An Interview with Danny Hellman

“Pretending to be living people is fun but perilous, pretending to be imaginary people is fun and far less risky.”

Two Faces Danny Hellman Did Not Like Drawing:
Kevin Costner’s, circa Waterworld (1995)
William Shatner’s, circa TJ Hooker (1982)

At some point in the late nineties, a series of letters began arriving at the NYPress, the alternative weekly where I was working as a staff writer. It took five or six weeks, after dutifully running the letters in the mail section, for the paper’s editors to notice each of the letters seemed to have been written off the same template. Each was written by a woman of different ethnic origin, who had been deeply offended by an innocuous story in the previous issue, using that as an excuse to launch a vicious assault on the paper as a whole. Read them individually, and they seemed utterly sincere. Read them all together, and it was obvious they were a prank. When the editors finally recognized this, and furthermore learned who was penning the weekly angry missives, the last of the series ran under the headline “Good Career Move.”

I first met Danny Hellman at the Press a few years earlier. Hellman was one of the paper’s foremost illustrators, at a time when the Press boasted a staggering array of notable artists from the world of indie comics, including Tony Millionaire, Kaz, Sam Henderson, Michael Kupperman, Russel Christian, and Ben Katchor. They all had unique styles, all were blessed with their own brilliance, but Hellman’s illustrations were unmistakable, marked by clean lines, perfect detail, and a seemingly natural facility for sharp caricature. Apart from the commercial illustration work, he was also a cartoonist, drawing occasional strips for SCREW magazine, contributing toThe Big Book Of… anthology series, putting out his own mini comic, Peaceful Atom and the Mystery Mice, and even doing an issue of Aquaman for DC. Unfettered by the constraints of editorial illustration, when his imagination was given free reign, Hellman’s work could get pretty fucking twisted.

I hadn’t seen Danny in over a decade, and being blind can’t see him now, but to my mind he will always be a slightly paunchy fellow, bespectacled and bald save for an emoticon of facial hair. He’s a smart and funny guy, an odd mix of the comfortable and intense, both self-possessed and low-key. He seemed to know everybody and, I would later learn, was an inveterate prankster. Those letters to the NYPress were just a hint of the trouble to come.

In 1999, Village Voice cartoonist Ted Rall wrote a Voice cover story...