Dan Watters

[INTRO TAG — pre-recorded]

Dan Watters [00:00:00]:
Hi. I’m Dan Watters, writer of various comic books, and I’m on Splash Babies.

Carrie [00:00:06]:
We have an amazing guest who I’ve read a ton of stuff by and I’m thrilled to have on. Ratatoskr is not so thrilled about waking up, but he never is. So he’s got some gin going today. We’ll figure it out. I was hoping he’d just go with a mimosa, but, you know, squirrels. But yeah. Happy Saturday. I’m awake. This is unusual, but I’m getting used to it now. And to talk more about our guest, let’s go see how Drew’s doing.

Drew [00:00:35]:
Okay. God, both of you stop talking so loud. It’s so bright. Hey, everybody. No. It’s Saturday, not Tuesday. You didn’t sleep that long. But all jokes aside, everybody, we have a great guest here. Like Carrie said, we’ve all been reading some of his work. He’s totally killing it in a lot of projects. Currently, you’ve seen him working on Nightwing. He’s also killing it on Batman: Dark Patterns with the great Hayden Sherman. He’s also done Creature from the Black Lagoon Lives with his constant collaborator Ram V. I believe it’s either One Hand or Six Fingers — one of those, he did. But it was together with Ram V. Point is, he’s done a lot of good stuff. He’s very badass. He’s very chill. He’s in New York right now and he’s joining us. Everybody, the one, the only, Dan Watters.

Dan Watters [00:01:42]:
Yeah. And I thank you for having me.

Leo [00:01:43]:
Hopefully, you’re getting some of that nice New York weather.

Drew [00:01:49]:
Goddamn it, Leo. I do wanna say this for our guest — I think that’s probably the most succinct intro ever. It was like, “I’ve written stuff. You’re on Splash Pages.” He gets right to the point. I love that.

Dan Watters [00:02:06]:
It’s about clarity and cutting out adjectives.

Drew [00:02:11]:
Yeah. Well, thank you for joining us. Carrie, do you wanna start? There’s so much our guest has written. I feel like we should just pick a pin and go. Where do you wanna start?

Carrie [00:02:32]:
Can we go — I’d really like to talk about Six Fingers and One Hand and how they tied together, because that was such brilliant storytelling. You and Ram V had to be working together in very detailed ways, with the artwork and everything else. How did the idea come together? Had you planned it out, or were you selected to work together?

Dan Watters [00:03:04]:
No. It was very much our thing. We’ve been circling together, just chatting about various things and recommending each other podcasts and books and things. And then at 3AM, he just dropped me a message and was like, “I just had this idea, but it needs to be two stories and two books. I know what one side is, but I think you need to write the other side and figure out what that is.” So, annoyingly, that was kinda his idea. But we then took two or three years before we actually started making it, actually started putting a team together. So it had a long gestation period, and we would talk about it a lot, and it morphed into what it was over time. Which sometimes is nice — to let something sit and grow before you put pen to paper, because in comics it’s not often like that.

Carrie [00:04:17]:
Well, it’s obvious you guys spent a lot of time on it because the intricacies involved are just insane. I was getting so excited — oh, I gotta read what’s next. Oh, which one’s next?

Dan Watters [00:04:32]:
Yeah. It was definitely like a relay.

Carrie [00:04:39]:
Yeah. If you guys haven’t read it, it’s a mind-blowing detective story and killer story, but there’s a whole weird secret society type feel to it, with clues and hints from murders. It has to do with hands, and people can travel through things. I don’t want to give it away too much because you have to alternate reading both books to keep up with both sides of the story. But it’s beautiful and wonderfully done and just very, very smart storytelling.

Dan Watters [00:05:22]:
Oh, thank you. Yeah. We didn’t wanna go formalism first, but there was definitely an idea that we wanted to tell three stories through two books — where if you read one book, you would get a full, satisfying story. If you read the other one, you would as well, without knowing the other one existed. But if you read both, you would get a lot more inference, and there’s kind of a third detective story for the reader, in between the books.

Drew [00:05:54]:
So you’ve worked with Ram V quite a bit. Do you guys message each other privately? Like, you’re reading each other’s work — he’s currently working on New Gods, which is great. And you’re working on Dark Patterns, which is also great. Is there a back channel where you guys swap ideas or hype each other up?

Dan Watters

[00:06:59]:
When I started out in comics, I met Ram V, Alex Paknadel, and Ryan O’Sullivan — three other writers that I met very early on. The four of us kind of realized we had similar ambitions and similar approaches to what we wanted to do in comics. So we formalized it a little bit into White Noise, which we’ve always called our writer’s studio, but it’s really a group chat. But it’s done very well for us. People sort of think of us in the same breath. We had a Zoom catch up on Tuesday, actually. We still talk all the time. Everyone’s busier now than when we started, but yeah — if someone’s got an issue they’re proud of, they’ll drop it in the chat and be like, “guys, look what I made.” Or covers, or anything. It’s a bit of hyping each other up, a bit of friendly competition. It’s been a cool unit to have around me and has definitely helped push me to where I am.

Drew [00:08:45]:
That’s really great to hear. They’re like your industry big brothers.

Dan Watters [00:08:47]:
Yeah. Most of those guys are a little bit older than me as well. So they’re sort of my industry big brothers.

Leo [00:09:02]:
Speaking of detective stories — hopefully I’m not jumping the gun — but Batman: Dark Patterns, I have to say, I’m a huge Batman fan. This is a breath of fresh air. I absolutely loved all three issues so far. I thought this was going to be a mini-series, but I didn’t realize this is an ongoing. Are you staying on past the third issue?

Dan Watters [00:09:29]:
It’s a maxi series. 12 issues — four detective cases, three issues per case. Yeah. It’s something I conceived with our editor, Ariana Turturro. We’ve worked together on a few things — we did Arkham City: Order of the World and Azrael. But she was back when I did Lucifer at Vertigo — she ended up as the point editor on that because we just really gelled and she really got what I was going for. So we’ve been always trying to work together ever since then. We conceived this book as a way to build on that.

The original plan was to get four different artists — each case was going to have a different artist. But we reached out to Hayden Sherman first, and Hayden immediately said, “Can I draw the whole thing?” And we were like, absolutely — we just didn’t think you’d be available. But it turns out they are an absolute monster who is capable of drawing Dark Patterns and Absolute Wonder Woman at the same time.

Carrie [00:10:53]:
Yeah. That’s incredible.

Dan Watters [00:10:54]:
So we had a long lead time. I think Hayden is drawing issue 10 now, and issue three has just come out. So yeah. Absolutely.

Leo [00:11:14]:
I didn’t realize they were doing Absolute Wonder Woman. I’m loving that as well. But what I really loved about Dark Patterns is that Batman’s gotten so convoluted, but your story is bringing Batman back to a true detective story while also acknowledging all the dangers in Gotham. I love where he says there’s a fire going out here and he’s acknowledging these troubles that he really can’t focus on. Your writing is just fabulous.

Dan Watters [00:12:06]:
This is definitely the book I’ve wanted to do since I sort of got my hands on Gotham in general. I’ve been doing bits and pieces — miniseries and things. I had a horrifying moment when I was on a panel last year at Comic-Con, on the Gotham City panel, and I realized that I’d sort of accidentally become the Gotham veteran in the DC office — that I’ve been lurking around there for five-ish years at this point. This is the book I think I’ve always wanted to do with that stuff. It’s all of my interests slammed together with Batman. There wasn’t a book that felt like this currently coming out, so we slipped into that space.

Leo [00:13:04]:
Reading this, I don’t know why, but it gave me a feel of the old Legends of the Dark Knight series, which I absolutely loved when it came out in the nineties. Just a real good story that gets to the heart of Batman. What are your thoughts on DC and the DC All In initiative — they seem to be trying to make things easier for readers to get in?

Dan Watters [00:13:53]:
I always find that a tricky one. I think there are different valid opinions, but I don’t know if it’s because people’s approach to media has changed with the advent of streaming. People expect to binge from beginning to end, which just wasn’t ever a thing before. You’d have some random VHS tape with episodes seven and eight of some show, and you’d just watch that over and over because you didn’t have access to the rest. You’d pick up a random issue 320 of a comic and that would be your entry point. You didn’t know everything that was going on, and sometimes that was part of the excitement — it felt like walking into a real world.

But I don’t know if that’s as feasible now. People expect to start something from the beginning and have a full understanding. So I think both are valid ways to approach comics. But also, if the story you’re writing doesn’t work on its own — if the stakes aren’t inherently clear within the single issue — then you’ve gone wrong somewhere. You should be able to not know who this person in pink spandex is who’s attacking the main character, but you need to know that it’s a problem for them. Generally, that should be enough.

Drew [00:16:12]:
Reading this, I definitely agree with Leo. This felt like early Batman — it fits right in with Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s Year One, the Long Halloween with Jeph Loeb and the great Tim Sale. Early Batman, still getting his hang of things, relationship tentative with the GCPD. And I love the narration — Batman is aware of these things happening in Gotham that he can’t get to. He’s saying, I can’t be everywhere, but that doesn’t mean I’m not aware. He’s putting Post-it notes where he’s gonna come back. And then the Wound Man — what was the inspiration? Was it the 17th-century medical text referenced at the end of issue one?

Dan Watters

[00:17:28]:
It’s called the Wound Man. It’s drawn from a 17th-century medical text image. I sort of love the history of medicine because most of it is horrific and terrible — people just lopping off legs in theaters and stuff. So I’ve been staring at the Wound Man image for ages, knowing he’d make a really good villain if you just brought him to life. That was the starting point. When we knew we were doing this book, we wanted a mixture of new villains and classic ones. There’s one or two classic villains that will pop up — not the ones you expect. I’ve seen people online saying it’s clearly building toward the Joker, and I’m gonna go on record here: it is not, in any way, shape, or form. But yeah, I had the Wound Man in my head for ages and I was like, we’re doing a new Batman number one, so let’s go with a bang.

Carrie [00:21:57]:
It reminds me of something out of Hannibal — the series. This person has been horrifically pierced with rebar and metal and somehow kept alive and set loose. And the way that Batman can’t engage with him — he’s wearing essentially Batman-proof armor because anything Batman does would cause fatal harm. That was brilliant.

Dan Watters [00:23:15]:
Yeah, he’s definitely a Batman-specific villain. If he runs up against Red Hood or Midnighter, he’s not gonna last very long.

Drew [00:23:23]:
And the next arc — Scarface? Correct me if I’m wrong.

Dan Watters [00:23:34]:
Yep.

Drew [00:23:35]:
Just out of curiosity — are you keeping the bit where Scarface can’t pronounce B’s?

Dan Watters [00:32:11]:
They are. It’s part of the fun.

Drew [00:32:16]:
Because I remember reading that as a kid — Wesker can do all these things but he can’t pronounce B’s. I’m like, well played, DC. So just confirming for everyone — it’s “Gat Man.” The Bat-Cave becomes the “Gat Cave.” And there’s no Robin yet.

Dan Watters [00:32:57]:
No Robin yet. But yeah, we did something different with Scarface. I think it’s gonna be interesting.

Carrie [00:33:19]:
Just as a storyteller — you’re so welcome to our show, we’re going to praise you a lot, this is what we do.

Dan Watters [00:33:28]:
Thank you. I’m a writer. It’s what feeds us.

Carrie [00:33:32]:
When you were talking about how close the team was on Dark Patterns — focusing on not just the story but the artwork and coloring and everything to enhance it. How much fun do you have putting together the perfect team for each project?

Dan Watters [00:34:30]:
It’s a funny one because sometimes you are the one assembling, and sometimes you aren’t. If you’re working for big companies, the editorial staff will quite often assemble the team, and you get brought on later or earlier in the process. But when you have a team that sings, it’s just the best. A lot of those I’ve found through suggestions from others. The Fiumara brothers — I worked with them on Lucifer for about two years and they knocked everything out of the park. Hayden was suggested by Ariana for the Detective Comics backups originally, and we just absolutely got each other from the get-go. And sometimes, especially at Image, like Casper Wijngaard and I took our first book there ourselves, and we had become friends before we’d started working together. It’s like playing in different bands a lot of the time.

Carrie [00:35:57]:
With the Night Terrors stuff — that was huge. So many different stories covering so much. Did you all have a collective bible you were working out of?

Dan Watters [00:36:32]:
I was doing the Detective Comics issues, so I had relative free rein within the framework. Josh Williamson was writing Night Terrors, so I was sent his main bible document. But Josh is a fantastic collaborator — we’ve worked on a few DC things and done the Energon stuff at Skybound together while he was doing all the GI Joe stuff. I write Destro because they always give me the villain. So I was able to just reach out to him and be like, “Does this work? Is any of this a pain for you, what I’m planning?” So really I was just able to write a story about Jim Gordon’s nightmare and do what I wanted with it.

Carrie [00:38:11]:
It was one of my favorites. You don’t get Jim Gordon as often as we really want. And Dead Man. Just beautiful.

Drew [00:38:41]:
Since you mentioned Skybound — I wanted to ask about Creature from the Black Lagoon Lives. The sequel you and Ram V did to the Creature from the Black Lagoon. What were the challenges of picking up from something like that classic monster?

Dan Watters [00:39:37]:
That was an interesting one because Ram V was originally doing it himself. Then he signed his DC exclusive, so he couldn’t carry on with it. But he came to me — I’d already worked with the editor Alex Anton at Skybound. He’d actually given me my first ever superhero one-shot, which was an Ocean Master Year of the Villain comic. So I already knew the editor. Ram just came to me and said, “Hey, we’ve got this outline approved. I can’t write it, but you’re a horror guy, you’re a classic monsters guy. Is this something you’d be interested in?”

The challenge with the Creature is we don’t know what he wants or what he is. And once you start trying to solve those problems, you kind of ruin it. It’s like Bigfoot — if we found Bigfoot, it would just be a big monkey. Not that exciting. So the Creature, if you take away the mystery and give him an origin and his mother’s maiden name and a social security number, you’re not going to have much of a story. But character motivations are really what any story’s about. So that was the challenge.

Dan Watters [00:42:20]:
Our solution was that he has to be a thing onto which different characters are projecting. There are things they want that they think the Creature is the solution to.

Drew [00:42:47]:
Yeah. And you have the character — the Ahab-type doctor who’s made his entire life hunting this thing, but ultimately realizes the creature isn’t a monster, he’s just living his life. That mirror moment was heartbreaking.

Dan Watters [00:45:16]:
It’s a horror story at the end of the day. I’m never a fan of putting a punch in.

Carrie [00:46:14]:
I’ve loved what they’ve been doing with the new Universal Monsters line. We’ve read all of them. Michael Walsh killed it too. They’ve been picking the best of the best.

Dan Watters

[00:47:13]:
That’s interesting. And this goes back to the stuff I think we’re exploring in Dark Patterns somewhat — how urban myths and straight-up myths are storytelling as cultural warning. So many cultures have these fish people figures. You’ve got the Kappa in Japan. In England we have Jenny Greenteeth. There’s the Selkie. There are dozens of these things, but really they’re all an easier way to tell children: don’t go near the body of water unattended. Because telling them “you might slip in and drown, there are currents” — kids don’t understand that. If you tell them there’s a woman with green teeth who’ll come out and eat you, that has a little more resonance.

Drew [00:48:34]:
You’re right. Back in ancient civilizations, mythology was a way of explaining the world. Even in America, which is still pretty new compared to thousands-year-old cultures, we still have our own myths.

Drew [00:52:27]:
I’ve read the first volume of Homesick Pilots, and I have so many things to say. What was the inspiration? To me it felt like Power Rangers meets The Shining meets 13 Ghosts — there were all these different ghost entities, the horseshoe ghost, the VHS mummy — what the heck?

Dan Watters [00:55:28]:
Casper Wijngaard and I have been friends forever, by this point. We did our first book together at Image — a book called Limbo, back in 2014 or so. We were just nobodies. I was still at university. Casper had been taking his portfolio around conventions and we became good friends, realized we had similar interests. We decided to put something together and take it to Image, and we were lucky enough they took a chance on us.

That book I’m still very proud of, though it definitely feels like a first book when I look back at it. But all the work I started getting afterwards was because of that book — it was very much a calling card.

Then we both went off and did our own things. Casper was doing a lot of Star Wars comics and I was doing Lucifer. We built a bit of a name for ourselves separately, then decided we wanted to come back together and have another punt at a creator-owned thing at Image. Initially it was going to be a Limbo sequel. But we stumbled across these punk kid characters that were going to be the focus of a detective story, and we realized we were more interested in those kids than in the Limbo-ness of it.

We both love nineties kitsch and strangeness, and we decided to throw all of that into the same place. We’d get together, have some beers, and end up watching Guyver, 13 Ghosts, more recently stuff like Mandy. Both huge Hellraiser fans, and Stuart Gordon. So this was our love letter to all of that.

Drew [00:58:16]:
It was just great. The giant battle at the end with the Power Rangers feel — and how did the Casper Zordon character come about?

Dan Watters [01:00:12]:
He is a crappy Zordon. If you get to the end of the book — it’s three volumes, which felt like getting away with something given the state of the market, especially since we launched it straight into COVID. By the time you get to the end, you’re realizing just how crappy a Zordon he is.

Drew [01:02:42]:
Yeah. The coolest story came from…?

Dan Watters [01:02:51]:
There were a couple of ghost movies around the time we were conceiving it that had gone for the happy-ish ending kind of thing — which I think comes from a screenwriter brain where you’re trying to solve the problem by the end, or solve the character’s trauma. Haunted houses are quite often a trauma metaphor. But that’s not how I think it works. You don’t just beat the ghost and confront your past and because you’ve confronted it, you’ve solved it. It doesn’t go away.

So the idea that sparked everything was: what if you try to leave the haunted house and it just comes with you? It stands up and walks with you. And that led us to the haunted house mech.

Drew [01:03:39]:
Even the Evil Dead — Ash beat everybody but the thing still came for him at the end. You were victorious but you still lost.

Dan Watters [01:04:36]:
The reason the more recent Evil Dead movies have been so good is every one of them feels like you’re watching the beginning of the apocalypse. The genie is not going back in the bottle in any of those stories.

Carrie [01:05:07]:
Okay. I have to ask every horror writer — are you a part of the super secret horror comic book writer’s tiki club?

Drew [01:05:21]:
As if I don’t know what that is. Here we go.

Dan Watters [01:05:32]:
It feels like a leading question. I don’t have a tiki mug, so I’m definitely out in the cold.

Carrie [01:06:32]:
I’ve noticed a bunch of horror comic writers are all very into Tiki, and I started asking around. It’s a toss-up whether it exists or not — Jason Aaron, Brian Azzarello, Fred Van Lente, Cullen Bunn, and now you. Some lead me on, some flat out deny it. Brian Azzarello is just like, “that’s not a thing.”

Dan Watters [01:08:16]:
I’ve been listening to a podcast the last few days about this guy in the eighties who worked at an Air Force base. He went to his bosses and said he thought he’d seen UFOs, and basically what he’d seen was experimental aircraft they didn’t want him to know about. So the U.S. government gaslit him into thinking he’d been involved in a big UFO conspiracy. Maybe this horror tiki club is trying to hide something far darker from you.

Carrie [01:08:55]:
Oh my god.

Leo [01:09:15]:
What do you dork out about? What is your downtime?

Dan Watters [01:09:38]:
Not really collecting anything. I have some original art but mostly it was sent to me very kindly by collaborators. Dani is a sweetheart — she always sends me original art from things we work on. But I’m always scared of getting into collecting anything because I know I’ll get in too deep. So I’ve avoided vinyl and all that.

Horror was kinda my interest in the first place — probably pretty apparent once I start talking. I’m a big reader. I love to read. Horror movies. Detective shows are a big one as well. We recently got BritBox and we’ve just been burning through British detective shows. 75% of BritBox is detective stories because the Brits just love a grisly murder in a lovely little countryside cottage.

Dan Watters [01:11:19]:
I don’t know why anyone’s moving to where Father Brown operates because that parish is just one big graveyard at this point.

Drew [01:11:31]:
Has there been anybody you met at a convention who was your fanboy moment?

Dan Watters [01:11:51]:
Early on, I’ll always shout out Declan Shalvey for that. When Casper and I made Limbo, Declan was the guy — no one knew who we were, no one had any idea what we were doing — and Declan was the first person to come over, start a conversation, take an interest, and convince Big Bang Dublin to bring us over for a signing. He’s an absolute sweetheart.

Beyond that, it’s been cool having people I grew up reading become friends and even collaborators. I got to do a short with the late, great Jean-Paul Léon at DC, and that’s one of those things no one can ever take away from me.

One of the first comics I read where I thought “this is really cool, I think this could be something I want to do with my career” was Kieron Gillen’s run on Journey Into Mystery — he just did so many cool and smart things with the storytelling there. And now Kieron’s a friend, and he’s nicked Casper off me to do Power Fantasy. The people I started out with are now all the people that other people are excited about — Ram V and Casper and Alex Paknadel. I’m just grateful and it’s a cool thing to get to do.

Drew [01:15:01]:
We should probably ask about Nightwing. You picked it up following Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo’s great run. What was your approach?

Dan Watters

[01:15:57]:
There’s a big difference between doing something like Dark Patterns, where we start with issue one, versus taking on something like Nightwing at issue 119. Even though we’re definitely going to do our own thing and take it in our direction, I’m very conscious that it’s issue 119 and there are people who have been following it since issue one. I don’t want to throw out everything that came before. It’s about building on it, and that’s part of the joy of having a mythology like that.

I wasn’t too worried about it because Tom and I are just different writers. Something horrendous was going to happen to the tone sooner rather than later just because that’s where my brain would go.

The thing I’ve really ended up drilling down into is — and I only realized this a little late — this week is actually the 85th anniversary of Dick Grayson’s first appearance in Detective Comics. What Tom and Bruno did so beautifully is take Dick to this place where he’s very confident in himself and his abilities and out from under the shadow of Batman. He’s got 85 years of comic stories behind him — all that experience, all those layers of sediment. I find that very interesting. We can drill down into it and pull different things out.

Drew [01:19:19]:
Well, that’s pretty much all I had. Leo, wanna wrap it up?

Leo [01:19:46]:
Yeah. Dan, where do you like people interacting with you?

Dan Watters [01:20:31]:
I’m kinda off Twitter and all those sort of things because I’m pretty anti the destruction of democracy. I’m on Bluesky at danpgwatters, I believe. But my favorite place for people to find me is the Dead Air channel at ghost.io, which is my newsletter. You can just read it online. That’s where you’ll get the most comprehensive updates and waffles and brain dumps from me. That’s where I’m mainly hanging out on the internet these days.

Leo [01:20:31]:
Awesome. And Drew, who do we got coming Tuesday?

Drew [01:20:36]:
Next Tuesday we have the great Keith Williams coming on. We’re gonna be talking about some of his work. We have a special guest host as well who’s very excited to be with us. Should be pretty dope.

Leo [01:22:13]:
Sounds good. Drew, take us out.

Drew [01:22:15]:
Hey everybody. Thank you for joining us on Splash Pages. You can find me as Drew Malo, GhostMan1984 on Instagram. I’m on Bluesky where I’ve been promoting the events — thank you to Dan for reposting. We appreciate it. Enjoy the rest of your Saturday, and stay cool.

Leo [01:22:50]:
Awesome. With that, we’ll catch you later.

Carrie [01:22:53]:
Bye, everybody.

Transcript processed: 2026-04-08 | Source: EP106_2025_03_08_Dan_Watters_Castmagic.txt