We really hope we don’t have to tell you who Daniel Warren Johnson is.  By now, hopefully, you’re already well versed in his work, starting with SPACE MULLET, then GHOST FLEET, then ALABASTER (all from Dark Horse), and soon his newest original series EXTREMITY (coming in March from Image).  If you’re properly up to speed on this amazing talent, you’ll also have a warm familiarity with his Star Wars fan short comic GREEN LEADER and his Star Trek fan short MARTOK.

But if, somehow, you don’t know his stuff, we’re here to help you fix that.

Probably one of the biggest things in Daniel’s life that made him want to draw was reading Calvin and Hobbes.  He had never seen so much dynamic movement on a comic page before.  Watterson’s characters were the first comics he was exposed to, and the influence still fuels him today.  He went to college to be an art teacher, and did that for a few years, although he was never passionate about it.

Finally, with the support of his wife, he quit his teaching job and gave comics and illustration a fulltime shot.  At first he took any sort of visual or graphic design job he could, while creating the webcomic SPACE-MULLET on the side.  He did that for a year and a half until Space-Mullet was noticed by Dark Horse, who hired him to do an EVE:ONLINE comic, which led to even more work, including the excellent GHOST FLEET with writer Donny Cates.

Since then, he’s done work for DC, Marvel, BOOM, and Image.

Privately, he has always wanted to do a Star Wars: Rogue Squadron book, a passion that was evident with his fan-fiction comic short, GREEN LEADER.  He just loves drawing those ships!  He’d also love doing something in the Aliens, Predator, or Judge Dredd worlds.  Considering the amazing work he’s putting out, we don’t see anything from getting in the way of those dreams…

He credits a ton of influences and inspirations, from comic artists to painters.  He tries to keep things rounded, not wanting to be fueled only by his own medium.  Sometimes, if the drawings just aren’t working on a certain day, he’ll take a ride on the public transit system and sketch people for a few hours.  That helps him break out of his own head.  He loves the feeling of pencil, pen, and brush on paper, and likes the idea of pages getting old and yellow.  He likes figuring out how to speed up the process of the traditional medium, like using ten point dividers for perspective, etc.

He most recently completed the 5-issue series ALABASTER: THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE BIRD for Dark Horse before beginning work on his newest, current original project, EXTREMITY, a post-apocalyptic tale of revenge which has been described as “Mad Max if produced by Studio Ghibli”, debuting in March from Image’s Skybound.