dan Brereton: [01:51:28] Early stuff and it’s very simplistic cover, but I can stare at it. Yeah. Me too.
Alex Grand: [01:51:35] There’s something about that.
Dan Brereton: [01:51:36] And I love that idea. And he would do a lot of those sort of ensemble monsters altogether kind of things. And Severin did them too for cracked, I love that, I love that jumble of monsters. And I’ve done a few of those myself. Um, but I did this one where, like, he’s Uncle Creepy is opening the door and you’re entering into, like, a party, and there’s, like, Frankenstein and other creatures and a vampire woman and stuff. So it’s definitely, you know, inspired by that. And I would have I could have done those every month. I could have done one of those every month. Yeah, I’d love to do it. And then they got more specific to story in the next three, which were not as fun. Um, and then I got to do a, I think there was one that had Cousin Eerie and Uncle Creepy on it, which was pretty cool, right? But there were a couple that were like, there was one like an axe wielding clown in Like a Tunnel of Love, which came out nice. And then there was one of like, sort of like a kind of a devil woman with, like, monsters in her hair, kind of very sort of, you know, not super representational, but, um. Yeah, that was that was a fun era. And, and what’s and here I am completely new to this whole thing. I’m not, like, a veteran cover artist.
Alex Grand: [01:52:39] You’re, like, five years into your career at this point, right?
Dan Brereton: [01:52:42] This is the guy who would turn in work in school, and it was okay. But somehow when you’re when you’re being paid and you’re with the big boys, you step up. Yeah. Otherwise, you’re not going to make it. Yeah. And I was just I was cut loose. I didn’t have anyone giving me rules and stuff like that. I was like, we just do something cool, and and I and I didn’t. It wasn’t like getting an assignment in art school where they said, okay, we want you to do the pamphlet for, like, a travelogue. Maybe it was some boring, not boring, but like something that wasn’t like speaking to me passionately. Yeah. And all of a sudden, they’re, like, creepy here. Creepy. Number one. Holy cow. Like you’re just. You’re just set free. Yeah. Yeah. For sure.
Alex Grand: [01:53:23] Speaking of ensemble of Monsters. So Nocturnals. It was first published by Malibu Comics. Is that right?
Dan Brereton: [01:53:30] Yes. And.
Alex Grand: [01:53:32] And with that agreement with Malibu, you still own the the rights to the characters? Yeah, that’s how that was.
Dan Brereton: [01:53:38] So Malibu had, um, had they were they were, they were flush with cash from being the distributor for the first image title. That’s right. And so they thought we’re going to do our we’re going to start our own, uh, line of superheroes, and we’ll hire these talented guys and gals and to put together this whole universe for us, which they did. And then someone somewhere along the line, the idea to do a creator verse, kind of like Dark Horse’s legend line came about. It might have been, um, the collective, uh, entertainment lawyer for all of us bravura guys who came up with the idea, but I had pitched dark horses. Nocturnals. And I always wanted to do with dark Horse. And then my my attorney said, well, you know, here’s the offer from Dark Horse, but I got this other publisher over here that I’m talking to about putting together a line of creator owned stuff. And I’ve got Walt Simonson, I’ve got, uh, I’ve got Howard Chaykin, Gil Kane. Yeah, Steven Grant, Marv Wolfman, uh, Jim Starlin, I go and me, he goes, why not? I go, oh, I can think of some reasons why not, but I guess I couldn’t really say no. I mean, sure, okay. And so they made an offer and accepted it. It was amazing. And yes, full ownership. This is what they offered us. It was like the greatest deal. It was such a great deal that when Malibu started to flounder.
Alex Grand: [01:55:00] So flounder. Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [01:55:01] They were losing money. It was looking pretty dark for them. Marvel comes along and buys them, takes a look at the. They send an attorney and an accountant out to run the company. Yeah. And they look at our deals, the bravura creator owned guys deals, and they’re like, what are you doing? You can’t pay these guys this much. And I remember they had already kind of stopped paying us a little bit. They were always. There were these, like, excuses for why you weren’t getting it. Oh, you didn’t turn a voucher in with your Malibu? Yeah. My editor said, well, you didn’t turn a voucher. I go, yes, I did. I would never turn in a work without a voucher. That’s how I get paid. Well, I don’t have your voucher. I’m like, this is not right. Something’s not.
Alex Grand: [01:55:37] Right. Something’s.
Dan Brereton: [01:55:38] Gil Kane stopped working on his book The Edge immediately and started doing other work because he’d seen that coming. He, you know, he was no dummy. Yeah, he’d been down that road. He started working on some other stuff. Other places. I mean, he eventually edited it, finished it, but, um, no, he was like, okay, well, if they’re not going to pay me, I’m going to go do this work over here.
Alex Grand: [01:55:54] Howard did some work with Rivera, too, right?
Dan Brereton: [01:55:56] Oh. He did. Power and glory. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alex Grand: [01:55:58] That’s right.
Dan Brereton: [01:55:59] That’s kind of how I. I mean, I’d met Howard before, but that’s how. And obviously I’d worked with Walter, so you know that there was some familiar familiarity there, but I didn’t really know Howard very well. And that was a whole other thing, getting to know Howard. And that’s what led to us doing Thrillkiller together later on for DC.
Alex Grand: [01:56:13] I see. Was there ever a mutual work there?
Dan Brereton: [01:56:15] And Howard was the one that came up with the idea because we had this. We had we were in the Philadelphia con in 93, and we were put together this panel to kind of announce this creator owned line. We didn’t have a name for it yet. And Howard goes, well, you know, what we’re doing basically is bravura pulp. Yeah. And I went, oh, there’s the title Bravura Pulp. And then they just shortened it to bravura.
Alex Grand: [01:56:36] So now when you were making Nocturnals and you’re getting your ensemble of characters getting their colors, their visuals, their personalities, how much of it was planned saying, well, we got to I got to have a little bit of this and a little bit of that to give it an overall balance or how much of that is like just ID based where you just kind of impulsively just create things and then just make it work.
Dan Brereton: [01:56:57] Well, I think there’s both there’s both to it because there’s characters that are sort of running around in your sketchbooks. But the original idea was I was on a plane. It’s 1992. I’m on a plane in Scotland for the second time going to their show out there, and I was trying to think of an idea for a pulp character who had, like, a pulpy sounding name. Yeah. So I come up with doc. Doc horror.
Alex Grand: [01:57:21] Mhm.
Dan Brereton: [01:57:22] And then the idea comes along of like this sinister or not sinister, but kind of mysterious character whose, um, motivations are kind of murky. And he takes in these sort of night creatures and he’ll put you up and give you sanctuary, but you have to work for him and you have to you have to do his bidding. And so I thought, okay, who are these? Who am I going to populate? So I had some characters from here and there, and then I had this character who I called Halloween Girl, and that basically came from my four year old daughter Lindsey. At the time we were discussing, Halloween was coming up and I said, what do you want to trick or treat? What are you going to dress up to? Trick or treat. What do you want to be? She goes, I know I want to be Halloween girl. I go, oh no, no, honey, it’s it is Halloween. You can dress up however we want. And I just stopped and I went, wait a second. This just picture in my mind.
Alex Grand: [01:58:15] Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [01:58:16] Sprang up of Halloween girl. So I did this drawing real quick, and I had this other character who was like a kind of a scarecrow gunslinger gunslinger. And he became the gunwitch, right? So in the beginning, Halloween Girl was one of these characters. But she wasn’t Doc’s daughter. She was just this little girl who came out of nowhere, who was kind of mysterious and spooky and stuff, and I’d done a kind of rendition of her on a cover of a Ray Bradbury comic, uh, that Byron Price put out. And I’d done this sort of idea. The idea came about also from that, too, like, this is kind of a halloweeny little vampire. Uh huh.
Alex Grand: [01:58:49] And, um, did you meet Byron Price?
Dan Brereton: [01:58:53] Uh, yes.
Alex Grand: [01:58:54] How was he.
Dan Brereton: [01:58:55] A nice guy. Nice guy. Didn’t didn’t really talk very much with him. But I met him and he liked my work. And he was, uh, he was very, you know, friendly and gracious and gentlemanly, but it was. It wasn’t like I had long conversations, right? I did I did meet him, um, and I liked the stuff that they put out. I would have liked to have done more Bradbury stuff because, again, huge influence. Bradbury.
Alex Grand: [01:59:14] Yeah, yeah.
Dan Brereton: [01:59:14] Of course. So I’m in Scotland and I had this idea, this title, it’s called Doc Horror’s Pawn Shop. And so you pawn yourself to this guy, you know, in return for, for sanctuary and a place to live and protection from the outside world, you sort of pawn your life to this guy. And and so I remember there was a British artist, um, who had did a drawing and he said, Doc Horror’s pawn shop, like a seafood place where you get fried prawns. I always thought that was funny. And I was like, okay, I’m going to probably drop that whole idea. And then and I start working more on what the story really is and who the dynamic of these characters are. And, and I think, I think these are father and she’s father, it’s a father daughter thing. And um, and then the name came later, like, I need a really good name and finally settled on Nocturnals.
Alex Grand: [02:00:05] Yeah, it’s a great.
Dan Brereton: [02:00:05] Name, even though it sounds a little bit like a group or something. There was a there actually. Turns out there was a short lived group in the 60s in Canada called the Nocturnals.
Alex Grand: [02:00:15] You mean like a music group?
Dan Brereton: [02:00:16] Yeah, yeah. Um. And. Yeah. So? So I knew there were certain aspects I wanted. I thought, well, you know, I don’t it’s not like I want to. I want to, like, create the recreate the universal monsters, right? But I started to realize that there were correlations in some ways. There you go. Fireline is sort of a demon, and she’s like the creature. But again, I wasn’t trying to recreate the the. Right, right.
Alex Grand: [02:00:37] Would you say that the Universal Monsters and let’s say, like, Clive Barker’s Nightbreed and kind of stuff, did all that stuff kind of go into your I?
Dan Brereton: [02:00:46] The weirdest thing is I was I remember seeing Nightbreed a few years earlier, and I was I loved that film. I loved the idea. Yeah, I remember trying to find movies or stories that were like it for like months afterwards. Yeah, it just was nothing like it. Yeah, and then I just forgot about it.
Alex Grand: [02:01:01] When I watch it, it felt very much like the Morlocks from the X-Men, in a way. Like these weird underground kind of freak things with powers or whatever.
Dan Brereton: [02:01:08] But there was this, like, serial killer in a mask who was the bad guy, and then this guy is a monster, too. And they live, like, underneath a cemetery. And to be honest, when I was coming up with all the different things for Nocturnals, I never even thought about Nightbreed anymore. I was over Nightbreed. Yeah, but it had gotten into the cauldron, the bubbling cauldron, along with so many other things. And it wasn’t until much later that some Nightbreed came up somewhere and I went, oh yeah, so I got to do it. So. So I made what I wanted. Yeah, I wanted that something like that. I wanted that feel. And I just ended up making it myself. Yeah. That’s great. Never thought about that. I might have thought about it back at the time, I was into Nightbreed, but then I put it on a shelf and forgot about it.
Alex Grand: [02:01:47] And you already had such a tendency toward monstrous things anyway, that you were just kind of following your creative impulse, basically. I mean.
Dan Brereton: [02:01:53] I was a big fan when I was a kid of Herculoids. Yeah. Which was a bunch of monsters in a family. Yeah. You know, a mom and a dad and a kid and a bunch of monsters. I mean, that’s my fantasy. Yeah. I mean, holy crap, you know.
Alex Grand: [02:02:04] Did you ever interact with Clive Barker at all during any.
Dan Brereton: [02:02:07] I met him, we. When Dredd came out, eclipse put out their version. Yeah, the horrible cover. We were at San Diego and we did the first signing. I did my first signing.
Alex Grand: [02:02:14] There you go. At the convention.
Dan Brereton: [02:02:15] And he was there. And so we sat at the table and we signed books together, and I met him for the first time. He was super gracious, super nice guy, very charismatic. You can see why people love him. It’s just such a cool guy.
Alex Grand: [02:02:27] Yeah, that is cool.
Dan Brereton: [02:02:27] And I wish I could have gotten to know him a little bit better, but it was great just to spend that, you know, like a couple of hours just sitting and talking. And definitely one of those guys that makes you feel good about yourself. You know, there are certain people who are like that. They make you feel good about yourself when they’re when you’re around them, you know, they know how to they know how to treat people. And oh, that’s great.
Alex Grand: [02:02:43] Just kind of, um, like a review of various covers. You did, you know, the kind of the mid 90s era is the specter. You did one where he’s fighting like a five headed monster.
Dan Brereton: [02:02:54] Yeah, yeah.
Alex Grand: [02:02:55] And then you did Animal Man, which had like a wolfman.
Dan Brereton: [02:02:59] Kind of Bigfoot character in the background, shirtless, like on the ground. Yeah. And then behind is like the silhouette of sort of like a ape. Like maybe like a Bigfoot.
Alex Grand: [02:03:08] Yeah. Yeah. Like some fur. Fur.
Dan Brereton: [02:03:09] And I throw in some raccoons because we’re working on the nocturnal at the time, and I was really into raccoon.
Alex Grand: [02:03:13] Although, you know, you could have taken it to, like, a superhero extent. You definitely want more monster in those themes. Was that was that intentional? Is that something that the editor wanted? Well, sometimes. Was that more of your thing.
Dan Brereton: [02:03:25] So that you can get a label thrown on you like, you know, if you. It’s funny, I remember and I was going to.
Alex Grand: [02:03:29] Ask about the label being thrown and kind of being typecast a little bit. Tell me about that.
Dan Brereton: [02:03:34] Well, that’s why sometimes you get offered some things and you don’t get offered other things, you know, because they see you do apples all the time and they don’t think that you can do oranges, which is silly. And that’s something they told us that was actually something they talked about in art school, about how you have to show them in your portfolio. You can do apples and oranges.
Alex Grand: [02:03:51] There you go.
Dan Brereton: [02:03:51] Because they’re not going to necessarily make that connection themselves? Yes. Now, I worked with people who did make the connection, which is odd. Um, a couple of times. Um, but for the most part, you wish you could do something because, you know, you could do the heck out of it. You could. Oh, I could, man. I could really just do that cover up. I could have done that story. That would have been so much fun. But they don’t think of you that way. They think of you as this way. They put they they see he’s the monster guy. Yeah. Or he does the dark stuff. He does? Yeah. You know, or his stuff is way too colorful, you know, any any opinion someone can have about your work, they’re going to have it and they’re going to hang on to it.
Alex Grand: [02:04:26] Um, even if you’ve gone beyond that, they’ll still kind of have carry.
Dan Brereton: [02:04:30] It with them. I mean, look at the difference between like, legend of the World’s Finest cover. This is the first piece of artwork I did before I even started working on it. Big painting is what they called a promo piece. Yeah. Like a poster. And the original sat under Mike Carlin’s desk blotter to say, stay in flat for like a year. And then we decided, hey, let’s use this for the cover for the trade paperback. Right, right. Very colorful. Primary colors. Yes. You know.
Alex Grand: [02:04:50] And I love. And look at this one.
Dan Brereton: [02:04:51] Could it be any more different? It’s very.
Alex Grand: [02:04:53] Different. The cover to Dredd and the cover to legend of the World’s Finest couldn’t be more different. Yeah. And yet they’re different genres altogether.
Dan Brereton: [02:05:02] Put in the box by.
Alex Grand: [02:05:04] Certain people.
Dan Brereton: [02:05:04] In certain.
Alex Grand: [02:05:05] Boxes. So in some of those covers that are more monster, that was more directed by the editor to do it that way.
Dan Brereton: [02:05:10] The animal man thing was a specific story. There you go. And so they said, do this. The Spectre one I wanted to do the Spectre, like, you know, like a Spectre cover. And then Dan said, he’s fighting this monster with five heads because it’s in the story. And I was like, so what? A monster with five heads, and he’s fighting.
Alex Grand: [02:05:32] Him.
Dan Brereton: [02:05:33] And this thing’s coming in this gross character thing. And he’s he’s like, back here. He’s like, he’s at the bottom of the thing. It’s my fault because I was trying to get the monster in. The monster became the monster for me, you know? And I said, pushing him up out into the frame more. I was trying to figure out how to fit this creature in there. And again, you don’t have a lot of time to put this together.
Alex Grand: [02:05:52] Right.
Dan Brereton: [02:05:53] And so rather than doing some badass shot of, like, the Spectre, you know, with shadows and. You know, just something dramatic. I was asked to do this scene, and I remember Dan said, can you have him putting his reaching out and grabbing the neck of this creature? I go the neck of the creature with five heads.
Alex Grand: [02:06:13] So which neck like that? Yeah. So you’re talking about the common neck? No, it was there.
Dan Brereton: [02:06:18] It’s coming down. This creature is coming down on. He’s down here.
Alex Grand: [02:06:22] Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Dan Brereton: [02:06:22] And it’s coming. Okay. I’m sorry. Because I’m. He’s down. He’s down here. He’s down here. And it’s coming down on him. Yeah. Like that. And so he wanted me to have him reach out and grab the neck. And I’m like, which neck? His arm just disappears into a nest of heads. And I just hate it so much. It’s so anathema to what I would do if he just left me alone and said, do me a killer. I would have done a killer Spectre cover that we could have both been happy with, but it’s sometimes is a little too much muscle flexing. Editorially, I see now if it had been another editor, they would have said, like Archie would have said, I know you’ll do fine. Just do a Spector cover for me, right? Don’t worry about it. And it’s funny because with, um, the legends of the Dark Knight, I did two legends of the Dark Knight covers for Archie. One was for specific to my story that I did. He didn’t give me any, uh, he didn’t tell me what to put on it. It’s Batman, like, holding his side, and he’s bleeding, and he’s like, you can tell he’s, like, in some ruin. And it’s very close up on him. So it’s a character shot.
Dan Brereton: [02:07:18] It’s. It’s powerful. It’s one of my favorite, um, covers. I haven’t seen the originals. I don’t know how long, but, uh, the other one I did was an inventory cover. Yeah. And Archie was had done covers with Frazetta for Warren where Frazetta would just turn in stuff, and then Archie would write a story around the, like the cover of eerie, I think eerie number one. Yeah. Is this, like sea monster? So he he Frank turns in this cover, and then Gene is asked to do a story that Archie writes about a guy who encounters like these, you know, creature, some kind of sea monster creature, underwater creature. So he’d write the stories around Frazetta’s covers. So when I did my my, um, my quote, uh, inventory cover for legends of the Dark Knight, he said, make it as specific as you want. So I have him in a cave wearing a gas mask. Um, shining a flashlight. There’s rats, there’s skeletons, there’s snakes. There’s, like, noxious fumes coming up from some, I don’t know, whatever’s in the cave. And, uh, he took that cover, that inventory cover, and then later hired an whichever writer wrote the issue for that and said, here, write the story around this. And they did.
Alex Grand: [02:08:34] Yeah, and they did.
Dan Brereton: [02:08:35] And I was like, so thrilled because, you know, that’s how I used to do it back. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And, uh, that was great. Um, but to have some I mean, and again, you know, it’s my job as an illustrator, as a freelancer, to, like, make the client happy. Okay. So if the editor says, please do this and this, that’s going to make him happy. You should do it.
Alex Grand: [02:08:56] Yeah. You know.
Dan Brereton: [02:08:57] Right. Sure. And yeah, maybe you’re not crazy about it, you know. And Barron’s story in class used to say find something of yourself to put into the work to make it yours. You know, you may have a job that you have to do. That’s just. There’s nothing about it that’s interesting to you. Put something of yourself in there. Find some way to make it yours. And that was great advice. And I’ve used that advice many times. And you’ve not on the Spector cover.
Alex Grand: [02:09:20] Right. But you’ve consciously made that choice to do that.
Dan Brereton: [02:09:24] I tried to make the I try, you know, I try and it’s another thing someone said to me one time and our director said, well, you know, I consider you an asset, you know, and you want to be an asset to your employer. So you want you don’t you know, I wish I had heard that that was good advice I could have used when I was younger, because you can get a little bit of a prima donna attitude when you’re younger, because you think that you know that they should just leave you alone and do your brilliant work, but you’re not always going to do brilliant work necessarily, and you do need to listen and be cooperative. And you need to be an asset. You need to be someone who’s a team player. And I learned that ten years after I got into the business. It finally sunk in, you know, and maybe it was too late by that time with some people, maybe some people had written me off as being difficult. I don’t know if I if people think of me as being difficult or not, you know, maybe they had, but but I really do try and be more, like I said, more of a team player, more of an asset. Right. So that you felt good about hiring me? Yes. And it’s funny because I have been doing that for a long time, and it doesn’t always return a dividend.
Dan Brereton: [02:10:25] You know, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll kill on some job, a cover job, like, say, for Marvel. Marvel is for some reason I’ll, I’ll, I’ll deliver the goods. I’ll bring it home. The bacon. Right, right. And then I think they’re definitely going to hire me again soon because. Because they’re so happy with this and then nothing for years. You just got to move forward. Yes. Move forward the next thing. And a lot of what freelance illustrators do when the work dries up a little bit, you go through your doldrums, is you hustle, you drum up work or you, you go into commission mode or something. And there was a time, I think it was 2017 or 2018. A whole year went by without a single call or email from any comic book editor or publisher for for a job. Yeah, a whole year. And it hit me. Wow. I haven’t gotten an offer for any work in a year. And I thought, well, maybe they’re done with me. And then a month later, Steven Grant, old friend. Steven Grant, writer who made Punisher popular. Yeah, yeah, he says. Oh, yeah. One of our old editors at DC is now, uh, he’s now over at valiant. Should I tell her you’re interested in maybe doing some work? I go, yeah, sure. And so she called me or email me that same day. Right. And said, do you want to do punk mambo? I go, what’s punk mambo? Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [02:11:38] You know. And so she offered me like to, you know, the, the art chores on like a mini series, you know, drawing it, doing covers. And she told me what the deadline was, and I was like, I can’t make that deadline anymore. And I’m not sure I want to because I had other things I was doing. In other words, by that time I had worked out a system for myself to be an illustrator and to be working and busy and make a living that didn’t involve comic book land. I see, I realized when I realized that I hadn’t been called for a year, I thought, that’s okay, because I’ve figured out a way to to exist without them. I don’t need them anymore. Mhm. I can stand on my own two feet. And then the work starts coming in from Dark Horse Comics is wanting me to do covers. I’m doing covers for valiant some other a lot of jobs I had to turn down. I turned down a graphic novel for some company. Um, and, uh, that was great. And but then you go through another stage where you don’t get any calls again. Well, pandemic was kind of interesting because some stuff dried up and other things came up. It’s really weird, but no. I’m okay. I’m. I’ve figured a way to to make it work. Right on my own terms.
Alex Grand: [02:12:40] Now, some of the other covers and illustrations. Sergeant Rock Cable in Marvel Masterpieces two collection. Deathlok. So you got to kind of revisit a childhood kind of fun comic.
Dan Brereton: [02:12:52] Deathlok and cable were trading card. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [02:12:56] Trading cards.
Dan Brereton: [02:12:56] Marvel masterpieces. Right? Okay.
Alex Grand: [02:12:58] And then Mars attacks Topps. So, Topps. Topps.
Dan Brereton: [02:13:02] Topps hired me to do some Mars attack stuff. Um, and, uh, and then I ended up doing some more stuff for Topps or IDW because Topps remembered me. Um. Oh. Having done stuff when they were a comic book company. And so I got kind of jungled up with them again. That was kind of fun, but, uh, so random.
Alex Grand: [02:13:20] I mean, and that’s a fun piece of pop culture. Mars. I did a.
Dan Brereton: [02:13:23] Few covers for them. Yeah. And they were Topps, and the editor was fully the perfect editor for Mars Attacks because he was kind of sadistic and not sadistic, but he liked really gross stuff. Oh, yeah.
Alex Grand: [02:13:36] Right.
Dan Brereton: [02:13:36] And so the idea is that he would come up with for me, I actually had to tone one of the ideas down. I want you to have this beautiful woman. But she’s been she’s been altered by the Martians. So she’s kind of scary looking. And the Martian has his tongue wrapped all the way around her neck. And then at the end of his tongue is going into her mouth. I said, I am not going to do that. I said, I’ll do everything, but I’m not going to put his tongue in her mouth. He wanted that on the cover. This is the.
Alex Grand: [02:14:04] Guy. But you know, that’s that certainly gets your attention.
Dan Brereton: [02:14:08] Well, I got people’s attention without all.
Alex Grand: [02:14:10] Without the tongue.
Dan Brereton: [02:14:11] Most of it was everything he wanted except for the tongue going in the mouth, which was just, I think.
Alex Grand: [02:14:15] Right, without the without the colonoscopy part to it. It was.
Dan Brereton: [02:14:19] Almost too.
Alex Grand: [02:14:20] Much. And then Neil Gaiman’s Lady Justice, he did a cover there. So I did that.
Dan Brereton: [02:14:24] I did 18 covers for Lady Justice. So, so Techno Comics was founded by a company that had just sold the Sci fi network. Yeah. They start a comic book company with pretty much the express purpose in mind of creating IP that they can sell.
Alex Grand: [02:14:39] And techno is techno. Yes.
Dan Brereton: [02:14:41] Techno. And they they did about 9 or 10 issues as techno comics. And then they changed their name to Big Entertainment, which was the parent company was Big Entertainment. Yes. Techno comics was the comic line, but then they just changed it to Big Entertainment. And so I did 18 covers altogether. But I did like Lady Justice number one through nine, and then volume two one through, uh, 11 through no. One through 11 or something like that, whatever. It was 18 when I was done. And that’s my longest cover, cover, cover, cover gig. Yeah. And I actually wrote three issues of the book as well. So I wrote a three issue arc. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [02:15:22] And this is where you start kind of trickling into the writing stuff to like kind of late 90s. I had.
Dan Brereton: [02:15:26] Done Nocturnals.
Alex Grand: [02:15:28] I had was Nocturnals What like proved to the industry that you could write also?
Dan Brereton: [02:15:32] I don’t know who it proved it to. It proved it to me. I already knew I could write because I’ve been writing stories forever. But yeah, but I got over my initial anxiety about it a couple different ways. I talked to some. I talked to a couple of writers about doing the writing with me on on on Nocturnals. And then I decided that one of them said, you know, I might want to change things that are dear to you, so you might want to think about writing it yourself so that you know nothing that you really, really want is going to get excised. And I thought, that’s true. And then I started thinking, there’s some really badly written comics out there. What am I worried about? All I’d be doing is just adding to those. And some of those are popular. You know, I thought, I can do this. So but I but Harris entertainment attorney said, well, let me, let me put you in touch with, with Chaykin and you can talk with Chuck.
Alex Grand: [02:16:23] Oh I see.
Dan Brereton: [02:16:23] So Chaykin became my what they called creative rabbi for a very brief amount of time. And so I sent him my outline for nocturnals. He said it’s way too opaque. I can’t even get through it. Read these books about screenwriting.
Alex Grand: [02:16:37] That word opaque meaning in a sense of writing.
Dan Brereton: [02:16:40] It’s so it’s hard to. In other words, you’re reading something that is not clear to understand. It’s the way it’s written. There’s too many ideas. I see too.
Alex Grand: [02:16:51] Many.
Dan Brereton: [02:16:52] Things going on. It’s it’s not a clear through line. And which is important? You want to be able to make it very easy to understand and follow along. I had too many ideas. Way too many characters, way too many ideas. Interesting. So I pared it down. There were a lot more nocturnals. There were a lot more villains.
Alex Grand: [02:17:08] Some people almost say that was Jack Kirby’s issue with New Gods as so many ideas, but didn’t really focus it and pare it down. Probably. So that’s interesting. Okay, so you.
Dan Brereton: [02:17:16] Had there was also this other thing which was you don’t have to put everything into the pitch or the outline. You can hold back the things that aren’t that important. And I remember having this conversation with Howard. I was like, well, these guys, he goes, well, you need, you know, you need, you need to have like this main villain and you have this. And then I go, well, yeah, there’s a lot of villains, but some of them are just like henchmen. He goes, no, no henchmen. There’s no henchmen. I’m thinking, well, there’s always henchmen. He’s like, no, the henchmen don’t enter into your your pitch. You know what I mean? And I had, I had I had histories and names and personalities for all these different characters. And it’s not that you can’t put henchmen in there, but they’re not integral to the main story. You have to pare it down. So he said, you know, I’m going to want you to read this book called Screenplay by Syd Field, which I did, and it’s about structure in in story. And then I also I ended up reading Robert McKee later on some other Syd Field stuff, and also William Goldman wrote some, uh, stuff about, you know, writing screenplays. So I was reading that to kind of get the idea of this three act structure and, and the things that you’re supposed to do in the beats and everything. And the paradigm for, for, you know, for the three act structure and story, all these things that like, were intuitive to me before.
Dan Brereton: [02:18:33] I didn’t really think about them. And when I was trying to explain all my ideas to someone like Howard, it was all coming out in a big vomitous riot of things instead of picking and choosing what was important. So now if I write a pitch, I’m going to pare it down to the most important things. I still have an issue sometimes where I haven’t quite figured out the whole entire three act structure, but I have a very strong idea and I always feel like I can get there. I know how to get there. I feel confident I can get to that third act and make it all come together. But I don’t necessarily always know from the very beginning you know how it’s going to end. Or I might know, but what’s the second act going to be like? You know? So that helped a lot. And that really kind of made me realize that there was so much I didn’t know and so much I really had to keep in mind. But somehow I think I pulled it off with that first thing. I pulled it off because I knew, I knew I had a story. It was just, how do you explain it to somebody in this many words, when you know you’re going to make it this many pages later? And that’s a whole, uh, that’s a whole skill in itself, you know, pitching the art of pitching.
Alex Grand: [02:19:38] It is. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s the whole pitch deck and then sizzle reel and all those things. All that stuff. Yeah. You know, all that stuff to get.
Dan Brereton: [02:19:44] The two pager, the one pager to.
Alex Grand: [02:19:46] Get the people financing, get interested is the idea. Quick thing on Lady Justice. Did you ever interact with Neil Gaiman at all?
Dan Brereton: [02:19:52] Neil Gaiman’s Neil Gaiman, basically, he came up with this concept. They paid him a lot of money and then he went away. He had no interest in being involved with. I see the comic series was.
Alex Grand: [02:20:03] More the initial.
Dan Brereton: [02:20:04] Concept. It was the idea. And basically he took the idea of Lady Justice, which is a statue in many, many cities around. Right? Wherever there is the concept of justice, there is the sword and the woman with the blindfold. And he took that idea and he said, that spirit takes over someone, some woman, and then she’s able to, you know, enact justice or vengeance or whatever, right. Which and then $80,000 or whatever they paid. I heard it was like 70 or $80,000. And then he walked away.
Alex Grand: [02:20:33] I see what you’re saying.
Dan Brereton: [02:20:34] So they used his name. They used this concept, uh, and it was up to the editors to kind of.
Alex Grand: [02:20:40] Assign.
Dan Brereton: [02:20:41] Writers to sort of figure out where it was going to go. I see. And so it was a very episodic type of story. And I finally got to do my third, um, my three act thing, which was, uh, kind of a hats off to Red harvest, the story of Dashiell Hammett’s, uh, novel, which has been adapted many times. It’s the idea of a character who comes into a situation where there are rival gangs who are who are tearing up a city and, and pits them against each other.
Alex Grand: [02:21:12] I see.
Dan Brereton: [02:21:13] Um, like Yojimbo, basically a very pared down sort of version of Red harvest.
Alex Grand: [02:21:18] Another cover. Heartbreaker. That was for Dark Horse. Right. And this is where you start moving. Nocturnal. Heartbreakers. Yeah, yeah. And you start moving Nocturnals over to Dark Horse. And you tell us how that happened and what you were interacting with Mike Richardson around this point to kind of make this deal happen.
Dan Brereton: [02:21:36] So I had done the Malibu Bravura Nocturnals, and I was supposed to do a second Nocturnals mini series with Dark Horse, but I was going to do a second one. I had it all worked out. Yeah, it was all set up two months before I was supposed to start or something like that. I get a call from the editor saying they they’re not going to do it. It’s they they did the the accountant went through the numbers and they can’t afford to pay you whatever you’re wanting, whatever it was, you know, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Yeah. I was like, wow, it’s going to start this major thing in two months. Now what am I going to do? And so, uh, Mike Richardson said, well, I’ll tell you what you can do is you could do a three part Dark Horse Presents story, and then that’ll give you some work to do on a nocturnal thing for us. And then we will, uh, put it together as a one shot. And that gave me work. Uh, and so I was able to do that, and I added, I think, eight pages to the story for the one shot. And then as I was working on it, it was, you know, Dark Horse presents this black and white. But I was doing limited color. And then I added more color as I went along. So the story isn’t just flat black and white. There’s color in it. Yeah. And I actually really happy with that story. Um, I’m really happy with the way it came, especially in the in the one shot. They got some great pinup art in there and stuff like that. Rob Zombie did the illustrated introduction.
Alex Grand: [02:22:59] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dan Brereton: [02:23:00] It’s a great book. Um, and it I’m pretty sure that that issue sold out eventually, that one shot issue. So that was really cool that Mike was willing to do that because he knew I needed work. He knew I just didn’t want to leave me high and dry. Uh, but then I think after that, when I did not, I did Thrillkiller because I pitched Thrillkiller and then did Thrillkiller and then ended up doing another one. So, uh, Heartbreakers came about because I’m friends with Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett, who were a married couple at the time doing that book. Heartbreakers, their their creator owned book for Dark Horse. And, uh, so they asked me to do a cover for them. And I think around that time that I did that cover for them, I was working on Lady Justice and Thrillkiller.
Alex Grand: [02:23:41] There you go.
Dan Brereton: [02:23:42] Yeah. And I only just did the one which is, you know, which is fine. And that was fun to do. They were nice folks. Uh, but it didn’t lead to like a whole bunch of dark horse covers. And what happened basically was there was an editor at Dark Horse who was not a fan of my work, who came to power, I guess, for a time. And so my work at Dark Horse was very limited.
Alex Grand: [02:24:05] I see I.
Dan Brereton: [02:24:06] Didn’t have I wouldn’t even have editors who would call me up and say, we want you to do this thing. And then later on they would say, oh, we’re not going to do it, or they would just not never call back. And I found out later it was because there was.
Alex Grand: [02:24:17] Someone who was.
Dan Brereton: [02:24:17] Not exactly a fan of.
Alex Grand: [02:24:19] Mine. Thrillkiller. Yeah, that came out in 1997. There’s Thrillkiller, you know, Batgirl and Robin, Thrillkiller Batman and Batgirl. That was written by Chaiken. Tell us about how that came about. Because what I love about it is that it’s set in that time period. I love the way you draw and paint the characters, especially Batgirl. Like, I love the way you did her Commissioner Gordon with his pipe, or Bruce Wayne out of costume in his suit. They look very much like their initial appearance in that first Detective comics that they premiered in. So there’s this very classic Gordon and Wayne depicted by you in there, and it’s an Elseworlds story, you know. Tell us first, like, how did Thrillkiller come about? How did that get conceptualized and implemented?
Dan Brereton: [02:25:06] So I had this idea for what basically was Thrillkiller, which was back. Earle and Robin are the dynamic duo, and Bruce Wayne is a cop who works for Gordon, and something happens to Robin or Robin’s family. Bruce Wayne is brought in on the case, and he has to deal with these two kind of thrill seeking vigilantes. There you go. Who are kind of like having this crazy, wild romance with each other. And she’s the heiress, so she’s the rich one because her mom. And the way we worked out was this Gordon’s the father of Barbara Gordon in the story, but the woman he married was was like the heiress. She was the rich, the rich. She had the money in the family. And so she’s just like a thrill seeker. And that’s why I came up with this title, Thrillkiller, which was supposed to be a working title, but we never it never got changed. Yeah, it just stuck. So the idea is that, you know, there are these sort of fun loving vigilantes who like to go and fight crime almost kind of in the way that Batman and Robin in the TV show fight crime. But they’re also like Elvis and Ann Anne Margaret. And they’re in this like, you know, kind of whirlwind romance and it’s kind of wild and fun. And I actually thought of it as being more set in 66 or 67 originally. And then Howard, when I, when Howard was brought in, because I pitched this to Archie. Archie liked the Archie.
Alex Grand: [02:26:24] Goodwin initially.
Dan Brereton: [02:26:25] And I and we sort of thought about like the idea of Howard writing it. I thought Howard would be the guy to do it because he’s, you know, he would remember more about that time than I would because I was born in 65. He was born in the 50s. So he put me together with Howard and a phone call, and we talked about it, and he liked the idea, and we talked about Anne, Margaret and Elvis Presley and this kind of May-December romance and setting it. And he wanted to set it in the early 60s because it still feels like the 50s. It’s not really the 60s yet. Yeah, yeah. And he had these very specific ideas, and I thought, this is great because he’s taking the idea and he’s running with it, you know, but it’s not diluting it. He’s not changing my, my basic, you know, idea. He’s adding to it. He’s fleshing it out. Perfect, you know? And he just got it. And I kind of thought he would. I don’t know Howard that well, but I kind of thought he would. Yeah. He did. Perfect storm. And, uh. So, yeah, it was so easy to do. You know, there was really no conflict. As far as I know. There was only one little hiccup, which was, you know, we talked about them carrying guns and the whole story went through.
Dan Brereton: [02:27:30] And I think maybe it was because we’re used to writing these characters the way that they’re written. So Barbara Gordon, Batgirl, and Robin never pull a gun in the story. And I’m illustrating the last issue and it hits me the third issue. There’s been no guns. They were holding guns on the cover, but they’ve never used guns. Uh oh. So I call Archie, and I said, what do you think about it? He goes, yeah, that’s true. Well, I said, I have an idea for how we can make a change that would have would resonate in the story involving a gun and the idea that when Robin is out for blood. He pulls a gun, but it ends up being his undoing. So there’s a message there, I see. And, uh, it didn’t help. It didn’t help at all for these heroes to carry guns. And so I get on the phone with Howard and I said, you know, we did this whole thing. We’ve got them carrying guns on the cover, but they never carry guns in the in the story. You’re right. Let’s go with what you want to do. We’ll make that work. That that I like that make it work. I was like.
Alex Grand: [02:28:34] Good. Yeah. Because I interviewed him, as you know. And then. And then he and I worked together on that Howard Chaykin zine that we made. And, um, it was a real pleasant, you know, even when I turned in the draft before publishing and he read through it, made some little quick, um, he spotted a couple changes and he sent it back, and it was just very easy, you know, and but one thing that I really remembered was when we were talking about Batman during the interview, I said, how do you like Batman? He goes, oh, I hate that character. And I’m like, why? And he says, because why would a man of such means, if he really cared, he would do something more in the form of like social programs, things like that.
Dan Brereton: [02:29:11] If he wasn’t damaged.
Alex Grand: [02:29:12] Not not putting on. Right. Not putting on some costume just to beat up poor people in the street every night and to get off. And the way he was talking about it, it felt very like there’s a fetish to Batman, and there is a weird fetish between Batman and Joker, and.
Dan Brereton: [02:29:26] He’s a unique individual to be able to spot that, because not everyone, not.
Alex Grand: [02:29:29] Everyone sees it that way.
Dan Brereton: [02:29:31] Howard is lives outside the world of fanboy, the fanboy world. He does so because he’s not. He’s not you. Yeah, but but he.
Alex Grand: [02:29:38] And he’s not a superhero obsessive either. Yeah. And he deconstructs.
Dan Brereton: [02:29:41] It, feeling that he’s somewhat versed in the S&M world. I don’t really know, like.
Alex Grand: [02:29:46] His, you know, that he did that was banned in Canada, right? Very sexual. Yeah. And all that kind of crazy stuff, wasn’t it? So, you know. So yeah, I agree, but I made this joke. I said, well, then it sounds like, you know, Batman should be wearing a ball gag the whole time that he’s. And he was like, yes, exactly.
Dan Brereton: [02:30:03] He’s right, you know. And he’s one of the few people working in comics who will point out the reality of the situation that we’re all trying to like, you know, we all sort of stuck in this kind of like, little loop about, like we just the nostalgia behind it. And he has all that, but he also has the presence of mind to know that look what’s going. I mean, I always just think about this the other day.
Alex Grand: [02:30:22] Which I love about him, by the way. Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [02:30:24] What’s funny about that is that I was I’m doing these, um, pieces for an upcoming, like, virtual art show. So I’m doing some characters I like to do. I’m doing some Bronze Age characters, like I’m doing Warlock and Gomorrah and Deathlok and stuff like that. And I wanted to do Killraven. And so I have the I have several issues of the War of the worlds Killraven stuff, and the first, in the beginning, his costume is like a wrestler’s singlet with like these neat thigh high boots. I mean, and, you know, he and Neal drew that first issue. I don’t know who came up with the costume, but the costume is very kind of like it looks straight out of some S&M club, right? Sure. You know some guy?
Alex Grand: [02:31:06] Yeah. Like Zar. Zar does look like that.
Dan Brereton: [02:31:08] Yeah, exactly.
Alex Grand: [02:31:09] Sean Connery.
Dan Brereton: [02:31:10] I wonder, yeah, I wonder if there’s a correlation there, but. Yeah, exactly. And, um. And then it changed when Craig Russell came on, and he kind of made it like I prefer. I would much prefer that one. So it’s like, okay, I’m going to do that one. I’m not going to do this other one. But yeah I mean that’s that, that’s someone had to come up with that idea. Where did it come from? You know what I mean? To come from Zardoz, I don’t know, maybe.
Alex Grand: [02:31:30] Well, I have to. I came.
Dan Brereton: [02:31:31] From some club someone was at.
Alex Grand: [02:31:33] Because my parents romanticised Sean Connery like, as James Bond. I’m like, look, we got to watch Zorro. I made him watch Zorro. Oh, my God, did we just watch the brutals? We mentioned, you know, Giant Killer 1999 already? To some extent, it definitely seemed to be a fusion of, like, the Japanese kaiju with the Jack Kirby monsters, West Coast samurai swords. I’m kind of conflating that creatively a little bit with your time on Franken Castle that Franken Castle 2010, ten years later, which was ten years later. I’m almost grouping it because there were Kirby monsters. There was a 70s horror hall of monsters, and the colors were just all beautiful in both productions. And what I find in these productions years is one your influences kind of show in this, but also how you can mix monster with like this, like very vibrant color scheme, which I feel like is is so rare and beautiful.
Dan Brereton: [02:32:27] Unless you look at the old Kirby and Ditko stuff where it’s like these big orange guys. Yeah, green guys, which.
Alex Grand: [02:32:33] Are naturally like that. But in the, in the, in the four color version. Yeah. Because like the.
Dan Brereton: [02:32:36] Last issue of the series, 21 I did there in the jungle. So it’s very lush and green. You can’t get away from green in the jungle. Green’s not a color. I gravitate to try and use it very sparingly. Um, you.
Alex Grand: [02:32:49] Do read a lot, right?
Dan Brereton: [02:32:50] Yeah. Red. Purple. Yeah, yeah. Warm tones. I mean, even warm greens, like olive greens and stuff. But but, uh, you know, sometimes it’s just, uh, it just somehow it feels right to just. I’m not afraid of using bright colors. Yeah, you know what I mean? And as far as I’m concerned, as long as you put the right colors next to each other, they. They get kind of harmonized. Yeah. You know, um, I.
Alex Grand: [02:33:16] Wonder, is there some of the kid in you also active to portray monsters but almost brighten them up so they’re not too scary? Well, have you.
Dan Brereton: [02:33:23] Noticed how in the. Have you noticed how in a lot of films, when they have monsters like in the Pacific Rim, they’re kind of gray? Yeah. You know, there are a lot of gray. Yeah. Muted colors. Yeah. But you know why? Why do they have to be I mean, they’re not like that in necessarily you know like if you look at kaiju films or if you look like shows like Ultraman, Ultraman is wearing like silver and red. Yeah, there’s there’s that riot of color, that sort of swirling paint in Ultraman.
Alex Grand: [02:33:53] Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [02:33:54] You know, um, and, and there’s a lot of characters with, like, bright splashes of color on them, you know? Um, and I think those accents of color are what kind of bring excitement to things. You know, just making everything gray. Oh, yes. More. Maybe it’s more realistic to think of things being gray, but I kind of don’t care about necessarily that part of realism. Yeah. You know, I want to get the lighting right, but why not throw in some color?
Alex Grand: [02:34:18] I’d almost rather have just the color in there. Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [02:34:20] It came out of my love of discovering, rediscovering those films. There you go. So my son Hunter was just a toddler at the time, and someone sent me. I think I watched a Godzilla vs Biollante on a video cassette, which was HBO video, and it’s a film that came out in 89 where they brought Godzilla back. It’s called the Heisei series. It’s like the second series of Godzilla films, and it starts with Godzilla versus Biollante, and it goes all the way up to Godzilla versus destroyer. So I discovered I was going. I’d gone. I was going. I went through a divorce, and I was my son and I at the time, it was just my my toddler son and I living up in the Sierras where my parents live in Truckee. I had a place there and my parents lived nearby, and they’re helping out. And so I’m this newly single parent, and I watched this movie and I think, wow, I love this idea that first of all, Godzilla fights this sort of Lovecraftian plant monster who’s part him. But the way that the the people in the story regard Godzilla as almost a deity.
Alex Grand: [02:35:22] Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [02:35:23] Right. The one character in the story goes, the ways of Godzilla are mysterious to us, just the way that people describe. Yeah. God.
Alex Grand: [02:35:30] Right.
Dan Brereton: [02:35:31] And I was like, I love this idea of a world where people worship Godzilla like a god.
Alex Grand: [02:35:38] Yeah. Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [02:35:38] That’s so freaking cool.
Alex Grand: [02:35:40] Yeah, that is interesting.
Dan Brereton: [02:35:41] And it’s not really been done yet necessarily, but. And then I started watching more of these movies, and I. And I’m getting to the point where I have to get the fan sub. So the movies are coming Japanese Laserdisc, and then some fan does a subtitle. I see, and it’s like a bootleg thing. Yes. And then I’m buying the I get a Laserdisc player. I’m buying the Laserdisc just to watch Godzilla versus destroyer. Even though it’s not subbed, I don’t care. I’ll find one of those later.
Alex Grand: [02:36:02] Yeah, and you want the action, too?
Dan Brereton: [02:36:03] I want the full screen, you know, Laserdisc thing in my 50 inch screen and all that stuff. Super into it. It’s like nothing I’ve really been exposed to before. It’s not even that much like the old stuff, because when I was a kid, I thought Godzilla got kind of silly in the 60s, and I wasn’t really down with that. I liked Sherman a lot. Right. Watched it every day after school. Yeah. There’s even an homage to Ultraman in Giant Killer. Jack is basically watching Ultraman TV shows in this big screen and getting all excited because he wants to go in there and fight these rubbery monsters. So, um, so I, my son and I start watching these, and he’s just like a toddler. He can’t even say Godzilla. He says, yeah, it’s as close as he can get to saying Godzilla and buying the toys. And this is all helping me forget my stuff, you know, my personal stuff. And we’re moving forward and we’re enjoying this thing together and we’re bonding over kaiju. And I get this idea one day, like, what if you took a human being, you took, like, Godzilla DNA, and you splice them together into this warrior who could fight the monsters? Not titanically tall like them, but, you know, bigger than a human, but would scale them like a monster and just go at them and have the same powers as a kaiju, but would just take them on on his own terms. And that’s where Giant Killer was born. Yeah, it really just came out of that. Watching those films with my son, which is why I dedicated the story to him. But, um, so then I started coming up with this sort of A to Z list of them.
Alex Grand: [02:37:28] Yeah, I love that.
Dan Brereton: [02:37:28] And, uh.
Alex Grand: [02:37:30] It was so much fun.
Dan Brereton: [02:37:30] Actually, I was talking to Mike Carlin about Giant Killer, and Dan Raspler was in the office, so I guess I was in the office talking about it, and, uh, I was pitching it, and Dan liked it, and Mike liked it. And Mike goes, well, since Dan’s here in the room, he’d be the one that would edit it. Yeah, and you’re cool with that? I go, yeah, sure, I’ll be a team player. So Dan was the editor came up with what is Jack’s motivation? Yeah. What’s his quest about? Dan sent it in. It got accepted, and they even said okay to the field guide issue. And it introduces Jill, Jack, other monsters, the situation and it’s issue zero. When I read I had.
Alex Grand: [02:38:08] A crush on Jill. By the way, have you.
Dan Brereton: [02:38:10] Noticed how many characters there are that are like these tough gals with like, the platinum blonde short hair who carry guns? Like there’s one in Wreck-It Ralph? That’s right. Like, she’s like, she reminds me of Jill. She fights monster aliens, and she looks like Jill. Huh. Um, again, I’m not saying that they read Giant Killer, but it’s just kind of this sort of archetype. Somehow it seems that way.
Alex Grand: [02:38:27] Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [02:38:28] The fact that they said yes to the whole thing, I was walking on my feet, didn’t touch the ground for a month. Yeah. So excited. And that was just such a it was nothing about it. That was work. Yeah it was. And Dan and I would have conversations about like, you know what? You know what Jack’s purpose was and you know, and, um, and that helped too. Uh, so, yeah, it was it was pretty great. And I the only thing is I wanted I in my mind, I kind of wanted them to publish it as like an oversized book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I ended up getting to do that like a few years ago. Yeah. Published it oversized full color. Because if you watch some of the Godzilla movies that have come out, there’s, uh, Godzilla in like, the 90s, Godzilla versus Mothra, space. Godzilla destroyer. They’re colorful. Yeah, they’re there’s color on the screen, and Godzilla is kind of held back. He’s not super colorful, but it’s that gray, black or green black against super bright, bombastic colors. And and they’re giant and they’re fighting and, um, that’s I think that’s what I was trying to capture. And then Jack, Jack himself, I was like, okay, what color is he going to be? Originally he was going to be green. I was like, why is every monster have to be green, be green and red? That’s too much like a Christmas tree. And I can’t make them all red or too much red, because that’s like Hellboy. Yeah. So I made him gray. I tried gray grey. Purple with stripes, like a like a. I did a Tim Burton one on purpose. Like black and white stripes on his tentacles. Interesting to see what I thought of that. And then eventually came up with the grey like asphalt grey with red as the accent.
Alex Grand: [02:39:55] Right. And it’s a great contrast with the various colored monsters he’s fighting and stuff. They take all these different colors and he’s like kind of the more grey one, right?
Dan Brereton: [02:40:02] And he’s it just fit it, really. It worked. It worked well. He’s not black and red. He’s grey and red. No, it’s perfect. And you can do when you’re using a character who’s whose skin is grey, you can throw colors and reflected colors in there. You can make you can make it more blue. You can make it more orange. Yeah. True. Like at the end of the story, when he crawls out of the volcano, he’s blackened practically from having been in the volcano. Um, so in the very last page, he’s this dark, smoldering black figure. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [02:40:28] Yeah, I read that. When I read that, I was like, wow, this is, uh, more fun than I’ve had in a while reading a comic, actually. Yeah. Because, you know, you read comics, you enjoy it, but it was like, just a fun ride, the whole thing.
Dan Brereton: [02:40:39] It’s nothing like there’s no heavy, you know, issues or. Yeah, things like that. It’s just my love letter to that stuff.
Alex Grand: [02:40:47] Yeah. Right. You feel it. You feel it when you read it. Um, there is a.
Dan Brereton: [02:40:51] Little bit of some people have said to me at the end, they said the relationship between Jack and Jill was kind of interesting, the way that people reacted to the way I.
Alex Grand: [02:40:59] Because you structured it like a brother and sister. Yes. But I thought there was going to be a romance at first.
Dan Brereton: [02:41:04] Right. But it didn’t. Interspecies romance didn’t really seem like the way to go. It was never in my mind. And also he’s he’s, you know.
Alex Grand: [02:41:13] Ever since Howard the Duck and Beverly nailed it, I just I don’t think there’s any. There’s no more walls now. No, no, you’re.
Dan Brereton: [02:41:18] Right, you’re right. But I mean, for DC, I don’t know. And also another thing that was interesting about that is DC wanted to make it part of the DC universe. Yeah. And the idea was that we would we will do we’ll do an issue of Justice League because Justice League was really top selling book at the time. Yeah. We’ll do an issue of Justice League with Jack. We’ll introduce him in the Justice League book. And I said, well, why do you need a Jack the Giant Killer if you have a Justice League, if you have a bunch of monsters invading California, just send Superman and Wonder Woman over there to take care of them. Why would you even need Jack?
Alex Grand: [02:41:45] That’s. Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [02:41:45] I also knew in the back of my mind that I was going to get the rights back eventually, and then it would be a lot harder if they made him part of the DC universe, and they had him show up in a comic. It would have been tough.
Alex Grand: [02:41:55] So you almost kind of resisted that. Did you end up getting the rights back to it?
Dan Brereton: [02:41:58] Yeah. 5 or 6 years later.
Alex Grand: [02:41:59] Oh, good. Good for you. That’s awesome.
Dan Brereton: [02:42:01] Put out the trade through, um, through image. And then again, I did the big oversized hardcover a couple of years ago. So it’s.
Alex Grand: [02:42:09] A win win all in.
Dan Brereton: [02:42:09] All. Yeah. I mean, um, it it didn’t sell like a dog. It didn’t, like, make me like royalty money necessarily. But, you know, I was getting paid to do the work.
Alex Grand: [02:42:18] Yeah. And it’s a beautiful property. And I was.
Dan Brereton: [02:42:20] Able to put it out myself and. And when I put it out myself. Yeah. There was. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [02:42:24] Yeah. It’s beautiful.
Dan Brereton: [02:42:25] Didn’t lose money on it or anything like that. It was. I was really I was actually pleasantly surprised how many people, uh, supported it and were wanted it. And I actually made the decision not to sell it through diamond because I kept the print run small. I thought, you know what, I’ll just let Bud plant, take up the excess. He can sell them and and, uh, and actually, um, it just came out in France, uh, this week, and it came out in Japan last year, which I set. I set those, uh, the Japan thing I was helped with Matt Frank, who’s a Godzilla artist who they love in Japan, too. And he, he put me in touch with, uh, publisher that does a lot of the Godzilla stuff he’s involved with. And they they did giant killer over there in two volumes.
Alex Grand: [02:43:08] Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you know, created by Joss Whedon. The property. He wrote the screenplay originally and then worked on the TV show. There was a comic series in 1999. Tell us how you got involved in that. You wrote or co-wrote for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, right?
Dan Brereton: [02:43:23] I was never approved as an artist, but I was approved as a writer. Yeah, which was cool. So we’re watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We think it’s a really cool show. I, of course, remember the movie, but the show is different and it’s just, you know, sucked us in and we were into it pretty early on in the first season. Jamie Rich was an editor at Dark Horse at the time. Um, and we were he had been my editor on the Nocturnals, uh, Witching Hour book. And so we were talking about Buffy, and then he tells me the news, you know, we’re going to do Buffy comics. Are you interested? I go, hell, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, he he didn’t get me. He I didn’t get approved as an artist on for covers, but I did get because I couldn’t have done I didn’t have time to do the interior stuff. I did get, uh, approved as a writer. I’m not sure how that happened, but it did happen. And they were. They offered me the monthly gig of writing the series. The monthly series, and I part of me was a little intimidated by that, and part of me was also really busy, and I thought, I don’t think I can quite carry that yet. You know, I haven’t done enough to where I can just dive right in. Yeah, I should have said yes and dove right in. I could have handled it. Instead I said, I don’t know. I don’t think so. So they gave it to Andy Watson.
Alex Grand: [02:44:42] And that’s Andy with an Andy. Yes.
Dan Brereton: [02:44:44] British comic creator who had done, uh, skeleton Key thing. Anyway, before that came out, I wrote the first graphic novel. I don’t know if there’s any other graphic novels, but I wrote a Buffy the Vampire Slayer graphic novel called The Dust Waltz, and which was a lot of fun. Joss Whedon’s people asked me to change one word in the entire script. They said, can you take out the Eddie Munster reference you put in this one line? I said, sure. That was the only. That’s nice. They liked it. Uh, and they were Joss’s mouthpiece. So I never talked to Joss, but these people were represented and they were mutant enemy. They were mutant enemy. His company. Um, so I was they liked me. I was doing well, I wrote that, and then I, I, I, And then Andy left. Andy. Andy. Not Andy. Stout. My editor. Uh, Jamie. Jamie left Dark Horse to go help, uh, Bob Schreck with Oni. Mhm.
Alex Grand: [02:45:45] Oni press.
Dan Brereton: [02:45:46] Oni press, which would be the future home of Nocturnals for a while. And Scott Allie was brought in and I knew Scott Allie didn’t really like my work, but he. And he wasn’t a Buffy fan. He wasn’t that thrilled about any of it. But he was fair with me at first. He was fine. I did, uh, the dust waltz I was working on when he was. So I was still working on the Dust Waltz when he came on. And I remember, uh, at the at the end of the story, Buffy fights a werewolf. But the artist who was a South American drew him as a vampire. And I said, Scott, you didn’t tell me that. He didn’t draw him as a werewolf. He goes, yeah, the books behind and I guess we can change it and they change it. He just drew a snout on this vampire to make him look like a witch. Okay, whatever. He just didn’t care. But Buffy became a hit. There were celebrities at Comic-Con. There was this, that, and the other thing. And then slowly, you start to see, wow, this thing has, you know, some momentum. And so then I. The next thing I did was, again, the mutant enemy. People liked me. They liked Christopher Golden. So Christopher and I wrote, uh, an adaptation of the film script, but we worked it in we worked in the TV stuff so that you could make a bridge between the film and the, uh, the TV show.
Dan Brereton: [02:47:10] And that’s what that Buffy the Origin miniseries was. And so we wrote some new material, but mostly we were adapting the original screenplay. So it wasn’t that tough to do. And, and, and Chris did a lot of heavy lifting, probably most of it. So that came out and that was fine. And then I wrote a, I wrote a, um, I can’t remember what other stuff I did, but the last thing I did was it was like this TV guide eight pager, and I sent in a plot, got approved, wrote the script. Then they said, change the plot. Now, by this time, I was supposed to be working on Giant Killer, and I was getting the feeling that the mutant enemy people were off me a little bit and more on on Chris and I, because I noticed how I would send in ideas and they would, they would, um, they would say, no, we don’t want that. We don’t want that. And actually, what I found out later was a lot of those ideas were already scripts like, oh, Buffy goes up against a cult, I see.
Dan Brereton: [02:48:07] No, they didn’t say because we have a script for an episode. It just I found out later because they sent me a bunch of scripts, or someone sent me a bunch of scripts. Oh, okay. So they already had this idea. This idea I see. So that was part of it. But then I felt like they really responded well to, to to Chris. And more and more I started feeling like I was losing touch with that. They really wanted. I wanted to hit the mark with them and I was hitting it less. So I thought, well, I’m gonna take a break from Buffy, work on Giant Killer, and let Chris make the changes to this little eight pager, and then I’ll share a writing credit with him. And he was like, sure. So later on, I tried to go back and do more Buffy stuff, and Scott just didn’t want anything to do with me, and that’s okay. I moved on, and Buffy got more and more and more popular. Yes. And, you know, and I really should have taken that gig. The first gig I see a monthly gig. I should have taken it when it was offered to me by Jamie. I think it would have been fine. But do you feel good?
Alex Grand: [02:48:59] Do you feel that it’s an issue of of commitment and confidence and, you know, it sounds like there’s a lot that goes into that, especially if you’re working in some sort of commercial art, like, can I do this? And it’ll be a good job. Was there some insecurity there?
Dan Brereton: [02:49:12] I really yeah, there’s probably always a little insecurity because, you know, the sensitive artist types that we are. But I think I really was I really was thinking schedule wise, can I make this happen without it becoming a big issue in my life and causing a lot of headache and stress. Yes. And can I do the job? Do justice? I knew I could write Buffy the Vampire Slayer stories. I was totally in tune with what the story with the show was, and I loved the characters. And there was no it wasn’t like there was going to be any shortage of ideas. It was just, can I juggle this and this? Because I was working on this and I was working on this, and I was like, that’s a lot to kind of put together. And realistically, it didn’t seem like a good idea.
Alex Grand: [02:49:49] This sounds like where like the balance of ambition and quality of life.
Dan Brereton: [02:49:53] If the only thing I was doing at the time was writing a comic book, and that would have paid all the bills, I could have just written the Buffy comic book, not done any covers for it, maybe done some covers for something else. But I had other things I was doing. Yeah, yeah, big commitments doing pages 12 pages a month.
Alex Grand: [02:50:08] Yeah. That. Yeah. You’re also painting at the same time. Yeah. And that pays the bills more than a script does for a comic, right?
Dan Brereton: [02:50:15] Definitely. Especially if you’re writing it too. Yeah. Like Giantkiller was writing it and doing it. So that was a it was a good.
Alex Grand: [02:50:21] There you go.
Dan Brereton: [02:50:21] Very good page rate.
Alex Grand: [02:50:22] So yeah, I saw this amazing illustration of Mike Allred’s madman that you did. It was like, you know, one page illustration in one of his madman comics in like 2000. What was the story behind that? I mean, that thing is was incredible. I looked at.
Dan Brereton: [02:50:38] It, in case you didn’t.
Alex Grand: [02:50:39] Know. Amazing.
Dan Brereton: [02:50:40] That’s the greatest piece of artwork I’ve ever done.
Alex Grand: [02:50:43] That’s what Allred said, right?
Dan Brereton: [02:50:44] Yeah. According to Mike, it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done. I said, you’re not a little bit maybe biased because it’s your character.
Alex Grand: [02:50:50] Because it’s his character.
Dan Brereton: [02:50:51] No, no, I’m being totally serious. I said, okay, thanks.
Alex Grand: [02:50:53] But it’s an incredible, incredible piece.
Dan Brereton: [02:50:56] It’s, uh, just something weird. I did some fluky thing. He’s like, he’s got a pedometer in his mouth. He’s sick. There’s a devil puppet menacing him. Yeah, it’s just some odd.
Alex Grand: [02:51:07] And there’s some image. And it also kind of goes with, like, his lightning heroic imagery with. And you also just stars and weird stars and weird other stuff. Just it’s just a great it’s just paying.
Dan Brereton: [02:51:20] Trying to pay homage to a really fun character. Yeah, yeah. It’s just, uh. Yeah. I remember when the Mad Men was called The Spook, and that’s when Mike met Mike, when he was doing this thing called the Spook. Yeah. And the character had a mask over his whole face, and he had these stitches on his mask. And I remember Mike telling me I took the stitches off of him because it was because you already had the gun, which with the stitches. So I took them off. Oh, really? Wow. Thanks, man. Oh, yeah.
Alex Grand: [02:51:41] That’s right.
Dan Brereton: [02:51:41] The gun with the mask off completely and just made him this handsome Mike Allred looking guy. And he made the mask more like, just like a face, you know, and changed the name, which was a good, good, good name change. Um, but that was fun. And I remember when that was done for a trading card set that he was putting together. And I went and visited him and stayed overnight at their house in Eugene. I was doing a convention out there. Oh yeah. And I stayed overnight with the Allred’s. Yeah, the Allred’s and the kids and everything. And, um, the whole house was like the staircase you walk up and other parts of the house. He had, he had gotten all the artwork for the card set that was going to come out and he had the artwork. It wasn’t put in a flat file at Dark Horse or whatever. It was in his house, matted and framed all over like a like his temporary art show. And I said, wow, you got the stuff matted and framed already in the walls. He goes, oh yeah, that’s it’s temporary. It’s going to come down and go back to everybody. But for now, I have it up. Yeah, yeah.
Alex Grand: [02:52:37] Oh my God. Like a little museum going on in his.
Dan Brereton: [02:52:40] Hilarious. The the shrine to, you know, um, but yeah, he’s a very interesting guy. Um, he did this thing with his drawing board that I, I kind of got the idea to do. Yeah. Which is he had this over his drawing board was a huge piece of plexiglass. And then he put, um, images underneath it of all the things that he liked, his character and things he liked. And Jack Kirby over here and Steve.
Alex Grand: [02:53:02] Oh, yeah.
Dan Brereton: [02:53:02] Whatever, like influences and things. And so I thought, what a great idea to make your drawing board look like a collage of what’s interesting. Yeah. So I did the same thing and I still do it. And I would add and subtract and I don’t always see the stuff underneath, you know.
Alex Grand: [02:53:14] But yeah, but it harnesses like your creative energy into that. Yeah. And I think what.
Dan Brereton: [02:53:18] You’re doing for for someone who’s drawing you would see more of it because you’re moving pages around because I, what I do on my board is I have like a, I have these pieces of masonite or art board. Right. And I tape the pieces that I’m working on because when you’re painting, you usually tape stuff down so it doesn’t get warped. So I put things on masonite so I can move them around. So if I have something I want to stop working on and put something down, I just lay it on top so I could have three thick with three different pieces that I’m working on. They just stay on there. Um, and then when you’re done, you just peel them off. So, um, but yeah, so it was really cool to do that. And he got Frazetta. He got Kirby. I can’t believe he got Frazetta. And yeah, the card set was this little box, and it was a really cool idea. Um, but that piece, he definitely he’s used it. He used it a couple of times in some other things. But yeah, it was pretty fun.
Alex Grand: [02:54:09] Mainstream superheroes. You actually, you know, let’s go back to them for a little bit because at this point, kind of like 2002, you’re starting to kind of get involved in ultimate Spider-Man special in 2002. You did one with Spider-Man, and Blade’s in it. So there’s yeah, again, a monster theme going on. Yeah, yeah. Then the JLA, the Justice League of America, seven caskets. Yeah. You wrote and painted that. And what’s interesting is you have, you know, the Justice League superheroes, but they’re encountering large underwater monsters. Then they kind of die and become demonic versions of themselves. And and then Wonder Woman has almost looks like Lily Munster in a way, when you kind of did.
Dan Brereton: [02:54:52] Her vampire Vampira. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [02:54:54] Vampire kind of deal. And and it’s kind of like a morbid take on the JLA. So. So tell us, like, you know, in approaching Spider-Man, you know, throwing blade in there and then the JLA and having, like, this kind of monstrous take on this, you know, tell us about putting those together.
Dan Brereton: [02:55:11] So yeah. In 2002 or 2001, I was supposed to do a three issue ultimate Spider-Man team up arc, and I was supposed to do the art, and Brian obviously was going to write it, and we were going to do the Marvel 70s monsters. Morbius. Dracula. Yeah. You know, and it was like three months worth of work. And I was really excited to do it. And it would have been, yeah, me penciling and inking and someone or, you know, doing the colors or whatever, I think, or it might have been painted, I can’t remember, but whatever it was, it was going to be three months worth of work and I think it was going to be black and white for me. And then what happened was, is Brian was doing all these different books and I guess decided to drop Ultimate Team up, and then they decided to drop the book from being published completely. They, they I don’t know if it’s because the sales were low, but what they said was, is that Brian’s so busy that he had to drop the book, and we can’t think of anyone else who could take over for him, which I found. Not a credible statement. You can’t find anyone who could take over Ultimate Team up to make it cool. Yeah, you could, but for whatever reason, they decided to drop it. But then. So there goes my three months worth of work. I see. So what happened was. And there were other people, I’m sure, who was set up to do stuff, too. Um. So. So Brian says, well, we’re going to do a final issue that’s like a double sized, you know, giant final issue, and you can do a, you know, a chapter, a part of that. Okay. So my three month, uh, job was shrink shrunk down to seven pages. Yeah. So I was not thrilled. And, uh, and I thought I was going to be Spider-Man and Morbius, and then they said, well, you got that blade movie coming up. So Joe Quesada and I were thinking.
Alex Grand: [02:56:55] Oh, I see there’s a new.
Dan Brereton: [02:56:57] Blade coming. And I go, blade. Okay. Yeah, okay, I’ll do blade. Dennis goes, uh, just knock it out of the park and really show them what you can do. So, you know, so I penciled and inked this this seven page story came out and no one cared. You know, the thing was over the cool Michael Golden cover on the book. Okay.
Alex Grand: [02:57:14] Okay.
Dan Brereton: [02:57:15] Um, and there was a lot of people in there, a lot of different artists represented in that book, but it didn’t really go anywhere for me. I didn’t get any more work from Marvel or Brian.
Alex Grand: [02:57:24] I see.
Dan Brereton: [02:57:24] Okay, like, you know, hey, Brian, I want to do an electric cover. Oh, well, it’s not up to me. That was the answer. It was cool to do Spider-Man because Spider-Man’s not comfortable for character for me to do. Yeah, I didn’t grow up drawing him because it’s just not my wheelhouse to draw all those webs. I can draw him out. I can draw him just fine. But it was kind of cool in that way, to be able to kind of do that for for at least seven pages. So then, um, but before that, I had finished Giant Killer with Dan Raspler, and I wanted to do something else. And this is like 99, 2000, something like that. Uh, we talked about doing it because you want to do a Justice League like one shot, because they were doing those. They were doing these. Justice League prestige format one shots, 48 pages. So I came up with this idea that, uh, the JLA become sort of monster versions of themselves. And the idea was that they discover, um, all these horrible things start happening all over the world. And the seven kings of this primordial, kind of primitive, prehistoric version of Earth are resurrected from their caskets. Yeah. And they start to wreak havoc. And they’re very powerful, like sorcerers and they’re inhuman. And and they used to rule the world at one time when the continents didn’t look like they.
Alex Grand: [02:58:43] I see.
Dan Brereton: [02:58:44] So it’s it’s another age during Pangaea. And the idea it’s the idea that the human race is just one of several intelligent civilizations that have sprung up over time and then gone away, and this new one comes and takes its place. Yeah, civilizations rise and fall, and we have no idea of the real prehistory of of of not humankind, of the earth at the center of this is this God of chaos that lives in the bowels of the earth. And guess who knows about this stuff but hasn’t been telling anybody. Aquaman. Because Aquaman is the one in this story who is the keeper of these ancient secrets that mankind really doesn’t need to know. So all these crazy things start happening, and Aquaman explains to them, he takes them down to the bowels of the ruins of the city and, you know, deep underwater, and shows them this map of what the world used to look like and the kingdoms that were, you know, these places that were, you know, cut up and they were all, you know, divided up and and who were the good guys and bad guys and who ran things and all this kind of stuff. And so it’s all coming back. And so, uh, the, um, the story was pretty wild and out there. And then we get to the point where the JLA, in order to fight the God of Chaos, have to align themselves with chaos and be changed by this chaos energy into these, chaos beings, and it’s the only way they can fight it on its own terms.
Dan Brereton: [03:00:06] Right. And so that’s why they become these sort of monster versions of themselves. And the danger is, is that they could go too far, you know. Um, and how are they going to come back from it? And, you know, they do, because it’s not an Elseworlds. In the end, everything has to go back to normal. That was yeah, that’s one of the things the editor says. Well, everything has to go back to normal at the end. And I took a lot of cues from Dan because they’re, they’re they’re characters. They’re not mine. So when he said, well, let’s do this and this, and I said, okay. And so one of the ideas was that, um, there’s a disagreement between two characters that in the end gets resolved, you know, and so we had that I think it’s between Superman and, and Aquaman. And at the end of the story, one of the things I came away with was Aquaman would be a cool character to do these kind of stories with, where Aquaman is the one who has all the lore, the secret knowledge.
Alex Grand: [03:00:53] Right? Because it’s all underwater, buried somewhere.
Dan Brereton: [03:00:55] And we actually talked about it like a mini series or something, where where Aquaman is kind of the keeper of secrets, and it never, never amounted to anything. But it was kind of.
Alex Grand: [03:01:03] An interesting concept, which I like, actually.
Dan Brereton: [03:01:05] But it was fun. And yeah, Wonder Woman had this kind of like streak in her hair, and she looked sort of vampiric and but they all had that. They all had that kind of thing. And um, that was kind of fun to do. And people, I guess people were sort of more or less expected from me. Oh, look, brereton’s Nocturnals with the JLA. So so.
Alex Grand: [03:01:20] So 12 pages. It takes it probably about 30 days to do 12 pages. That was 48 pages. So that took about four months of work. Then it.
Dan Brereton: [03:01:28] Was more than that just because, uh, because you’re also.
Alex Grand: [03:01:30] Doing other stuff at the same time.
Dan Brereton: [03:01:31] Well, you know, 12 pages a month, you have to. Well, first, you have to get around to the point where you’ve done all your layouts. You’ve approved the story. Yeah. Um, I wasn’t writing dialogue per se ahead of time, but I had in mind what they would say and stuff. So I was doing the artwork. Plus I was writing the dialogue. So it took more than four months, you know? But, uh, what happened was I had about 2012. Pages to go. Maybe, maybe I was halfway through when they put it on the on the schedule, which they’re not supposed to do, right? But DC would do it to me all the time. And so you have to do 12 pages or 24 pages, and you have to get them done because the book is coming out and the book needs to go to press, and you don’t have enough time to spend the real time. So I had to kind of like, really just go wild on the last, uh, part of the story and just kind of just just knock it out as fast as I could. Which sucked, because I think it could have been better. And there’s some cool stuff in there, you know? But I feel like some of the battle scenes could have used more finessing if I’d had more time to really focus on them. And that’s another thing, too, is when you’re doing 12 pages with a handful of characters. Yeah, you can do 12 pages in a month. But when you’re putting all these guys and every and every page and maybe some in every, it’s a lot of work. I needed to what I should have done and was I should have I spread them out, but I should have spread them out even more. And I did try and do that. Put him in teams. You know, Dan and I talked about that, put them in teams. Well, that’s what.
Alex Grand: [03:03:02] A lot of these team books do is they split them up into teams. I didn’t think of that being the reason that.
Dan Brereton: [03:03:07] But there was there was too much team together stuff. So I’m doing okay. Do him. And when you’re painting it, you have to paint everybody in all the colors. And you have to really be precise about everybody’s costumes. And it’s a lot of work. And when you get to the point where there’s seven of them fighting, seven of these bad guys on these pages really needed to be able to slow down. Yeah. And I just didn’t have time to slow down. I see. And but other than that, you know, I it was fine. It’s a beautiful.
Alex Grand: [03:03:36] Book, though.
Dan Brereton: [03:03:37] Thank you. Oh, yeah. It was weird to do. Um, and then after that, um, there was no more DC work after that, and I, I ended up doing, um, uh, Nocturnals, uh, miniseries.
Alex Grand: [03:03:50] Interesting. Is that just because, um, Basically the like editors kind of move on to other places. So a new batch comes in and they just don’t know you as well. Is that how that works?
Dan Brereton: [03:04:01] Raspler was just I think I’d moved on. Let me see. I think he felt like the only reason to have me do anything was monsters, which again. But again, I was doing other things.
Alex Grand: [03:04:13] So when you were doing this, I was having caskets with JLA. There was this feeling of, hey, can you make this a monster story? Like, is that was that the expectation?
Dan Brereton: [03:04:23] I had done Giant Killer. We talked about me doing Justice League. I had this idea for a Justice League story that had a little bit of a soup. The idea was, there’s this kind of like a barbaric sword and sorcery character they would go up against, and then eventually it just kind of turned into this thing where they were going to become these monsters and stuff, which was fine. But then I think Dan was just like, I’m going to take a break from Monster Dan Brereton for a while or something, even though I could have done anything. Yeah. You know, but by that time I also was talking with Oni about doing Nocturnals. So there you.
Alex Grand: [03:04:56] Go. Nocturnals got brought over to Oni Press around 2003. He also did gunwitch Outskirts of Doom around this time.
Dan Brereton: [03:05:03] So what happened was, is when, um, uh, Oni started up with Bob Schreck at the helm, one of the first things we talked about doing was doing was collecting Nocturnals The Black Planet, the first Nocturnals mini series, as a trade paperback, which they did. It looked great. And then, uh, talking about doing new Nocturnals. Yeah. And so I pitched The Dark Forever, which is this three issue Nocturnals story. And then the other, the secondary idea was that those issues would come out bi monthly, and then in the intervening months, we would do a Gunwitch mini series. I c I would write, do covers for and then we, we, we went to Ted Naify to draw it. It was a friend of mine who’s super. You’re going to meet him one of these days. Super talented. Um, he hadn’t really come into his own as a creator yet, like he would with, uh, with, uh, Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things and a bunch of his other creator owned things, and he drew the heck out of the story. Yeah. So I remember, I, I, um, laid out the Gunwitch story on a trip to visit some friends in Montana with my family, and my dad was doing all the driving, and I sat in the back with Hunter in this minivan that we rented.
Dan Brereton: [03:06:13] And I laid out the entire story for the gunwitch, but the the nocturnal stuff was already in motion, right? So yes, I worked on the nocturnal stuff. Ted was drawing the gunwitch stuff. I was writing it all, doing covers, and it got late toward the end. Um, I moved to from Truckee to Verdie, and my parents were helping me with the kids because, you know, raising three kids basically by myself with my parents help. And we moved to Verdie. They were 25 miles away, so I didn’t have the same kind of help. It slowed things down. Then I got into a relationship with Chartreuse, who was in Sacramento. That slowed things down in a good way. Yeah. You know, my life wasn’t just revolving around kids work, kids work, kids work. And so it slowed things down. But mostly it was about being outside of the comfort zone, of having my parents helping with the kids so that I could they could help take up the slack so I could spend more time working.
Alex Grand: [03:07:02] I see.
Dan Brereton: [03:07:03] And that slowed things down, and I didn’t realize how much it was slowing things down until only was like, you know, you’re behind. We’re talking a month behind, not months and months behind. Um, and it did. It came out when it was basically when is more or less when it was supposed to. And I was pretty happy with it. The only thing that that I regret, and it’s is that when I didn’t scan my own pages and send in scans because the back and then you still were sending back that time, we were still sending artwork in to, to for them to scan it and then send it back to you. I should have scanned it all myself because Oni decided instead of having it scanned, they decided to, um, have it digital camera to shoot the artwork in the digital camera. So if you look at some of the pages of Dark Forever, you’ll see where at the very bottom of the page it goes a tiny bit out of focus. Maybe it’s not quite, and you’re not catching all the nuances and the detail. And there have been people who have who have said, I don’t really like the art on that one as much. Well, if you saw the original pages, you’d probably like the art just fine.
Alex Grand: [03:08:04] Yes.
Dan Brereton: [03:08:04] And when I finally figured that out, it was way too late.
Alex Grand: [03:08:07] I see it was already in production.
Dan Brereton: [03:08:09] So there were some little inconsistencies and things like that. Like they took like when they put the they put out the Dark Forever as a trade paperback. My name isn’t on the cover and they didn’t bother to like, say, oh, you know, we forgot to put your name on the cover. We’re sorry I brought it up and they got really defensive. It’s just kind of sad, interesting. I really wanted to work with them more and they just they didn’t. It just never happened after that.
Alex Grand: [03:08:29] Has Oni Press changed since he first worked with them like that?
Dan Brereton: [03:08:33] They’ve totally changed, but in ways that I wouldn’t quite be aware of because I after the Nocturnals, I didn’t do anything else with them. I see we were all like gung ho together, and then for some reason they felt like I had, I don’t know. I really don’t know what their feeling was. They. I feel like they, um. You know, one thing I will tell you is if someone’s paying you much more money to do a book than they would normally pay other creators doing books for them, you really should put if you’re putting that much. If you’re investing that much in something you shouldn’t, you should invest more in marketing and sales and promoting the book. Because if you want a return on your investment, you have to treat it like it’s it’s what you paid for. Yeah. So if you’re doing ten books a month and you’re paying 50 or $100 a page to these creators, and then you’re paying much, much more to some other creator, you really should put more work and time into promoting that book. And I’m not saying they didn’t put work in.
Alex Grand: [03:09:26] Because without the promotion, then it doesn’t really hit.
Dan Brereton: [03:09:29] I feel like it was a little more than they were ready to. They bit off a lot. I see. And um, it was great to do it, and I liked working with them, and I would have been happy to work with them again. But it just that was just the end of things. And it’s just That’s just the way it goes, right? I don’t bear any ill will toward any of those guys, you know? Um, I, uh, I’m thankful that we got to work together, and we did, um, a book called, uh, Troll Bridge that they put out in 2000 that was like this one shy Halloween book. It was all colored in black and white and orange. Got a bunch of different artists to come in and draw different sort of chapters of the story. And the whole thing is set up to where Halloween Girl is going through these, going to these different worlds on Halloween night, and every world is drawn and sometimes even written by different creator team. So we had Jay Stevens, we had Jill Thompson, we had Bruce Timm is in there. Adam Warren is in there, John Heebink, uh, the, um, Landry Walker and Eric Eric, um, Jones, you know, the little gloomy team at the time. And it just all flowed. And it was so fun to do that book, you know? And that was one of my first times where I sort of acting kind of as an editor, I see. I mean, not that we didn’t have an editor, but I was helping sort of wrangle some of these people. And that was really fun to do. So we put out some really cool stuff, you know, and everything got collected as trades. Never saw a dime from any of the trades. That’s kind of that happens sometimes. I remember there was I think Black Planet went to second printing and I never saw a royalty check. And I just was like, you know, okay.
Alex Grand: [03:11:02] Have you ever asked do you ever kind of think, okay, I’m going to ask. I could.
Dan Brereton: [03:11:04] Have pushed. Yeah, I could have pushed harder, but I just I don’t know, I don’t know, it’s just, um.
Alex Grand: [03:11:11] It was, you know, you don’t want to create a conflict if there doesn’t have to be one.
Dan Brereton: [03:11:14] Well, I mean, I think maybe they thought that if they sent me more comps of books or something, that that would take up the slack for it. But I kind of got the feeling like that if they could have, if they had no problem just sending me a check, they would have and then maybe they needed the help. So part of me maybe wanted to just like.
Alex Grand: [03:11:33] Kind of lay off and take it easy on them a.
Dan Brereton: [03:11:34] Little. But then again, that’s not a good business. So you know, yeah. If I would do it that way now.
Alex Grand: [03:11:39] Right, right. You have to kind of think about both things sometimes. Moonshine. A company that you did it kind of interesting work. Kind of a pulp style anti-heroes. You did the spider. Yeah. The bat? Yeah, the bat. The black bat, rather. And these are like pulp magazine characters, like, you know, kind of gun toting kind of detective types. Then you also did, like Werewolf Dracula for the same company. Moonstone, two different things. You got like pulp magazine kind of characters and doing their covers, and you have like, monsters, like Universal Monsters for the pulp characters. Did you look at old, you know, pulp magazines to kind of get the visuals? Yeah. How did that all work out?
Dan Brereton: [03:12:19] I mean, Joe, who runs Moonstone, also has a couple of comic shops in Illinois. He publishes the comics kind of as like a labor of love. He does a great job with what he has, and I tried to be as accommodating with the low budgets as I could until I just couldn’t anymore. And so I did a lot of covers because they were fun. And then I, you know, oh yeah, you can sell the originals and stuff, but it was just kind of fun. And to be honest, around that time I wasn’t I didn’t have a lot of work. I wasn’t being offered a lot of work. So I would just take I would take really low paying gigs thinking, this could be fun to do. I’ll sell the original art, but that’s not a way to run your business. So eventually, when you get to the point where you don’t have to do that anymore, you don’t. But I don’t have anything bad to say about working with Joe and Moonshine because he’s a nice guy. I like his aesthetic, and I did some Kolchak Night Stalker covers.
Alex Grand: [03:13:08] Oh, yeah, okay, a.
Dan Brereton: [03:13:09] Bunch of spider covers I did, which were really fun to do. Um, black bat, like a Fantomas type character, they call him. And those were just fun to do. I mean, especially the spider stuff and. Yeah, of course, I looked at the. I looked at all the pulps, and I love pulp magazines. I love the pulp aesthetic. And ever since I went to a show in Oregon in the early 90s and found a dealer who was selling a bunch of old pulp magazines, I didn’t really realize that I had. I felt like a kinship to them more than a lot of people in comics, because they never really I could never really look at anyone who was doing stuff in comics in the 90s and kind of go, oh, I’m kind of in that neighborhood. Yeah, I didn’t really feel like that kind of kinship with any of the other comic book painters. I mean, I love those guys.
Alex Grand: [03:13:52] Yeah, sure.
Dan Brereton: [03:13:53] They’re a lot. Some they’re amazing. But it didn’t feel like we were in the same neighborhood, necessarily. And then you see the pulp stuff. And I’m not saying I’m a pulp artist, but like, I felt a lot more kinship towards.
Alex Grand: [03:14:02] That’s really interesting.
Dan Brereton: [03:14:04] And I hadn’t seen a lot of that stuff. I’d seen a little bit of it, but I hadn’t seen enough of it. And so, yeah, I definitely, um, you know, that’s extremely well done. Yeah. It’s sad that a lot of those covers were just painted over and painted over until they just burned the canvases. Um, there’s some great stuff and great ideas. And that’s one of the things about Nocturnals is that I felt like there was a lot of pulp fiction in there, because some of the Pulp fiction that we don’t really know, necessarily know that much about, or that wasn’t as popular as, say, the, you know, The Shadow or Doc Savage is a lot of melding of things, weird stories, you know, melding together ideas, and they don’t always work. There is a character. One of my favorite pulp characters is Captain Satan, who only lasted for a few issues, but I love the idea that this guy is called Captain Satan. Now we have the Son of Satan and stuff like that. Now in comics. But a guy called Captain Satan who’s a good guy is such a bizarre idea, right? So I actually wanted to do something with that character, and I came up with these kind of weird, arcane things, and I wrote. Yeah, there’s.
Alex Grand: [03:15:06] Another guy in the pulps, Satan Hall, the pointy ears and, like, kind of a.
Dan Brereton: [03:15:09] Way of kind of getting your attention and what was acceptable, you know. Um, there’s also a character called the Crimson Dawn Diavolo, the Crimson Magician, or the.
Alex Grand: [03:15:24] Oh, okay, Crimson.
Dan Brereton: [03:15:25] Wizard or something like that. There’s some pretty cool covers for that. Some of it’s not really easy to read, right?
Alex Grand: [03:15:30] You mean the text? Yeah, a lot of that stuff. The pulp stuff is all about the covers for me.
Dan Brereton: [03:15:34] If you’re gonna read Pulp Fiction, you should read like, you know, Hammett. Chandler. Chandler is kind of coming out of pulps, but. Right. Chandler.
Alex Grand: [03:15:41] For sure. Good stuff.
Dan Brereton: [03:15:42] Quite a few other people who are doing stuff, you know, obviously Lovecraft Howard.
Alex Grand: [03:15:45] And Robert E Howard. Exactly. Last battle 2011. And it was like set in ancient, ancient Rome.
Dan Brereton: [03:15:51] 2011 was when the American version came out. So. Yeah. Set in ancient Rome.
Alex Grand: [03:15:57] What was that all about? And did you get a lot of your imagery, like looking at the old Spartacus and Cleopatra movies? Like, was that part of the visual that worked its way in there?
Dan Brereton: [03:16:07] When I was approached to do Last Battle by, uh, Disney Italia out of Milan, I was developing a show for Jetex, the Disney’s, uh, like 8 to 10 year old viewers adventure program. At the same time, I was doing.
Alex Grand: [03:16:22] The Battle Battalion the last.
Dan Brereton: [03:16:24] So they come to me and they want me to do this, uh, Romans versus Celts thing. And I’m like, you want me to do that? And this is the case. That was the opposite of like, apple. We see apples. We we know you can do oranges or we don’t think you can do oranges because we only see you do apples. Yeah, they saw apples and they thought he’d be perfect for oranges.
Alex Grand: [03:16:41] That sounds like a European thing.
Dan Brereton: [03:16:43] Maybe because I asked him, I said, well, is there fantasy in the story? And they’re like, no, it’s sword and sorcery or peplum. It’s it’s, you know, not really. I go, well, these characters believed in gods as if they were real. Is there any of that kind of stuff in the story? And like, well, maybe there could be. I don’t know. Not really. It’s like, why do they want me for? And I and I try to turn it down a couple of times, but I didn’t want to turn it down because this was like an opportunity, you know?
Alex Grand: [03:17:05] Yeah. To stretch your wings.
Dan Brereton: [03:17:06] So they tell me the story is about the siege of Alesia. Like, I know what that is. It’s where, uh. Uh, Vercingetorix. Or if you’re Italian, it’s Vercingetorix. Vercingetorix is a Gaulish leader. Who, uh. Who? Caesar laid siege to this town with his people for for a while until they finally gave up. And, uh, this Gaulish leader surrendered to very famously surrenders to to Caesar. He’s prisoner for several years. And when Caesar finally gets his his triumph. Which is this? This when the military dictator comes home with all his, you know, his accolades and he has they give you this big processional parade, and then they pull out all your enemies that they’ve been throwing in jail for years to wait for you, and then they execute them publicly. And it’s just this big, big thing. It’s called a triumph. I didn’t know about any of this stuff. Okay? I we didn’t study ancient history in high school. We didn’t study Julius Caesar. I don’t know anything about this stuff. So I sit down, I start drawing. They said, well, this character who’s like a retired Roman general, this guy Rhodius, they describe that this this Roman general is retired, is asked by Julius Caesar to go in and take out this Gaulish leader who is trouble. And he is he’s going to lead an army to to aid the siege, and it will beat Caesar if he does so. I could send you in and take this guy out. It’s described that he has his dirty half dozen that are his hand-picked, you know, guys. And so I’m like, okay, I’m going to sit down and see if I can just draw some of this stuff. So I start thinking of ways to kind of play against type for these characters. Like one of the characters is long blonde hair, almost like a Greek. So you’re.
Alex Grand: [03:18:44] Designing the visuals for these.
Dan Brereton: [03:18:46] Guys, really scarred up like he’s been, you know, all these. He’s had boiling pitch turn on. You know, he’s a, he’s a there’s another guy who’s like a, um, he’s a Nubian warrior. So he was a former slave who has become a Roman citizen and a soldier, because that happened a lot back then. And then, um, one guy is, uh, there was a gladiator type guy who had, like, a mask on. He always wore a mask. And so I just started these drawings. And a female Celtic warrior, you know? So I started doing these drawings. I send them in, and they really liked them. Now, were the costumes. Were they like, uh, did they fit the time period? Not really, because I didn’t really know, you know. Um, then I did this piece that’s on the cover, and, uh, and they’re like, oh, okay. So so the writer Tito Faraci, who writes a lot of stuff for Disney and he writes this comic called Tex that’s very popular over there, very prolific guy. So he likes it all. He uses all of it. Yeah, in his own way, because I don’t really know what a gladiator is. So I draw a gladiator, which is not a gladiator.
Dan Brereton: [03:19:47] There were only certain types of gladiators that were like, you know, you didn’t just make them up. So he became a Celtic warrior, wore this mask, and he was a headhunter and all this kind of stuff, which there’s all these different stories about whether or not the Celts, the Gauls took trophies, head heads or whether they were cannibals, basically. And so I go on this crash course. Yes. So I think, you know what? I’m going to show all these editors that aren’t hiring me, that what I can do if Frank Miller can screw up history with 300, which he most certainly did, I can I can do my version of 300. That’s a show that I have range, okay. And it’s not even it’s not even about Frank Miller. It’s just showing that I have some range. I can do things that they don’t think I can do. Right. There aren’t monsters. And but can I get invested? So these characters, if I could draw these characters, yeah, I can be invested. I could I can get invested in these guys. I can make it part, make it me.
Alex Grand: [03:20:37] So there’s a little bit of a challenge for for yourself. Totally. And a learning I mean, you learned about.
Dan Brereton: [03:20:42] And the writer added in some of that. Yeah. Oh, I had to basically I had to go on a crash course and teach myself all that stuff. Right, right. And I ended up learning things that they didn’t even know, some stuff they didn’t even know. And a couple of points. Um, so yeah, there’s not a lot of pictorial reference. The first thing it really got me onto it was I was in San Diego, the, uh, Disney Italia was there at their own booth, and they were handing out, um, this like these posters of the cover piece I had done. And it’s, it’s Rhodius, the Roman fighting the Gaul. And he’s got, like, his winged helmet and all this kind of stuff, and he’s wearing this sort of armor and they’re fighting, and it’s a cool image. And he’s just out of the blue at San Diego. These two guys show up dressed like Roman legionnaires, and they’re looking at my poster and they’re like, uh. And I tell them about the story and they go, well, that armor is all wrong. These guys were re-enactors. They were.
Dan Brereton: [03:21:36] They were Roman Legion. Legion reenactors that just showed up at Comic-Con. I’ve never seen him before or since. They just happened to be there to help me out. Like little guardian, little messengers to come and help me. And they tell me how wrong I’m doing because that’s Lorica Segmentata armor that’s not around until 300 years. Uh, A.D., I see. I was like, oh, okay. And I go, well, how would they have dressed? He goes, um, back then, Caesar’s legions, the 10th, the 10th Legion or whatever, they would have wore chainmail tunics and, uh, well, you know, all these things. And I was like, oh my God. So I got, I got to really pay attention to this stuff because I want to get it right. So one of the things that you do not do is look at any Hollywood Roman films. They’re almost all wrong. They’re almost all wrong. You know how, like, they’re always wearing these, like, gauntlet things? Yeah. Wristbands. No one wore a wristband. Really? Unless they were an archer. If you were an archer, you’d wear something to protect your forearms.
Alex Grand: [03:22:31] So those movies didn’t get it right? No, but nobody knows the difference.
Dan Brereton: [03:22:35] The armor that’s being worn in The Passion of the Christ by the soldiers that are scourging Jesus. They’re wearing lorica segmentata. That’s when that stuff would have been used. There’s there’s somewhat of that there. But you have to really know. You have to find out on your own. There are some books that are like military costume books that I found. There’s a whole series of them that helped. I also read, uh, Caesar’s Gallic Wars, the translation of Caesar’s Gallic or Gallic Wars, which is his. It’s the only thing we know about that time period, because Caesar wrote his memoirs. But Caesar is an unreliable narrator because he describes things like fantasy characters and creatures and stuff. He also says some horrible things about the Celts or the Gauls. Celts? Yeah, yeah, yeah, which aren’t true. You know, they may seem like they’re just barbarians. And they were. They were animals, but they had their own road systems. They had their own civilization. It just got. It got absorbed and conquered by Rome. So I became this, like, insufferable, you know, bore for a long time with my family because I just had all this information that I was, I was absorbing and I would come it would come out sometimes. So, yeah, I could have given lectures about.
Alex Grand: [03:23:37] So people who haven’t read it would expect to see something pretty visually accurate of that time period. It sounds like I.
Dan Brereton: [03:23:44] Tried my best. And the thing that’s funny is, like leather, leather, uh, armor. None of that leather armor survived, so it’s hard to know what it was like. So if someone’s there’s a lot of leather being worn, but I don’t really necessarily know what it looked like because it rotted away. Yeah. Also, back then, most soldiers were using slings.
Alex Grand: [03:24:04] Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [03:24:05] In fact, more most soldiers were using that more than like bows and arrows. They were deadly accurate with their slings. I see they could take you out from you know you know David Yards.
Alex Grand: [03:24:15] Like David and Goliath stuff.
Dan Brereton: [03:24:16] That was very that was like the pistol of the time. That was the gun or the rifle of the time. Um, Rome the average Roman soldier was five foot, five foot five inches. Yeah. All the Gauls were huge by comparison. The Romans could get in with their short swords if they could get inside that the reach of the Gaul with his long sword, they could get him. You know, there was a reason why the Romans were very, um. They’re very well organized. Caesar was a whole interesting character. He. Caesar doesn’t. He’s only in a couple of pages of the book, which is fine. And then Vercingetorix doesn’t show up really at all. But I had to illustrate the siege of Alesia. In other words, I had to show the siege towers. I had to show what you see in the book. Right?
Alex Grand: [03:24:56] Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Dan Brereton: [03:24:56] Have you seen all the stuff they set up and everything? Um, there was a there was a scene where a bunch of characters get killed and they don’t even, like, Tito didn’t even deal with it. A bunch of people getting killed, they just moved on. I go, wait a second. This is like his friends. Yeah. Shouldn’t there be some, like, moment taken for them, you know, and and, um, and they’re like, yeah, you’re right. They should be buried. Well, they didn’t bury their they didn’t necessarily bury their dead. They go well yes they did. I go well yeah, but they burn bodies. And then they buried them. Right. The Gauls just burns you. Yeah. You know, so, uh, and there’s also a scene where Rhodius is in, um, he’s at one of the arena games before the Roman Coliseum. They just. They had arena games. So he’s he’s in this, you know, the crowd watching these, um, these gladiators go at it, and, uh, he someone tries to kill him and he’s walking around with. He said, why is he wearing his toga over his head? I said, well, look at these bas relief sculptures of senators walking. Walking together. They’re wearing, you know, they’re wearing their toga over their head like a hood. And that was so they either weren’t going to be recognized or people couldn’t throw stuff on their heads. You know, it was a way to keep the sun off. It was just a way to wear your toga. It’s not something you ever see very often. But I was paying attention with all these. Anything I could get my hands on. So there’s a scene where he’s wearing it over his head and they went, oh, okay. I thought that was cool because you’re not going to see that necessarily. Did I get any? Did anyone come and go, wow. It’s really very accurate. Well, who’s going to tell me that? You know who’s reading comics? Yeah, yeah. They don’t know. They don’t know.
Alex Grand: [03:26:27] So here’s a funny question is if everyone’s used to seeing the inaccurate stuff right. In the Hollywood movies, and they see your stuff and they see it’s real, you know, it was there. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Or as real as you can make it. Was there some predicament saying, well, should I just make it more like the Hollywood substance that’s more recognizable? No. Or was it more like, well, let’s keep this.
Dan Brereton: [03:26:45] I had so much respect for the stuff that I was learning, and I had so much fascination for it that I wanted to get it right. And I wanted to do it for Rome, for Italy, for the people, for, you know, because.
Alex Grand: [03:26:55] For them, they have a sense of what’s going on. And there’s a.
Dan Brereton: [03:26:58] Lot of people who would know. One thing was also interesting was there was a rodius wears leopard pelt because when they were doing the arena games, they were catching all they were capturing animals from Africa and other parts of the world that they sort of dominated, and they’d bring them back to the arena games and they would just slaughter them wholesale. They would let a bunch of lions, tigers and panthers and whatever animals loose, and they would set people against them. So they were just slaughtering people and animals, like by by the hundreds and thousands all the time. And so I thought, you know, it would make sense that maybe rodeos would be, would have been given some pelt. So he wears kind of this pelt? Yeah. Um, it’s like a spotted, like a leopard or a panther pelt or something. And in this one point in the story, he has to fight one of his friends who’s like a turncoat, and they stripped down and he’s wearing his pelt, and they said, um, can you take out the spots on it? Because some people are saying he looks too much like Tarzan. Yeah. I was like, what? He looks like Tarzan with a sword and a kilt and a short hair. I go, okay, fine. So I went and digitally took all the spots.
Alex Grand: [03:28:04] Yeah. Because Tarzan had a loincloth. That’s not the same Tarzan.
Dan Brereton: [03:28:08] If he’s wearing a spotted loincloth, it’s only because it was a texture. He probably would have had a lion loincloth, maybe, which would have been blank. So that’s, you know, just that’s the next thing. And I just there were these little touches I threw in that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. But yeah, that was kind of funny. They wanted me to take the spots off.
Alex Grand: [03:28:23] The next project that I really loved going through, The Simpsons Meet Cthulhu.
Dan Brereton: [03:28:29] Oh yeah.
Alex Grand: [03:28:30] Yeah, written by Len Wein. Yeah. And for Bongo Comics. Yeah. Uh, you did beautiful art for this because it was, like, painted and, uh, for for Treehouse of Horror 19. Uh, 2013. That was my.
Dan Brereton: [03:28:45] Second. That was my third Treehouse of Horror story for them. Uh, because earlier in 2000, I did, uh, a Lord of the rings, uh, it was fully painted. Yeah. It looks like a Lord of the rings graphic novel. Kind of not necessarily based on the movie, but then The Simpsons get dropped into their world. There you go. And cause havoc. And that one was written by Ian Boothby. So Ian Boothby wrote the Lord of the rings adaptation. I illustrated it. Ian’s very funny. We didn’t really have a lot of back and forth, but he’s a super good guy, very sweet guy. Funny as heck. Did a lot of stuff.
Alex Grand: [03:29:18] Powerpuff Girls and stuff like that.
Dan Brereton: [03:29:20] That’s right. He can totally nail it. And he’s a stand up too. So that was really fun to do. And then when I was done with that painted story, they said, we have a black and white story in the same issue. Can you do it? It’s a shorter story, but the artist couldn’t finish it or something. Written by Paul Dini. It was a take on the Poe’s story The Cask of Amontillado. A quick pencil job because they didn’t have a lot of time. And then I said, Can Ted ink it? Ted Naifeh inked it and.
Alex Grand: [03:29:47] Ted.
Dan Brereton: [03:29:48] H. He drew the Outskirts of Doom. Okay.
Alex Grand: [03:29:50] There you go.
Dan Brereton: [03:29:51] So that was really fun. And that appeared in the same issue.
Alex Grand: [03:29:53] I see, so you painted the other one, but then you penciled the other story.
Dan Brereton: [03:29:56] Yeah. And I had all this, like, steam left over because I finally, like, after doing that whole 18 page story, I could finally figure out how I finally had figured out how to draw The Simpsons, because I was like a learning curve, and I didn’t have time to sit there and do all these drawings before I started. So, um, so it took a while to get warmed up on those guys, and by that time I was ready just to draw Homer Simpson. Whatever. So, um, and they do want things on model because I could have drawn my version, but they want things to stay on. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [03:30:22] Right. Right.
Dan Brereton: [03:30:23] So, uh, so years later, I am talking to Bill about doing another story. I said, if you guys ever done like, a Lovecraft. And Bill said, you know, to be honest, I’m not really familiar with Lovecraft’s work. I know who he is and everything, but I’ve never really read his stuff. And I go, oh, wow. Well, that would be really fun to do, like a Cthulhu kind of thing. Yeah, and I feel comfortable enough with the Lovecraft stuff to have ideas for how to put in these little Lovecraft asides to his work. The idea that, like, maybe Homer, there’s some, some, some town somewhere where everyone has the Homer Simpson look rather than the Innsmouth look. If you know the story The Shadow Over Innsmouth, everyone has kind of this kind of weird wall eyed look because they’re all descended from the deep.
Alex Grand: [03:31:00] One’s wallet is in. The eyes were pointed sideways. Right? Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [03:31:03] Like, you know, he gets sometimes. So the idea is like that Homer goes there and they mistake him for one of them, and they try and chase him around and stuff. And maybe I should have written it myself, but I thought Len, who did lots, plenty of Lovecraft stuff with Swamp Thing and many, many other stories that Len which maybe Len would be fun to write it with. I wanted to work with Len, so they asked Len and Len said, yeah. So, um, he he he turned in a script and his was less, uh, pointed about the Lovecraft, um, asides, the Easter eggs I see. But it was very much like, I love the premise because Bart and Nixon have to clean the library as a punishment. The library is in the basement and no one goes down there. Yeah, so true to life now. Yeah. And they find a copy of the Necronomicon. Yeah. And my idea was the Necronomicon is like a paperback Scholastic Books edition. It says abridged, you know, $0.75 or whatever.
Alex Grand: [03:31:58] That’s funny.
Dan Brereton: [03:31:59] Huh? Um, kind of how? Like when I read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for the first time, it was like an abridged, you know, Scholastic edition. And then he takes that home and he starts using it to get revenge or whatever. And it was just really fun and horrific ending, you know, and just, uh, goofy. Yeah. And, um. Yeah, fully painted and that kind of stuff takes a while because you’re trying to you’re trying to be. It’s a different way of working than kind of this sort of looser, more illustrative thing. It’s the same thing, like when you’re doing superheroes, you know, you have a specific costume, you have to stay on model.
Alex Grand: [03:32:28] So yeah. Yeah. I loved how it was painted, where The Simpsons are, their cartoon character, but there’s a certain extra shading that you could tell this was a darker place therein. And then when you have the Cthulhu, you know, monster in there. Yeah. And I’m just like, man, this is great.
Dan Brereton: [03:32:44] I scan the artwork. I did a little bit of digital maybe here and there on it, but not a lot. And then I sent in the digital. So even though, you know, technically Bongo is supposed to own the art because they do a buyout. It’s just sitting in my flat file. It’s never going to get sold or anything. And if they ask for it back, I’d send it to them. But but they were like, no. Bill was like, no, no, just just hang on to it. I don’t know, maybe they’ll send that stuff back to everybody. Now that it’s sort of folded up, I don’t know. You never know. Yeah, I might get my Lord of the rings story back. Interesting. Um, around the same time that I was doing The Simpsons, I was also working on a Batman story, which would be my last thing I ever did for DC.
Alex Grand: [03:33:22] I see, okay.
Dan Brereton: [03:33:23] I was offered by an editor who became, like, more of, like, a group editor higher up Hank Canals. The opportunity to pitch a legend of the of the of the Dark Knight story for the digital series. And so I did. I pitched three stories, he said. I like two of them. Pick the one you want to do. So it’s a fish out of water story, and it’s called Six fingers. So in the story, a mobster’s daughter teenage daughter gets kidnapped and no one’s doing anything about it. Batman wonders why. So he goes to the mobster Falcone, and it takes a while for him to get out because no one wants to tell him what’s going on. He talks to the Joker. The Joker’s too scared to talk about it. Mad Hatter won’t talk about it. Falcone barely talks about it. He finally figures out that this. He does his detective work, and he figures out that the last time she was seen was at this summer camp up in the mountains. And she talks to her friend, and her friend tells her, oh, yeah, this woman came and visited her and I thought she was, like related to her. He goes, why? Because. Because they both have six fingers on each hand. I see, and the idea in the story is polydactyly is a sign of being a witch.
Dan Brereton: [03:34:26] So he goes up into the mountains outside of Gotham, in the middle of the night with his his headlights turned off. Just push through the moonlit night to try and find her. So the story takes place. The bulk of the story takes place on like this moonlit night in the mountains with Batman’s, like, all alone. Yeah. And then he encounters this coven of witches. Yeah, yeah. And it’s supposed to be creepy and scary and weird. Fish out of water story. And it is. It goes weird places. And I did not talk about the plot or anything about it with people, because I wanted them to be surprised. Now the idea is that it’s a it’s a four part story, so it’s it’s 40 pages and a cover and but when you’re doing the, the digital stuff you’re doing, each page is actually two pages, a top and a bottom. That’s because you look at the screen a certain way. So it’s over 60 pieces of art. When I was done and I wrote story two, so, uh, it was supposed to come out. It came out in 2015. The first part came out in 2015, at the end in December, and then subsequent, uh, three months later, the whole thing was out and you could just download, like what, for a dollar or two each episode or something.
Dan Brereton: [03:35:33] And then eventually it was supposed to be collected with other legends of the Dark Knight stories I see in like a, you know, a physical edition, right? Printed edition. And Derek Robinson was working on a story that was a five parter that he didn’t finish for quite a while, and I guess they were waiting on that to be able to put them together. Now here’s the weird part. Somewhere along the way, I lost track, but he finished his. It came out. It was published both ways and mine wasn’t. I don’t know why. It’s probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. Yeah, I’m. I would almost say I was proud of it, but that’s just kind of a weird, weird thing to say. But I’m happy with it. Yeah, I want people to see it. Yeah, I would like it to be in print. And, um, it’s not. I don’t know if it ever will be, but you can get it on, you know, DC’s, uh, platform. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but you should check it out.
Alex Grand: [03:36:22] Yeah, yeah, I will. The most recent thing you did for Marvel was that it was like an Alex Ross curated series. And you did a classic X-Men short story. Yeah, very much in line with, like, the Dave Cockrum, Len Wein X-Men of the all new, all different X-Men. Yeah. And kind of the origin of the fastball special, basically. So how how yeah. How’d that come about that sequence?
Dan Brereton: [03:36:48] I was this was 2020, so I was getting ready to do the giant killer 20th anniversary big hardcover. And then Alex gets Ahold of me out of the blue and says, I’m curating this, uh, anthology series. And they ended up calling it Marvel Anthology. It was sort of in line with the anniversary of marvels, and he was handpicking artists to do these stories. You can write them yourself. You can work with a writer, whatever you want to do. You can pick any character in the Marvel Universe. You just can’t pick Conan. And I was like, oh, okay. And then so I started thinking, what do I want to do? You know, and do I have time to do it? Ten pages? Yeah, I can do it. Yeah, that sounds awesome. You know, I’m excited. And it took me a while to figure out which characters I was going to do about a month. And then Alex and I were talking and I settled on the new X-Men. Yeah. And the storyline takes place like right after the events of Giant-Size X-Men number one.
Alex Grand: [03:37:38] Yeah, the Krakoa adventure.
Dan Brereton: [03:37:40] They’re back home. The only difference is, is that all the X-Men are there. The idea is like, what if all the X-Men decided to try and make it work as a team, including the beast who was in the Avengers, the original X-Men? So it’s almost an Elseworlds in that respect to make it simple, even though it wasn’t simple because there’s so many characters in every page again. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [03:38:01] There were. Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [03:38:02] They’re all called to be to train in the Danger Room together for the first time. They get there, the door is closed, and there’s a note that says Danger Room is down. And they’re like, what? They just called us down here. And it’s. What do you mean it’s not open? Yeah. It’s broken. What’s going on? So they’re waiting. They know what to do. So they’re all waiting. They’re on staircase. They’re in front. There’s a bunch of them. You know, beast is hanging from a chandelier. And while they’re waiting, stuck in the elevator, so to speak. Yeah. They start to interact with each other and they start to not all get along. And Logan’s freaking jerk, you know? Yeah, and so is Warren. He’s a jerk, too. And people start butting heads and getting real. And the whole time, the Xavier and Professor X and Scott are in another room watching it all take place. Yeah, and Jean knows what’s going on because they’re watching them to see how they interact with each other, how they’re going to work together. You know, is this going to work? And then when things get get kind of to the point where Wolverine and Beast are going to get into it, the door is open.
Dan Brereton: [03:39:03] So they go inside, they start training. And I mean, you know, I know you know the story. And then we see what happens. We see if there’s any kind of turnover because they’re like, I don’t know. This Wolverine guy is going to work out. Right, right. When they start working together as a team in training, it becomes clear that. Yeah, okay, I think we have a team. This is kind of funny because I wasn’t going to write it originally. I had the idea. They liked the idea. They said, yeah, let’s do that. I said, what if Chris Claremont wrote it? How cool would that be? Yeah, to work with Chris Wright on those characters. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, what a weird, cool thing. Yeah, they are like, yeah, we’ll talk to Chris. So Chris was working on he was going to he was flying overseas to the UK. This is 2020. So they tell him the story, he writes an outline, he sends it back. I don’t hear anything for a little while. And then Alex calls me. He’s agitated and he says, uh, you know, we got our thing from from Chris, but it’s totally different.
Dan Brereton: [03:39:59] He said it in a bar. They’re not wearing their costumes. Sabertooth shows up. I go, what? He goes, oh, I’ll send it to you, but you’re not going to. I don’t think you want it. This isn’t what we we asked him for. This isn’t what we agreed to do. You don’t have to do it. And I go, well, I want to do the story that I, you know, the idea I came up with. Because we do too. Well, now, what do we do? He goes, don’t worry. Tom will take care of it forever. So he did. So he told Chris that we were going to go with me, I guess I don’t really know what was told, what he was told, but then he wasn’t on it and that felt really weird. Yeah. Alex goes, don’t worry about it. He didn’t do what we asked him to do. What are you going to do? You know, I was like, okay, uh, you know, Alex has no problem with dealing with legends. Yeah. You know, I guess I was in a terrific con in 2019. First time I’d ever done that show in Connecticut. It’s a great show. Yeah. Shout out to Mitch Hallock.
Alex Grand: [03:40:52] And you saw him out there, right?
Dan Brereton: [03:40:54] I’m talking to two guys at my table about this very thing that we were talking about. Yes. The whole story. Just telling two guys that came up.
Alex Grand: [03:41:01] About what happened.
Dan Brereton: [03:41:02] About what happened. And I turn around and Chris Claremont is walking down the aisle toward us, all dressed in white. And I go, there he is right there. And I’m a little nervous because I was just talking about him, you know? Yeah, yeah.
Alex Grand: [03:41:15] Nothing bad. No. Yeah. Just saying what happened.
Dan Brereton: [03:41:18] And I go, hey, Chris, are you mad at me? And he goes, what? He walks up to me. He goes, why would I be mad at you? So I kind of recounted the story and he goes, I never saw your story. I never saw that.
Alex Grand: [03:41:31] So it just was never. He never saw it.
Dan Brereton: [03:41:33] I thought they sent it to him, I’m pretty sure, but he never saw it. It’s easy to sometimes miss things in an email. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [03:41:38] That’s true. You know.
Dan Brereton: [03:41:39] Whatever it was, he never saw it. I see. He went in cold. And that’s why it’s so different. And I went, oh. So I start to tell him my idea was. And he immediately starts rewriting it while we’re standing there. And I thought, that’s perfect.
Alex Grand: [03:41:57] So when you say rewriting it, he was like, no, it’d be better if it was like this. Is that what. Oh.
Dan Brereton: [03:42:01] Oh, he would never do that or he wouldn’t say that. And I was just giving him general broad strokes.
Alex Grand: [03:42:05] Oh, I see that guy would never say it like this. Now, I could.
Dan Brereton: [03:42:08] Go and show it to him now and say, give it a read and let me know what you think of it later and see what he says. But I’m way too nervous. I’m too insecure to do that. You know, maybe he’ll just come up and tell me sometime.
Alex Grand: [03:42:19] Yeah. That’s wonderful.
Dan Brereton: [03:42:20] If I’m lucky, I’ll never know. So I do my story. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [03:42:24] And you wrote this comes out?
Dan Brereton: [03:42:25] Yeah. It’s a little late because of pandemic, but. Yeah, it comes out. Yeah. I wrote a story. It took me a long time to work on that thing, because I was just trying to make it as good as possible. Yeah, it has a Cockrum vibe to it. And the way the art I am not Alex Ross. I never will be. Found that out the hard way. Um. But yeah, I mean, the first page where they’re all standing in there. It took me two weeks to paint that.
Alex Grand: [03:42:46] Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know.
Dan Brereton: [03:42:48] I just.
Alex Grand: [03:42:48] There was a lot of figures on each page, and I obsessed.
Dan Brereton: [03:42:50] Over it. You know, I don’t. If I had to do it over again, I could have done it in half the time, but I was just obsessing. Well, why.
Alex Grand: [03:42:55] Do you think you obsess on. Is it because.
Dan Brereton: [03:42:56] Because I felt like I wanted to impress everybody and put my best foot forward. And maybe this will lead to other things. And just all these things you think of when you’re working on. And I also.
Alex Grand: [03:43:03] And also, it’s the X-Men that you loved as a kid.
Dan Brereton: [03:43:05] Yes, exactly, exactly. Yeah. I mean, I’m like, this is a big deal for me. You know, it’s not just some job where I don’t feel the pressure or it’s just pure joy. It was supposed to be part of the time I was doing it. I was thinking, why didn’t you just do that? You should have done Deathlok and Killraven fighting Martians, because then you could have just painted rubble instead of the interiors of the X-Men mansion. Right. You know what I mean? Or whatever. Or all these characters on every page. I was really kicking myself at one point for not having chosen the simpler idea, you know? Yeah, yeah, but that’s okay. And then when it came out in comic form, it didn’t really look great because for some reason it didn’t print so well. And it wasn’t until it was collected as that Marvel Treasury edition that it looks perfect. It looks just the way you.
Alex Grand: [03:43:46] Go, and it looked the way it was. And then they.
Dan Brereton: [03:43:47] Offered me to do a cover, which turned out to be the variant cover for issue two, which was super fun to do. Yeah, and that was great. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [03:43:55] And then it sounds like you have a good relationship with Alex Ross, too.
Dan Brereton: [03:43:58] Yeah, we came up around the same time together. Yeah. So we we don’t we’re not in touch like constantly. But you know, we can I can talk to him anytime. He can call me anytime he wants. Call him. Yeah. Um, it was great that he thought of me. And I put together a really good package with that. And I would love to see them do that again. And just to be able to kind of, like, be set loose to do whatever you wanted. Yeah. That was so great. That was like, again, the kid in you is just like, wow, you’re doing the new X-Men.
Alex Grand: [03:44:26] Yeah. No. That’s awesome. Do it. Don’t screw. I love that era, too. That’s like I think that’s like the that I think that is my favorite era of X-Men is that early, those early like first 30 issues. It was so.
Dan Brereton: [03:44:38] Exciting to have these new characters show up, and then they show up in the issue, and then they show up in this giant size. And I was right there for all that stuff, and it was just exciting to see Marvel move in some new direction and bring in fresh blood, because they hadn’t done it for a while. That’s right. They were doing it here and there. They had Nova. And you know, I remember Guardians of the Galaxy when they kind of brought them back and they were sort of peppering them around. They never really got their own series right.
Alex Grand: [03:45:04] Like, Steve Gerber would kind of write Random Defenders.
Dan Brereton: [03:45:07] Yeah, right. They showed up in Marvel Premiere or.
Alex Grand: [03:45:09] Whatever, or like in Avengers with Korvac or whatever.
Dan Brereton: [03:45:12] Yeah. That I just, I that was exciting to the idea that you could follow characters around different titles if they didn’t necessarily have their own title.
Alex Grand: [03:45:19] And the X-Men had that for about five years. Yeah. They were doing reprints, so they would just show up in these random things, and it was the original team just kind of walking around like.
Dan Brereton: [03:45:28] Kind of team up.
Alex Grand: [03:45:29] Early 70s versions of those guys. Yeah, I.
Dan Brereton: [03:45:31] Remember I was into the X-Men and I was reading, uh, back issues. I was getting back issues. Yeah, it was really getting into it for a little while there, and then you couldn’t really get them. Yeah, they weren’t really out. And then all of a sudden, here they come. X-men 97. Yeah. You know, and you’re like, Holy crap.
Alex Grand: [03:45:49] Yes, they’re.
Dan Brereton: [03:45:50] Back. But who are these guys?
Alex Grand: [03:45:51] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dan Brereton: [03:45:52] And we already knew. Well, we already knew about Wolverine because I’ve been reading Hulk. Yeah, he shows up there and you’re like, again, super exciting new character. Really cool. Right.
Alex Grand: [03:46:03] And storm. Nightcrawler. Colossus I just love this. And that’s Dave Cockrum right there.
Dan Brereton: [03:46:06] It’s Dave Cockrum. And before that what did you have. You had Jack Kirby. Jack Kirby was the guy who did all that stuff. Yeah, he’s the one that brought it all out. Right, right. That tells you a lot right there that, you know, I mean, there were definitely Roy Thomas has a hand.
Alex Grand: [03:46:19] Sure, sure. There was something special about Dave Cockrum. He didn’t. He wasn’t afraid of creating new characters, creating whole new costumes and new powers and more.
Dan Brereton: [03:46:27] Flamboyant, the better. On the.
Alex Grand: [03:46:29] Yeah. Yeah that’s right. Yeah. The little sash and whatever total and.
Dan Brereton: [03:46:32] Whole style that he, he introduced because he.
Alex Grand: [03:46:36] Brought in that Legion of Super-Heroes vibe of his Legion of Super-Heroes. Right. That was awesome, too. It was like 12 issues or whatever it was. And it’s beautiful stuff. And then he basically recreated those characters as the Lilandra’s Imperial Guard, and it’s like each one has a Legion of Super-Heroes.
Dan Brereton: [03:46:53] Those guys are super exciting.
Alex Grand: [03:46:54] And they were when they first came out. I was like, what is this?
Dan Brereton: [03:46:57] I discovered them toward the end when the toward the end of the Dark Phoenix run, because I took a break from comics in like 1970. Well, probably around the time Star Wars came out. Yeah, yeah. Because I got really into Star Wars. I got really into, like, Tolkien.
Alex Grand: [03:47:09] And some other stuff.
Dan Brereton: [03:47:10] I see The Hobbit TV movie came out that in 77. So I got into more reading and super into comic strips, because for a while I wanted to be a comic strip.
Alex Grand: [03:47:18] Artist, right, right.
Dan Brereton: [03:47:19] And so I got away from comics, and then around the time that Dark Phoenix Saga was coming to a close, I got back into comics and and that’s, that’s when they have that dual they have to fight the guard on the moon. Yeah. And John Byrne and I’m like, this is I mean, I had seen John Byrne’s work that way after he’d been doing all this work on on that I hadn’t been aware of because I wasn’t reading.
Alex Grand: [03:47:44] It was definitely next level. A lot of that is a recreation of Fantastic 413, where the Red ghosts and the Super Monkeys were fighting Fantastic Four on the in the blue area of the moon, and they had that where they would appear over there, and they were like, what’s that flash of light? Right. Yeah. And then they’re all about to fight. And a lot of that, a lot of that. That was the first time that Kirby basically did that first. But Byrne and Claremont did this next level version of that. Yeah. And and when it resulted in, you know, Jean Gray’s death, it was the whole thing was a huge emotional, amazing event.
Dan Brereton: [03:48:16] There was so much emotion in those last issues. Oh, yeah. When she goes home. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [03:48:21] And she returned to her parents.
Dan Brereton: [03:48:24] Can’t keep Jean straight. She goes back and forth and scares the shit out of her parents. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that stuff is really powerful. Yeah, the cover is like. Oh, say, Chris and Ma both do the same thing where they have these big prints of covers. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [03:48:37] Okay, I see them.
Dan Brereton: [03:48:38] This is a great idea for a writer to do. So I got one from Chris, which was that cover, and he signed it. And, um, that just that whole. It just brings whenever I look at it, it just brings back so much stuff. And I still have my original issues that I bought, like at some little store in outskirts of Modesto back when they came out. I still have those and they’re not too bad of shape. Yeah. How many times I’ve read them and looked at them, you know, and I would and I would love to do more stuff with them. You know, I just.
Alex Grand: [03:49:05] Who determines that? Is that individual editors or is that more like overseeing editors?
Dan Brereton: [03:49:10] Well, what they’re publishing, what’s in their publishing plan? It used to be that you could come up with an idea and pitch it to them, and they would buy it and you’d be doing it. But now there’s much more organization in editorial with the writers and what their plan is for what they’re going to do. And so if you don’t fit into that plan, you know, like when I did the Punisher thing, Rick wanted to work with me. Rick Remender was writing The Punisher. Frank Rick.
Alex Grand: [03:49:30] Remender. Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [03:49:30] He wanted to work with me. And so they hired me to do two issues, and that was really fun to do. I enjoyed that, and I like working with Rick. I might be doing a cover for one of his new books coming up.
Alex Grand: [03:49:40] Nice.
Dan Brereton: [03:49:40] But, uh, yeah, that was really fun to do, you know? And it was. But it was a ton of work. And then I had giant killer stuff waiting because I had a whole ten page giant killer story to put into the new book. Yeah. That I did right after that. And that was a breeze by comparison, because there’s only four characters.
Alex Grand: [03:49:57] Right, right. But. And you’re also used to that world.
Dan Brereton: [03:50:00] And those are my guys.
Alex Grand: [03:50:01] Those are your guys? Yeah. And then, um. What? The giant killer just came out in France? Is that. Is that. Yeah, it.
Dan Brereton: [03:50:06] Just came out in France, um, through, uh, Hugin munin, which is like an imprint of Dargaud. And they.
Alex Grand: [03:50:13] Do a lot of.
Dan Brereton: [03:50:14] American stuff. They did Nocturnals, and they’re doing a second volume of Nocturnals pretty soon with French language. So, yeah.
Alex Grand: [03:50:20] Belgium, I guess, to Belgium.
Dan Brereton: [03:50:21] France, maybe, uh, French Canadian readers.
Alex Grand: [03:50:25] Interesting. Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [03:50:26] Quebec. Uh, I’m not really sure, but. Yeah. So it’s pretty cool. And, um, the dark the Nocturnals thing happened through Dark Horse, but the giant killer thing was them approaching me. I see, I do want to do, uh, a mass market version of Giant Killer for American audiences because not, you know, we only did a print run of 1000 books for Giant Killer, but. But Dark Horse has so much more reach. You know, like with the nocturnal stuff, they reach thousands more people.
Alex Grand: [03:50:53] Yeah, on my own. So, uh.
Dan Brereton: [03:50:55] Yeah. And I’d like to do. I’d like to do more giant killer stuff down the road. I mean, I did like this kind of crossover in that book with Nocturnals and Giant Killer. I’d like to ride that out and see where that goes. Yeah. Someday. Who knows? Maybe.
Alex Grand: [03:51:07] But, uh, so a lot of these plans are all in progress, basically. And, and then you also do commissions on top of your work for whichever companies, and then you have a Patreon as well.
Dan Brereton: [03:51:17] So the commissions and Patreon are basically go hand in hand now because I can. I can organize and manage my commissions through the Patreon, uh, thing. That way I don’t have to. I don’t overdo it. I don’t take on more than I, you know, bite off more than I can chew. I do also keep up pretty good with Kickstarter projects. I’ve done one, at least one every year since 2014, and that’s that’s made a lot of difference. Oh, great. What I like about that is having the control.
Alex Grand: [03:51:43] So you have a fan base now?
Dan Brereton: [03:51:45] Yeah. Luckily I have that, you know, and that’s built up over. Well last 30 years, you know, some people stick with you and some people don’t. And then there’s a lot of new people that come in too. And, um, it’s great to be able to come up with an idea and then throw it out there and see people go, yeah, I’m down with that, you know? Um, and I try and one of the things I incorporate with the Kickstarter stuff is doing the art rewards. So I get to create more art and then that feeds into the next project. Yes. And then the Patreon stuff will feed into another project. Right. You know, sometimes there’s even a theme involved. Like the last art book by the Blade is like, you know, characters basically holding sharp weapons. Mhm. Um, so I really enjoy doing that and I want to keep doing that. And, and I’m also working on a new Nocturnals graphic novel right now that’s completely penciled. It’s 96 pages penciled and the covers 96.
Alex Grand: [03:52:37] Yeah. Amazing.
Dan Brereton: [03:52:38] Right now I might get longer. Yeah. Sometimes you have to add stuff in. Yeah, yeah. The last one was 96 pages, and this one right now is 96. So barring any editorial changes where I have to add a scene in here or there to make things work better. About 96 pages. So it’s all penciled and I’m just slowly since just before Christmas, I started finally doing the paintings and stuff. Yes. And I’m doing as much as I can when I’m. When I can. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [03:53:02] Of course.
Dan Brereton: [03:53:03] And the more work I get done for that, when I get closer to being finished with it, I’ll run a Kickstarter because I want to have most of the work done before I run the Kickstarter.
Alex Grand: [03:53:09] That’s great.
Dan Brereton: [03:53:10] And, uh, yeah, so I’m pretty excited about that.
Alex Grand: [03:53:13] Well that’s amazing. Yeah, and I’m excited. And I love your art style. I love the way you depict every aspect of the characters that you draw, and I, and I’m a big fan of yours, so thank you so much for spending this time with us here. Thank you. And I’m excited to see how this also, I mean, you’ll see it on the the YouTube podcast, but you’ll also. Well, I’m excited to see how it manifests in your art book. So that’s great. And I’m excited about it. Yeah. Me too. And how that gets fleshed out. So I can’t.
Dan Brereton: [03:53:39] Wait to actually have some text in a book, because usually it’s just a bunch of art. Well, I try and put so much artwork in there that I think, well, you know, I’d rather have more art than text.
Alex Grand: [03:53:47] Yeah, sure.
Dan Brereton: [03:53:47] I think Bud, Bud actually was saying that he thought it was time to do something, and yeah, he actually was the he was the he was his idea to bring us together and. Yeah. Perfect.
Alex Grand: [03:53:56] That’s perfect. Worked out well. Well because I think I wanted to have some reason for us to do an interview anyway. All the better, right? Yeah.
Dan Brereton: [03:54:04] No, totally.
Speaker3: [03:54:05] You son of a bitch.
Dan Brereton: [03:54:07] Thanks so much.
Alex Grand: [03:54:08] Thanks, Dan. All right.
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