‘Plan B’ – Daniel Reed – bid is at $150

Dan grew up in Melbourne’s outer east, in Boronia.

‘It is a suburb that tourists drive through on the way up to the spectacular Dandenong Ranges,’ Dan said. ‘In itself, it was pretty unremarkable, but I only have fond memories of my time there with friends and family.’

‘When I go back now I am struck by how green it is. Huge trees everywhere but within a suburban setting. Big eucalypts on nature-strips and in people’s backyards which you can see from great distances.

‘I don’t think I noticed them when I lived there, but they are really striking when I arrive from where I live now. The air feels different too.’

Dan and his wife and children now live in Preston.

‘Sarah and I wanted to be ‘closer to the action’, and that was as close as we could afford, so we moved to the inner northern suburbs in our twenties.  There is lots to love about living here, everything is so close and accessible.’

Dan illustrates the worlds of other writers but also ventures far from home with his own graphic stories that explore fantasy and sci-fi genres with a mix of dark humour and original concepts.

Dan has a unique  and exquisite illustration style that is highly detailed and full of character, and as such, he is a sought-after collaborator with other writers.

One of his projects was a collaboration with Isobelle Carmody to produce the post-apocalyptic ‘Evermore’.

Isobelle loved working with him and later invited him to produce posters futurising four research sites in country Queensland where she was conducting post graduate research with young people, looking at the future of their towns. She credits his marvellous posters, created from a series of bad snapshots she had taken of the four towns, as being so attractive that not only did she draw in many young people, they are still hanging in pride of place in the libraries and public offices of those towns.

Lately Daniel has been working with film makers, developing scripts into graphic novels such as the epic crime thriller ‘The Boar’ with Lee Roy Kunz, and the claustrophobic horror series ‘The Chain’ with Sean Webley.

According to Dan, any day that he is earning a living making comics is a good day as far as he is concerned and he has no plans slowing down any time soon.

While we still make the most of it, our interests have changed a little since we moved here, different things have become more important,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a bushy corner in our backyard that hosts native birds at different times of the year, incredibly that includes a ‘rufus wagtail’ that has stopped over for a week or so, 2 years running (google it, they’re incredible), occasional pardalotes too. I tell everyone I talk to that I grew 24kg of tomatoes here last year, so that must be something that’s important to me as well …

‘What I love most about being an artist is that the more art you produce, the better you get,’ he said.

‘This is particularly true of technical things such as composition, anatomy and mastering different media, where the improvement is objective. It’s also true of things like: evoking reactions or creating atmosphere, where the improvement is less tangible but definitely still there. Working with different writers and film makers has also helped me improve my particular style of story-telling.’

Dan said he loves the actual working process of drawing, where the non-language parts of your brain takes over and  images appear out of the initial mess of scribbly lines. After a thousand separate (seemingly subconscious) aesthetic decisions something you value sits on the paper in front of you, often looking back at you.

‘My kite design is a reference to the book Isobelle and I worked on back in 2014, ‘Evermore’.

‘I was fond of the characters ‘Rose’ and Enzo’ by the time I had finished it, so it was great to revisit them. Princess Rose was trapped in a tower, trying to escape her mad father, the King of the post-apocalyptic world of ‘Evermore’.

‘The premise of my kite image is that this could have been a potential escape ‘Plan B’. Instead of climbing down from the towers dizzying heights, Rose and Enzo wait for the next gust of wind, taking flight on a kite made out of rags and scraps of fabric.’

Currently Dan is working on a couple of different comics for different clients.

‘Both are heaps of fun and are keeping me super busy, not sure how much I’m allowed to say about them. One is a superhero genre comic, which is something I’ve never tackled before. The other is much more cartoony, for a younger audience.’

‘I only recently finished issue 3 of my own comic series ‘The Mycelium Complex’, it’s a sci-fi/ time travel story that works on the idea that time is a species of fungus. People are like mushrooms living above the ground, while below the ground (in the Mycelium Complex), their histories and lineages twist, loop and branch as fungal hyphae strands. You don’t need any advanced technology to travel through time, you just need to access ‘The Mycelium Complex.’

Asked about his hopes for art and the future, Dan said pensively, I was selling my books at a convention recently and a young guy in his twenties sought me out to talk about his dilemma. He showed me some of his surreal AI generated art and explained to me how much better it was than the art he created himself. He showed me that too.

‘While I could see what he meant, I had a much more positive feeling looking at his own ink line drawings. They were a bit amateurish, reminding me instantly of the art that first got me excited about local comics. Back in the late nineties I discovered local artists in the ‘Silent Army’ and ‘Tango’ anthology books. They had such an edgy, handmade, punk sensibility that I was hooked. I loved how willing people were to pour their guts out onto the page, completely unfiltered and unrefined. I still seek that sort of thing out. I love the peculiar focus of a stoner drawing what comes to mind, or anyone naively putting a lot of time and effort into creating a comic/piece of art. These artists imbue some strange life into their work that is absent from some more polished artworks and definitely absent from AI generated images. Strangely, AI generated images have helped me understand this.’

‘The Mycelium Complex’, ‘Evermore’, and many of Dan’s other books are available at danielreed.bigcartel.com