The art of Daniel Danger
[Image ID: Daniel Danger's art print, 'To all who home to this happy place,' depicting a ruined Disneyland castle in a post-apocalyptic landscape with a statue of Walt and Mickey in the rubble.]
There’s this behavioral economics study that completely changed the way i thought about art, teaching, and critique: it’s a 1993 study called “Introspecting about Reasons can Reduce Post-Choice Satisfaction” by Timothy D Wilson, Douglas J Lisle, Jonathan Schooler, Sara Hodges, Kristen Klaaren and Suzanne LaFleur:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240281868_Introspecting_about_Reasons_can_Reduce_Post-Choice_Satisfaction
The experimenters asked subjects to preference-rank some art posters; half the posters were cute cartoony posters, and the other half were fine art posters. One group of subjects assigned a simple numeric rank to the posters, and the other had to rank them and explain their ranking. Once they were done, they got to keep their posters.
There was a stark difference in the two groups’ preferences: the group that had to explain their choices picked the cartoony images, while the group that basically got to point at their favorite and say, “Ooh, I like that!” chose the fine art posters.
Then, months later, the experimenters followed up and asked the subjects what they’d done with the poster they got to take home. The ones who’d had to explain their choices and had brought home cartoony images had thrown those posters away. The ones who didn’t have to explain what they liked about their choice, who’d chosen fine art, had hung them up at home and kept them there.
The implication is that it’s hard to explain what makes art good, and the better art is, the harder it is to put your finger on what makes it so good. More: the obvious, easy-to-articulate virtues of art are the less important virtues. Art’s virtues are easy to spot and hard to explain.
The reason this stuck with me is that I learned to be a writer through writing workshops where we would go around in a circle and explain what we liked and didn’t like about someone’s story, and suggest ways to make it better. I started as a teenager in workshops organized by Judith Merril in Toronto, then through my high-school workshop (which Judy had actually founded a decade-plus earlier through a writer in the schools grant), and then at the Clarion workshop in 1992. I went on to teach many of these workshops: Clarion, Clarion West and Viable Paradise.
So I’ve spent a lot of time trying to explain what was and wasn’t good about other peoples’ art (and my own!), and how to make it better. There’s a kind of checklist to help with this: when a story is falling short in some way, writers roll out these “rules” for what makes for good and bad prose. There are a bunch of these rulesets (think of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style), including some genre-specific ones like the Turkey City Lexicon:
https://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/18/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer-for-sf-workshops/
A few years ago, I was teaching on the Writing Excuses cruise and a student said something like, “Hey, I know all these rules for writing good stories, but I keep reading these stories I really like and they break the rules. When can I break the rules?”
There’s a stock answer a writing teacher is supposed to give here: “Well, first you have to master the rules, then you can break them. You can’t improvise a jazz solo without first learning your scales.”
But in that moment, I thought back to the study with the posters and I had a revelation. These weren’t “rules” at all — they were just things that are hard and therefore easy to screw up. No one really knows why a story isn’t working, but they absolutely know when it doesn’t, and so, like the experimental subject called upon to explain their preferences, they reach for simple answers: “there’s too much exposition,” or “you don’t foreshadow the ending enough.”
There are lots of amazing stories that are full of exposition (readers of mine will not be shocked to learn I hold this view). There are lots of twist endings that are incredible — and not despite coming out of left field, but because of it.
The thing is, if you can’t say what’s wrong, but you know something is wrong, it’s perfectly reasonable to say, “Well, why don’t you try to replace or polish the things that are hardest to do right. Whatever it is that isn’t working here, chances are it’s the thing that’s hardest to make work”:
https://locusmag.com/2020/05/cory-doctorow-rules-for-writers/
But if I could change one thing about how we talk about writing and its “rules,” it would be to draw this distinction, characterizing certain literary feats as easier to screw up than others, having the humility to admit that we just don’t know what’s wrong with a story, and then helping the writer create probabilistically ranked lists of the things they could tinker with to try and improve their execution.
Which is all a very, very long-winded way to explain why I bought a giant, gorgeous art-print at Comic-Con this weekend, even though I have nowhere to hang it and had sworn I would absolutely not buy any art at the con.
I was walking the floor, peeking into booths, when I happened on Daniel Danger’s booth (#5034, if you’re at the con today), and I was just fuckin’ poleaxed by his work.
http://www.tinymediaempire.com/
[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘It stopped being about the panic,’ depicting a ruined mansion interwoven with the skeletal branches of a tree, with a weeping statue and two human figures]
Now, see above. I can’t tell you why I loved this work so much (and that’s OK!), but boy oh boy did it speak to me. I just kind of stood there with my mouth open, slowly moving from print to print, admiring works like “It stopped being about the panic.”
https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/2022-sdcc-it-stopped-being-about-the-panic-v4
[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘headlight in the path of,’ depicting a ruined mall with a pair of stags standing at the top of the escalator.]
On the surface, this is moody, post-apocalyptic stuff, heavily influenced by classic monster/haunter tropes, but it’s shot through with hope and renewal and the sense of something beautiful growing out of the ashes of something that has toppled. There’s real “(Nothing But) Flowers” energy in “Headlight in the path of”:
https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/sdcc2023-headlight-in-the-path-of-v2
[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘We are no longer able to protect you,’ depicting a ruined factory with a coming-apart sign reading ‘We can no longer protect you forever,’ and a statue of a sword-bearing angel.]
Danger isn’t just a
very
talented artist, he’s also an
extremely
talented craftsman. As a recovering pre-press geek, I was (nearly) as impressed by the wild use of spot color and foils as I was by the art, like in “We are no longer able to protect you”:
https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/sdcc-2022-we-can-no-longer-protect-you-forever-v3
[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘made of smoke and chains,’ depicting a ruined landscape with a pair of derelict subway trains at the foot of a hill on whose peak is a rotting mansion. A pair of human figures, holding hands, are approaching the mansion.]
Danger himself calls this work “weird sad hyper-detailed artwork of dreamy buildings of ghosts and trees,” which is a very apt description of this work, as you can see in “Made of smoke and chains”:
https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/made-of-smoke-and-chains-mist-preorder
So I looked at this stuff and sternly reminded myself that there was no way I was going to buy any art at the con. Then I walked away. I got about two aisles over when I realized I had to go back and ask permission to take some pictures so I could put a little link to Danger in my blog’s linkdump, which he graciously permitted:
https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=interestingness-desc&safe_search=1&tags=danieldanger&min_taken_date=1687478400&max_taken_date=1690156799&view_all=1
[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s art print, ‘To all who home to this happy place,’ depicting a ruined Disneyland castle in a post-apocalyptic landscape with a statue of Walt and Mickey in the rubble.]
But then I got all the way ass over to the other ass end of the convention center and I realized I had to go back and buy one of these prints. Which I did, “To all who come to this happy place,” because fuckin’ wow:
https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/sdcc2023-this-happy-place-v6-foil
This was unequivocally the best thing I saw at this year’s SDCC, but I also got some very good news while there, namely, that Emil Ferris’s long, long-awaited My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Vol 2 is finally on the schedule from Fantagraphics:
https://www.fantagraphics.com/collections/emil-ferris/products/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-book-two
It’s coming out in April, which gives you plenty of time to read volume one, which I called, “a haunting diary of a young girl as a dazzling graphic novel”:
https://memex.craphound.com/2017/06/20/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-a-haunting-diary-of-a-young-girl-as-a-dazzling-graphic-novel/
If you are or were a monster kid or a haunter, this is your goddamned must-read of the summer. It’s a fully queered, stunning memoir for anyone whose erotic imagination intersected with Famous Monsters of Filmland.
(Also, if you’re that kind of person and you’re in the region, you should know about Midsummer Scream, a giant haunter show in Long Beach; I’ll be there on Sunday, July 30, for a panel about the Ghost Post, the legendary Haunted Mansion puzzle-boxes I helped make:
https://midsummerscream.org/
Now Favorite Thing book two was the best news, but the best experience was watching Felicia Day get her Inkpot Award and give a moving speech:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkpot_Award
And then learning that Raina Telgemeier also got an Inkpot; I love Raina’s work so much:
https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/04/ghosts-raina-telgemeiers-upbeat-tale-of-death-assimilation-and-cystic-fibrosis/
[Image ID: A photo of me with Chuck Tingle, who wears a pink bag over his head on which he has written ‘Love is Real.’]
To cap yesterday off, I also ran into @ChuckTingle, which is as fine a capstone to a successful con as anyone could ask for:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53065500076/in/dateposted/
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/23/but-i-know-what-i-like/#daniel-danger
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"I see you, and I love you" + hurt/comfort ; requested by @oops-i-dropped-the-galaxy!
Danny can handle being a halfa. He’s had years to get used to it, switching between dead and alive, living boy and ghost, always living in flux. He’s settled into his identity as one of the few halfas in existence, navigating the living world and the Infinite Realms with ease after years of practice.
What he can’t handle is becoming an Ancient.
Apparently, while most Ancients are born into the role, ruling over their domain, some can grow into it. It’s rare, practically unheard of, but not impossible.
Danny is growing into the Ancient of Stars, changed from the inside out by his love of space.
He would be happy if it didn’t hurt so much.
Danny can’t sleep at night anymore. When the stars are out, he can hear them singing, each windchime voice echoing through his ears. Though he can’t see them from beneath Gotham’s cloud cover, he can feel them shining brightly far above him.
He lays in bed with Duke, curled up in his side, trying to muffle his whimpers as his bones creak and hollow, his soul growing too large for his body to handle. He is space contained in a human body. It wants to be free, to stretch from its suffocating confines and fill every dark space with cold light. His skin feels too tight and his teeth ache.
All Danny can do is clench his jaw, wrap his arms around his stomach as tightly as he can, and try to weather through the pain of changing.
The agony of it comes in waves. He doesn’t know how long it takes until it recedes enough for him to feel like he can breathe again, trying to suck air in as his lungs are crushed by his ribcage. Slowly, Danny pushes himself up, taking care not to wake Duke, and stumbles out of bed. His throat is dry and feels as if its been scraped raw by sandpaper, and all he wants is water.
He gets halfway down the hall when the next wave hits.
Danny collapses, gasping for breath, and can only watch through tear-filled eyes as his fingers go dark, the same black as deep space. His body shifts, bones cracking and muscles stretching like taffy, and suddenly he’s big larger than life a galaxy a black hole there is darkness everywhere it is alive it is full of stars the stars are singing the stars are singing the stars are si
“Danny? Hey, sweetheart, are you okay?”
That’s Duke’s voice. He’d recognize it anywhere, even from miles away, even when he’s sure he doesn’t have ears anymore. It takes all his effort to pull himself back to Earth, back into their apartment, blinking up at Duke as the stars in his eyes fade away.
Duke kneels before him, concern clear on his face, gentle hands reaching out to hold Danny steady. The feel of his warmth grounds him, keeps him more securely in his body. The pull of space is still there, tugging at him, trying to pull him out of humanity and into the form of an Ancient, but Danny can resist it so long as Duke keeps him tethered to the ground.
“It hurts,” he croaks, shivering.
“Shh, I know, baby. How can I help? What do you need?”
Danny leans forward, burying his face in Duke’s chest as tears slip out of his eyes. “It hurts,” he says again, voice shaking. “I keep changing and growing and my entire body is being torn apart and—” he gasps, cutting himself off. “I keep disappearing. I don’t want to disappear. I want to stay here but it takes me away and then I’m too big and no one can see me and I’m alone—”
“You’re not alone, Danny,” Duke says, holding him tightly as if his arms will be enough to keep Danny from breaking out of his own body, ridding himself of a mortal vessel, his only remaining tie to this world. “I see you, and I love you. Even if you have to change and go far away to be happy, I’ll find a way to follow you there, okay? I’m with you for as long as you want me.”
“I don’t want to hurt so much,” Danny whimpers, black fingers speckled with stardust clawing at Duke’s arms.
“Just breathe through it, sweetheart, you can do it. Let it pass through you. I got you, okay? Just let the pain pass and you’ll be fine.”
He wants to snap at Duke that it’s not fine, that the pain will be forever, it’ll linger in every one of his joints, that he can’t just stop fighting it because it’ll hurt even worse then. But his jaws are aching, his teeth sharpening, and there’s a black hole in his throat that he refuses to let loose. He lets out another pained whine, shivering, and in his chest a star is formed, burning bright and angry.
“Breathe, Danny, breathe,” Duke soothes, rubbing a hand up and down Danny’s back.
It’s habit to relax into his touch. They’ve spent so many nights working through night terrors and injuries, comforting each other through gentle touches. The pain eases a bit, and Danny sighs, frost on his breath.
“There we go, sweetheart, that’s it. You’re doing just fine.”
Another tear slips down his face, but the ache in his entire body as his growing ghost form tries to escape begins to fade.
He’s spent so many nights in pain, waiting for the sun to rise to muffle the singing of the stars. If he can get any relief, he’ll take it, even if it means losing his human form.
Danny stops fighting. His resistance to this change falls away. There’s a moment where the pain disappears entirely, the world going still, but before he can let out a relieved sigh, the change hits him like an asteroid, sudden and instant and inevitable.
A cry is ripped from his throat, but it doesn’t sound like him. It echoes, deep and inhuman, and suddenly Danny is every dark space surrounding the stars, the arms of every galaxy, suns burning bright and dying, supernova, cold and ice and the slow drifting of planets in orbit. His body grows, expands, no longer a ghost but an Ancient, body curling into itself to stay within the walls of the too small apartment, large hands cupped around Duke to keep him safe.
He can feel the cold of space. Orbits dance in his mind. Meteorites and asteroids drift without pattern across his chest. Danny can see everything with too many eyes, and he can cup planets in his palms, so much larger than possibility. His chest opens and expands and his body can curl around Earth and keep it safe.
He feels settled in this new body, senses stretched in every direction and the universe is so much lovelier than he could have ever experienced it in a halfa’s body.
Danny, Ancient of the Stars, hums and the universe shivers, singing back to him.
The pain is gone completely. He wonders why he resisted so hard; this is what he’s meant to be. He’s never felt so right before.
“Danny?”
Duke’s voice is small, but only because he is small when compared to Danny in his Ancient form.
Duke, he tries to say but his vocal chords have changed. Instead of words, a deep hum erupts from his throat, similar to the purr of a particularly large cat.
“Hey, sweetheart. Feeling better?”
Danny nods, pulling himself back together to feel his body more keenly, no longer stretched across the universe, cradling every star in his reach. Duke reaches a hand up and Danny reaches back, folding himself back into his body. His human eyes return and he realizes the apartment is completely covered in darkness with stars sparkling all around them. It recedes as he fits himself back into his body, the black on his fingers fading away until his hand is indistinguishable from a normal human’s.
He takes hold of Duke’s hand and tries to stand. His legs are weak and unsteady and he falls onto Duke, who catches him with ease and sweeps him up into a princess carry.
“There you are, honey,” Duke says, voice warm and relieved. “You alright?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I feel a lot better.”
“Good. Do you need anything? Hot chocolate, heating pad, sleep?”
Danny thinks for a moment, then says, “Hot chocolate.”
“You got it. Let me just set you on the couch and I’ll have it out in a minute.”
He carefully sets Danny onto the couch, then tucks the blanket they keep folded over the back around him. Once he’s satisfied Danny is comfortable, Duke heads to the kitchen, flicking on the light as he does.
Danny sinks into the couch cushions, carefully moving all his fingers and toes to make sure they’re fine. He’s a little sore, as if all his bones where put through the ringer, but it doesn’t feel any different from when he has a particularly rough training day.
What’s more important that his physical body is the fact that he can feel his core, settled deep in his chest. It’s no longer the cold of ice, but it burns coldness, a white star embodying his soul, a changed core to reflect his transformation into an Ancient.
A baby Ancient, technically. He still has some growing to do, but the rest should be easier and, hopefully, less painful.
He closes his eyes and begins to drift off when he hears Duke return. It takes some effort to open his eyes, and his smiles softly and sleepily when he sees Duke set down two steaming mugs of hot chocolate on the coffee table.
“Love you,” he mumbles, freeing a hand from the blanket to try to pull Duke down to join him.
Duke goes to him easily, sitting next to him and pulling Danny in to cuddle against him. It’s been so long since he last felt so comfortable at night, not writhing in pain and biting through his lip to keep quiet, that he can’t help but sink into it. A purr starts up in his chest, and Duke startles.
“Sweetheart, are you purring?”
Danny flushes and tries to hide his face. The purr doesn’t stop. He’s always been able to purr after becoming a halfa, though purr is just an easier way to describe it. It’s less of his vocal chords vibrating and more of his core rumbling in contentment. Usually, it’s unnoticeable, barely able to be felt let alone heard. Apparently, becoming an Ancient and therefore a much stronger ghost means his purrs are also stronger and louder.
“You’re so cute,” Duke says, pressing a kiss against Danny’s forehead. “Drink your hot chocolate, and then we can go back to sleep.”
He makes grabby hands at his mug, and Duke laughs and picks it up for him.
“Love you,” Danny repeats, voice less muffled.
“Love you, too,” Duke says. “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
“I’m glad you were there to help me. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“It’s a good thing you’ll never have to find out. I’ve got you, sweetheart, always.”
Believing him is the easiest thing Danny has ever done. If Duke says he’ll be there for, then he will.
Always, always, always.
.
.
.
[send me ghostlights prompts!]
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