CO-OP / CONDO ART: MEET DANNY HELLMAN

"I really loved doing the 'Marvel' cover" of the September 2009 Habitat, Hellman says. The visually striking work came about when editorial director Tom Soter and art director Michael Gentile were inspired to create a colorful cover based on classic, ktischy 1960s Marvel Comics art. Gentile "came to me with a composite of Marvel Comics that he'd pieced together," and Hellman, a childhood fan, knew just the look that was needed.

"I grew up reading comics and loved Mad magazine and Marvel Comics," the 45-year-old says. "My favorites were [Marvel artists] Jack Kirby and Jim Steranko, and all the guys at Mad: Paul Coker Jr. I thought was a really magical illustrator, and Mort Drucker — it's amazing how talented those guy were. More of them than not were just brilliant draftsmen."

His other great influence? "I really dug Will Eisner when [the writer-artist's pioneering 1978 graphic novel] A Contract with God came out. After that I got every Eisner thing I could get my hands on. There might be more Will Eisner influence in my style than I'm willing to immediately admit to!" Hellman says lightheartedly. "I appreciate the way he handles figures, the way that people move and the expressiveness of his faces. He's just great at capturing a wide range of human emotion."

Hellman's not so bad at that himself, as this gallery of some of his Habitat work — complete, uncropped and, in the case of our new cover ( above; click to enlarge, click again to close), sans logo and typography — shows. His blend of cartoon fluidity, incisive caricature and a gravitas leavened by a sense of whimsy is instantly recognizable, and looks like no one else's.

Getting "Co-opted"

Raised in Queens, New York City, and now living with his wife and young daughter in a Park Slope, Brooklyn, co-op they bought in 2006, Hellman graduated from Manhattan's High School of Art & Design. He briefly attended the School of Visual Arts before dropping out to to log in time as a bicycle messenger while trying to make it as a commercial illustrator. His posters for local rock bands eventually landed him work in publisher Al Goldstein's nostalgically infamous New York weekly Screw, after which he came to the attention of another weekly, New York Press — where the art director at the time was our own Michael Gentile.

"He's one of the people who gave me my start," the ever-loyal Hellman says. "I immediately struck up a long-lasting working relationship with Michael. I'd follow him anywhere."

Apropos of the current cover, Hellman also draws occasionally for comics. In the 1990s, he self-published "minicomics," and later drew an Aquaman story for DC Comics and several one-page strips for DC's Paradox Press "Big Books of" series of whimsical trade paperbacks, which depict real historical events and oddities in such themed collections as T he Big Book of Urban Legends (1994), The Big Book of Conspiracies (1995) and The Big Book of the ' 70s (2000), three of the many to which Hellman contributed. He's also edited and published his own critically well-received anthologies of alternative comics, Legal Action Comics Volumes One & Two (2000 and 2004) and Typhon (2008).

Of Brooklyn and Boards

He knows Habitat's subject matter well: His wife is treasurer of their eight-unit co-op. "It's a pretty small board," he says. "Different chores get rotated, so we just had our stint on the garbage shift, hauling garbage cans out to the street once a week. There can be a little bit of squabbling" in the self-managed co-op "when someone has a repair project they want to get done and they need to win everybody over to their position, but it seems to be working fine. Everybody in the building gets along."

And how is it illustrating such amorphous topics as forbidding illegal sublets and protecting your reserve fund?

"Luckily for me, Michael usually comes to me with a sketch or at least a pretty well-formed concept in mind," Hellman says. "With something like co-op board issues and things, I like to have Michael come to me with the concept. Because then," he half-jokes, "I can put my brain on hold and let my hands do the work!"

 

Here and on the next page, see some of Danny Hellman's Habitat images. Click on any to enlarge, click on them a second time to close.