Dan Brereton Interview

Dan Brereton has been working as illustrator and Monster storyteller for more than 30 years. His client resume list ranges from Rock stars like Rob Zombie to DC COMICS. His unique art style of horror and adventure images stir the imagination with dark shadows crawling with crimson monsters, and women that are beautiful and equally powerful. I had a chance to sit with Brereton to discuss the past, present, and future of his work…

How you doing Dan? It’s been a while. <laugh>

I’m great, man! It’s been way too long, buddy.

Yeah. This pandemic thing has made things a little crazy <laugh>

Yeah, <laugh>

But you’ve been doing pretty good. Been seeing all of your crowdfunding projects you got going on over on Kickstarter.

Yeah, Kickstarter has become a really important aspect of an artist’s survival I think. To be honest, after living for so many years month to month on a freelancer kind of lifestyle where you’re hustling every month, you’re waiting on paychecks that are sometimes 30 days out, 60 days out or longer. To be able to have control over my career in a way I’ve never had before has been great. Kickstarter has definitely allowed that and my Patreon page too.

So has it been freeing for you as a creator and an artist since you’ve gone from hustling at shows and trying to get regular work from DC, Marvel, and indie publishers? It looks like here on Kickstarter you’ve got 12 of these campaigns now.

Yeah, at least 12, I don’t always run them all myself. I’ve partnered up with other people. I’m currently partnered up with Nakatomi Inc. I ran my own Kickstarter in January for a new artbook called, ‘By the Blade’, which was a kind of sword and sorcery book. You know, if a blade is part of the motif then it’s in the book. <laughs> It was something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. Nakatomi Inc is responsible for a lot of great Bernie Wrightson projects, Giclee prints, and drops. They did the Bernie Wrightson coloring book reprint, which is beautiful. They also produced the Bernie Wrightson Cycle of the Werewolf portfolio and calendar a few years ago, which was part of what actually had inspired me to do my own art portfolio, which I’d been wanting to do for a really long time. I produced a Nocturnals art portfolio, back in I guess sometime around 2017 – 2018, and it actually didn’t tank. It did well, now whenever I do an artbook, I offer a portfolio along with it. And it’s really great to see that there’s people who respond to that medium that was really popular in the seventies and eighties, and then kind of died out. I’m noticing a comeback. I’ve noticed artists like Frank Cho are doing a portfolio or did a portfolio, and I’m seeing them pop up more and more. So I love the fact that there might be a Renaissance in the art portfolio medium.

How big of prints do you usually do with the art portfolios?

The prints I do are 11 x 14 median size, for the classic art portfolio 11 x 14. Also when it comes to shipping it, you have fewer problems and it’s not quite as expensive as one as you’re dealing with oversized packages these days.

Yes, those prints at that size are really good because they fit great in a portfolio book and it’s a good sized book that you can hold, flip through, and look at the prints inside.

I like that. Yeah. I mean, most of our books are 8.5 x 11 or close to that size. So it works out great. I do smaller ones too. That you can slip into the book. Like book plates or sketch plates, things like that. Also, because my fulfillment partner is in Vermont. Um, I can’t fly out there and sign all the books. So we do these book plates and they’re actually fun to do, and they look good. You’re not getting your actual physical book signed, but you have this little nice book plate. You can mount it in the book if you want, or you can just slip it in there, whatever you wanna do. There’s usually an excess of books because of the print run, you have to do a set print run when you’re dealing with overseas printers. It’s usually around a thousand copies and when there are copies left, Bud Plant will pick them up. That’s the beauty of this is we’re all kind of in it together and it’s exciting. I think that’s what fuels every Kickstarter that’s successful is the enthusiasm and people willing to support it. I mean, I just became a super backer without even knowing it.

I have lost track of how many I have backed as well. I’m running out of room in my house. I have started using board games and art books as furniture. <laughs>

Yeah when I look back on how many projects I backed, I was pretty surprised. I had kind of lost track and, to be honest, it’s easy to back things. It makes you feel good. You are supporting what we’re all in this together for, which is to support creativity. And I love it. I love the freedom I get as an independent creator. I don’t have to chase editors. I don’t have to curry favor or be in favor with certain editors or publishers. Which for years became harder and harder to do. You know, when you’re seen as primarily a painter artist and there’s not as many painted books happening, the job offers become kind of sporadic. It was funny because at one point I had published The Nocturnals graphic novel that we raised money for through Kickstarter. And there was about a year where I didn’t get a single call from a comic book publisher or editor. I realized, WOW, it’s been a year! I didn’t panic because I realized I was okay. I thought, “well, I guess they’re done with me, but I’m okay”. I’m firmly entrenched in what I’m doing. I don’t really necessarily need the extra work. And the funny thing was like a month later, I got a call from an editor at Valiant who I’d worked with at DC years before. And I started doing covers for Valiant, with Punk Mombo and some other things. And then I got really busy and I had to say, “listen, guys, I can only do one cover for you a month”. <laugh> Which is really weird. Like, when have I ever done that before in my life? <laughs> Never. Then Dark Horse started to call, and I started doing stuff for them. Things got really busy, but I was still doing the Kickstarter stuff. Then I launched into Patreon at my oldest daughter’s urging. I kind of flew in there by the seat of my pants. Now It’s become a big part of my life. It’s great. I get compliments from my patrons saying that I post the most content on there and it’s been a great way of engaging with people. It makes me feel great because I really don’t take it for granted. You can lose people, they can drop off, get bored, whatever. The one thing that I really hoped for with Patreon was to be able to somehow organize my commissions. That I take my private commissions into one place. It made things more manageable and that’s happened and it’s been great. So I can turn down jobs that are a little too big. Some people want really ambitious things. They don’t necessarily always wanna pay what I would need for some projects. So I can say, “no thank you”. Or steer them towards something more manageable. There’s not a lot of slots open. They come open here and there. People who are patrons are there being supportive. They’re the ones that find out first when there’s an opening and they can scooch in. On my Patreon you can start at a smaller tier where there really is a smaller art reward. And then move up to the biggest tier which we call the Rogue Tier, where you get an 11 x 17 painting. That’s not quite a cover, but a little more than a pin up. And actually sometimes it does come out looking like a cover, to be honest. Because I really don’t put a meter on the work, necessarily. I just do what’s fun. When I’m working with a patron and we’re doing something that I wanna do, I automatically want to make them happy and I wanna make myself happy. Everything that I do through Patreon or Kickstarter, they end up becoming material for another book or another project. It feeds into itself. It becomes the wheels and the train keeps rolling and you get momentum from it. I’m able to put out an artbook almost every year with stuff I’m happy with. It didn’t hack that out. I didn’t think, ” well I’m doing this for the money”, you know, because I’m a freelancer and that’s what we do. So yeah. Things have changed quite a bit.

So you have a new Nocturnals omnibus out?

Dark horse put it out the Nocturnals omnibus. Which is this new, huge oversized, collection. There’s two volumes. The first one came out in October and it’s oversized.

What’s the size of those books? Let’s measure it. It’s eight and a quarter wide by, over a foot long. The first one has 320 pages or something. The second one that just came out a week or so ago is the same size, but it has 432 pages. So don’t even ask me how they can charge $29.95 for either one of ’em. I don’t know. <laughs> I know they did that. Bernie Wrightson’s Frankenstein book back in the day was 20 bucks!

It’s a beautiful book! I think when they have a good relationship with a longstanding printer overseas and they have so much printer volume that they’re putting out. Dark Horse is big. They’re huge! They are making all kinds of great stuff. Books, comics, games, film and TV, etcetera. So they’re able to do that. And for me, what it means is exposure that I might not necessarily get from just my Kickstarter platform or social media platform. They’re out there. So that’s great and it brings in new readers. When I do put out the next Nocturnals graphic novel, which is fully penciled right now. 96 pages, I just have to paint it. Which I think I’m gonna start in the fall.

Is that normally your process with these crowdfunders? How far along do you usually work on the book before you launch the Crowdfunder?

When we launched Nocturnals: The Sinister Path graphic novel, I had about 11 pages completed and a cover. A couple of covers. So when we launched the Kickstarter, it did very well. There were delays in my schedule, which happened normally to get it out. So this time around, I don’t want to make people wait longer than they think they’re gonna wait. So even though you have a target goal you’re trying to reach, you don’t necessarily always reach it. So you try and give yourself enough time. Didn’t give ourselves enough time that time. But I feel for the amount of time that people did wait, and what they got, they got 20 or 30 more pages than they thought they were gonna get. I think it was worth it. This time around, I wanna have a lot more work done on it before we launch it. because I want less of a wait time. If I could get the bulk of it done, the artwork anyway, before we launch the Kickstarter, that would be great. Then it’s just finishing it, getting it lettered, doing the production, printing it, all that other stuff. It will seem a lot less of a wait that way. The idea of doing an artbook is to be able to put this work out that you’ve already done and without having to do a whole lot of work the entire year. So you have maybe a three or four month window in a year to work on your private stuff. That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m working with Nakatomi Inc, the guys who have done the great Bernie Wrightson Cycle of the Werewolf portfolio. The coloring book that they reprinted is beautiful and they do posters for Metallica shows. They’re out of Austin Texas and they’re awesome. Tim Doyle, the proprietor and the mastermind behind all this, and I have been talking about doing some stuff together for a while. We came up with this idea of doing an October to October calendar of the Nocturnals. So that you can have that Halloween feeling all year long. I know a lot of people after Halloween get the blues because it’s such a great night and they love it. The build up, you know, all month long, just like Christmas. So why not do something that keeps you in the mood all year round that points out important dates every month? Like when was Boris Karloff born or when did the Munsters first hit TV? And when did Rosemary’s Baby get released? Anything you can think of. You’ll find it on the calendar. The calendar is actually not 12 or 13 months. It’s 15 months because we start in October of 2022 and we go all the way to October of 2023. But then we finish out the year, the last two months of 2023. I really hope we can do ONE every year, So we’ll see.

That’d be amazing.

I love the layout. I love the images that we’ve chosen for it. It’s accompanied by a beautiful 15 piece giclee print portfolio in a box. That’s kinda the thing they do. They do these beautiful high end prints. We’re also doing really beautiful T-shirts.

I’ve had the Nocturnal shirt you did back in the day forever.

Yeah. I put out two Nocturnal shirts through Graffiti. The first one was when the Nocturnals first hit in 94 or 95, and then we did another one in 2000. They were both great shirts. I did one for the Nocturnals. I did a Nocturnals fan club kit at Comic Con one year. We did about 200 Gunwitch shirts. Those were really cool. And then we did a color one that looked like it was four colors with ink. It was a neat ringer tee. That was a while ago.

But there’s a new one on this campaign, right?

Yeah. The new one is black with gray and orange. It’s beautiful. It has the Halloween Girl, Gunwitch and Polychrome on it. You can order multiples. You don’t have to just get one. That’s another great thing about this is when you’re shopping on this Kickstarter, you can go into the add-ons and add on what you want to customize your pledge. You don’t have to just go with the big end game packages. The only two items I think that aren’t add-ons are the big, giant, massive giclee, which kind of looks like the old sort of sixties door poster sort of design. There’s a re-mark edition of the portfolio where you get an 11 x 14 plate that I do a drawing on with color, and we are only offering 31 of those. The last time I looked, I think there might be one or two left. We have only a week left on this thing. So if you want to go in and back for the calendar, the portfolio, the t-shirt, there’s a glow in the dark enamel Jacko lantern pin.

Very cool. I still have the calendar you did years ago. I’m gonna wait for those years to come back around so I can reuse it again.

That’s cool. That was pretty early on. It was a small press one. I don’t think we even did a hundred of them. I think we might have made 50 of them just to sell at shows. I’m a fan of calendars too. I do the same thing. I have Jeff Jones calendars from the seventies. Sometimes the year will come back around, I’ll still flip ’em over every month. I hang them in my laundry room, I go in there when I’m doing laundry, and I flip ’em over to make sure they’re on the right month. So yeah I love looking at them and it brings me back and some of my calendars from the nineties. I have my work schedule written in so I can go back and see what my quota was at the time. Like when Thrill Killer comic pages were due or Giant Killer, Nocturnals or you know, some cover was due and I can go back. Cause that’s how I used to do it. I used to write it on a physical calendar instead of my phone. It does bring back the memories and that’s another thing about this calendar. It is one that, when you open it, the image goes down past the bleed. So you have a much bigger image of the cover. We didn’t have to crop anything which is really nice. It’s always kind of a pain to see an image that was cropped just to fit that square, you know? So I’m excited about the October Epoch.

How was your Mad Monster Party in Arizona show?

I really had a great time at the Mad Monster Party in Arizona last weekend!

My God! That line at the door was just crazy, the line went around the building! <Laugh>

The line Neve Campbell was immense all day. I was sitting right next to Nick castle. He had a long line the whole time. I got to talk to him a little bit in the green room at lunch. He came in to sign 240 Michael Myers masks for some auction thing. I asked him a few questions and to be honest, just between you and me and everyone who’s reading this, I had forgotten that Nick Castle directed the Last Starfighter. I haven’t seen that movie in so long and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I went and I looked up his films, he’s this super accomplished director of all these great films. He’s kind of a giant in a way and he’s still such a nice guy. Like he doesn’t have to do any of this stuff. He really doesn’t have to. He’s just enjoying being a part of the group of people that feel the same way about this stuff. I think that’s pretty awesome. That’s how I felt being there. I felt like this one hit me like in a way that my first big convention hit me. All these people are not like the people I see at the grocery store, or the mall, or the post office. They are all people who get the stuff that’s inside my head that I don’t talk about during the day with the normal person, you know? They can tell you who directed this film or, you know, who wrote the adaptation for that film or what this character is. We’re all in it together in the same thing.

That’s how it all started when we started Mad Monster. We wanted it to feel not like a convention as much as like a fan club party where everybody’s meeting up to hang out. What conventions originally started out as just small groups of people. It’s grown. Especially the Arizona show. So people that are on the west coast could get out to something that wouldn’t be so far to travel. It wasn’t quite as big as the Charlotte, North Carolina one, but now it’s massive! It almost seems like it might be eclipsing the other one. But I could be wrong.

<laugh> I don’t know. I’ve only done the one, but I know that it was in a great hotel. I love it when they’re all together in one place, you don’t have to go outside in the 115 degree heat. Yeah. It turned out that weekend, I didn’t step foot outside the entire day, only at night to go eat. I was busy all day, but right. It’s like Eben says, “It’s a party. It’s supposed to be a party atmosphere. It’s supposed to be festive.” And it really is. Yeah. I love that. When the shows become about exclusives, and running around trying to buy this and that. It’s like San Diego has become a gigantic nerd mall, people stampeding past all the comic book artists who are only given space at the con so they don’t lose their not-for-profit status. I’m sorry. It’s true. You know? You don’t get that feeling from a Mad Monster Party show. And from quite a few other shows, Wonder Con still feels like a comic convention. It feels like San Diego used to feel like. And so I would be happy to go to Wonder Con again. For that reason, it doesn’t take place in where the hotel is like Wonder Con originally did, when it was in Oakland. Which was when it was the best. But it’s so close to all the other places there in Anaheim. So I mean, if you’re gonna move it away from its original location in Oakland, I think Anaheim’s a good spot. Plus it’s huge, but not too huge.

I went to the Oakland one. I think the last year they had it was there. It was pretty fun.

Yeah, When I was still in art school I went to WonderCon in 1988. It’ll always be special to me because that’s where I got my first work meeting editors.

That was a great time for conventions.

Yeah, It was pretty amazing. Things have changed quite a bit. Social media helps. Kickstarter is a huge help. Patreon has been really fun! It’s nice to have the kind of sustained and consistent support of people who love what you’re doing and support what you’re doing. You’re not completely cutting out a middle man, cause you’re still dealing with the platform. But they make it hell of a lot easier. You can actually make a living being an artist and not necessarily feel like you’re stressfully trying to make ends meet every month. Which there was a time, especially in the early two thousands. It was like that, it was very stressful. You ended up taking jobs that paid very little. Sometimes you were treated not great. All that stuff is pretty much, knock on wood. It’s something I can put behind myself and focus on being creative. When I have an idea for something, I don’t have to go hat in hand to somebody and ask permission. I can float it to some people, get some good feedback, and you know? Just take a shot cause with kickstarter, I mean the worst thing can happen is all bets are off. You start over.

You’re going directly to your fans too.

Yeah.

Always the best way to go I think.

I make them happy, and myself. I do a lot more than just sit and draw, you know? I’m customer service to a degree. I’m the face of things. I engage with people. I’m not one of those people that’s hard to get a hold of. I’m busy, but at the same time, it pays off to keep in touch with people and be communicative with people. I mean, communication’s key with these kinds of things. You can’t just let people dangle and yeah. If they have a problem, you have to solve it, and you don’t get mad at anybody because they have a problem. Solve the problem, move on, and everyone’s happy. I’m happy to do it. I’m really excited about this new project.

Yeah, it looks awesome and it looks like it’s doing really well.

Yeah. We have a week to go. What happens usually in the last week is you have some people who back out and then you have other people come in. So there’s still great rewards in play. Like the original art reward. We’re also getting ready to ramp up the original art rewards with some drawings that we’re going to be adding in the next 24 hours I think. I’ve handpicked some drawings that I’ve done to offer up in tandem with the other goodies. So that’s gonna be really exciting to see fans respond to those. Because I think having a chance to get original art through the Kickstarter campaign is a huge feature of it.

Definitely!

I try to make as much available as I can. The newest book just showed up on my doorstep from the printer. The art book ‘By the Blade’. We’re gonna be sending those out before too long and the book’s stretch rewards. Sketches, watercolors, and other rewards. I’m tackling that right now. So it’s fun! It creates new material for the next whatever I end up doing.

That’s excellent.

The machine wheels keep turning.

Thank you for giving us some time out of your day. You’re a busy man.

My pleasure. It was great to catch up with you too.

Click HERE to back “Dan Brereton’s NOCTURNALS OCTOBER EPOCH Calendar & Portfolio” on Kickstarter. It ends Monday the 25th don’t miss out on this campaign FRIENDS! Pick up Nocturnals Omnibus anywhere the books are sold online or at your local comic shop. Be sure to check out his Patreon page. https://www.patreon.com/danbrereton_nocturnals