Daniel Hooker at Motor City Comic Con 2024 [Interview]

Mixing art, education, and a lot of passions, Daniel Hooker tells us what makes his work stick

Daniel Hooker’s booth at November 2024’s Motor City Comic Con has A LOT of different types of media. From zines to comics, art to board games, the Artist has woven his career along a non-traditional path. I had the chance to speak to him at the expo, and enjoyed chatting about the breadths of his work.

Q: Tell me all about you and a little about your influences, because I was immediately drawn (no pun intended) to your artwork.

Yes, I grew up reading comics and watching anime and cartoons and everything, so artistically I feel like I have like an amalgamation of Eastern and Western influences that have really played into what I’ve developed today. I really love just working on different projects; I try to come up with something new every year to keep me flexible, so I’ve done tabletop games, I’ve done graphic novels, 
I’ve done video games. It’s just fun to look at all the different ways that we can embrace storytelling.

Q: It’s apparent that you have a lot of different kinds of work here, from your tabletop card game, to sketches to your graphic novel. Tell me a little bit about some of these. How did you develop the graphic novel?

Okay, so the graphic novel Line of Ruin is a mystery adventure about a girl named Deirdre. 
She gets kidnapped and taken to a strange world and has to go on quest to figure out who she is, how she got there and how to get back home. It’s sort of an isekai story influenced by like Labyrinth, the old 1980s David Bowie movie. Spirited Away is one of my favorite Ghibli movies, so that was a big impetus for me.

Q: And your tabletop game?

Mermaid Mayhem is a battle mermaid card game where you and the other players go head-to-head against each other as well as against monsters and bosses in the deck and race for treasure. The game came about because I had been doing Mermay for a number of years — for those I don’t know what it is, iIt’s a month where everyone draws mermaids. It’s super fun. And one year I decided I was gonna do battle mermaids, and then just at the end of the month, when I had this big sack of battle mermaid, several people said, “we would love to use those if they were in some sort of game.” So, during the 2020 era when people were pulled up at home, I wanted a project to work on and so I said, let’s do it, 
let’s make a game out of this.

Q: Is that the only one you’ve developed?

As far as tabletop games, I have some other ones I’m working on. I won’t go into too much detail, since some of them I’m sure will definitely never see the lot of the day. I have got some other projects that we’re kicking around and, currently, I’m not publicly advertising it yet, but I have a visual novel that I’ve been writing and illustrating that it is kind about halfway done. I’m still looking at how I’m distributing that once it’s complete, but that’s my current project that I’ve been been hitting in my downtime.

Q: How long have you been illustrating and creating professionally?

I jumped into this professionally about 10 years ago, and since then, I’ve done a number of other comics. I did a graphic novel for the National Center on Improving Literacy about a young girl with dyslexia who has super powers that are tied into her dyslexia, called The Kayla Chronicles. 
I’m doing another series of kids books for them as well about her little brother called The Andre Chronicles, and I’ve got a number of other comics out there.

Q: What kind of schooling did you take for for illustration?

I went to Florida State University for graphic design. The program at the time, I think was just called Studio Art and it just kind of incompassed anyone who is into art. And when I did that, I came out and got a job working on a website. I did that for many years, but illustration had always been my passion. 
And so about 10 years ago I said, “You know what? Let’s make that shift.” And I’ve been doing that, and it’s been really cool.

You can follow Daniel Hooker and his work at his website.