Each year, we select a different artist to design the SXSW Interactive Big Bag, the souvenir canvas tote filled with tech-related goodies and promotional materials. We were thrilled when writer-artist Dan Goldman took on the challenge for 2010. A frequent speaker on both digital comic processes and distribution, Goldman is the creator of the Eisner-nominated web-to-print comic Shooting War and a founding member of the celebrated webcomics collective ACT-I-VATE. His recent nonfiction graphic novel 08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail has been archived in the New York Historical Society's permanent collection. SXSW Interactive advisory board member Noah Kuttler (IBM) recently sat down with Dan for a discussion regarding his recent real-estate horror series Red Light Properties, technology, and the creative process.

What was the inspiration for your mesmerizing bag design?

I thought about what attending SXSW Interactive meant to me, and as much as the programming is enlightening, the films and food and general buzz of it all is fun as hell, the central idea I take away from it is the "meeting of the minds." There's a simple way, given the quality of the attendees, that you're almost guaranteed to have nonstop smart/energetic conversations the entire conference with people you meet on the floor, in the panel audience, avoiding eye contact with at the urinal. So the meeting of the minds idea was core to my design, illustrating that feeling of connectedness and collabotition with a dollop of transhumanism that I'm obsessed with, of us slowly becoming a single thought/organism in the process. From the open-skulls sketch of the three attendees' minds literally meeting, I decided to push things even further into biological-computing/medical-ickiness by including real human brain tissue, which for better or worse gets a reaction from just about everyone.

Take us through your design process and the tools you used to create the bag.

I work 100% digitally, so all my sketching is done in Autodesk Sketchbook and looks like a fourth-grader. That phase is strictly about giving shape to ideas; I created this piece sitting on this loveseat I left behind in Brooklyn, drawing directly on the screen of my Modbook. Once SXSW approved my ideas, the faces and colors were drawn in Illustrator with the colors and human brains added in Photoshop, sealed with a kiss.

Describe your first SXSW Interactive experience.

I was invited three years ago to present work from my web-to-print graphic novel Shooting War, and was just electrified by experience. I rolled out to Austin from Brooklyn with some indie film and web-video friends and as we talked about what the internet was doing to video/film, I realized I was very much in a similar space with my work in comics, straddling traditional and digital distribution models. I was back the next year moderating my own panel about just that subject.

Who are some of the people that you follow in comics?

More for lack of time than anything, I haven't been able to read many comics lately, as those hours have been dedicated to research mostly. Some recent discoveries of mine have been the recent English translations of Naoki Urasawa's Pluto and 20th Century Boys (masterfully paced and emotionally-pitch-perfect comics), Greg Rucka and JH Williams' collaboration in Detective Comics (caveat: I really hate superhero comics, but artist J.H. Williams just goes hot-shit supernova in these pages, and these are easily the most engaging synthesis of artwork/design/storytelling I've seen in any comic in a long time). Another real treat for me has been following Jesse Moynihan's Forming online; it's a potty-mouthed cosmic battle of mostly-hermaphroditic gods and their fevered egos. I have no idea where it's going, but I consistently snort, giggle, and gawk over every single page as it crosses my screen.

Where or what do you think the next frontier is for comics?

The digital realm has only just started to open up, not just as a medium unto itself, but as its own ecosystem and marketplace, and I'm following this evolution very closely. Beyond that, I'm watching the transmedia ideas filtering in/out of comics and other media as stories grown beyond their containers and leave roots and tentacles in several media at once.

Comic book fans have been early adopters in finding ways to interact with each other. From letters pages and fanzines to message boards. How do you think new technologies like Facebook, Twitter, iPhones, and other social media will impact how readers and creators consume, produce, and interact?

I'm so bored of people theorizing about social media, I could shit.

Your new digital comic on Tor.com, Red Light Properties, is pushing through some of the clunkiness associated with web comics. Can you talk about the interface and why people like Scott McCloud are raving about it?

The Red Light Properties' panel-reveal interface that everyone's going googoo-gaga over is something I actually developing early on in 2009. I'd been contacted by AMC/ITV to create an original webcomic serial based on their revealed-to-be-shite reboot of The Prisoner; I hunkered down and delivered story for 10 episodes and proof-of-concept for this "new mechanic for webcomics" based on a lot of things I'd thought about after my own experiences and my SXSW Interactive panel last year. AMC absolutely loved my story, strung me along for a few months, and in the end they went with something a lot safer. Which was perfect in the end, because it would've tied me up for another seven months, and that left me free to find a home for Red Light Properties, which I've been working on since 2001. I don't think webcomics are "clunky," but they've definitely leaned toward being just-like-print-but-onscreen, when they don't have to be. I've been trying to take advantage of the language of the comics medium without adopting animation techniques that make it no longer a comic, like those "motion comics" on iTunes now, which are really low-budget cartoons. I think I've been successful in that, and I promise as RLP's story unfolds, it's something I'll continue to muck around with.

Many SXSW Interactive attendees work across multiple time zones and continents. You recently moved from New York city to Brazil. Did technology factor into your decision?

Yes, working via the internet as an artist is something I've been consciously working towards for years; you've got to make your name somehow/somewhere, but after that, all you really need is a dependable signal and a safe place to stow your rig. I'm in love with Brazil, my wife is from São Paulo, and New York was just getting boring after spending 11 years there. There's a huge world, and with the right laptop, you can keep working for your same clients while finding new ones during your travels.

Given the abundance of social media software and the pace of innovation, where do you see the future of artistic collaboration a year from now? Five years?

I know my own collaborations have been influenced by iChat and SMS, video-sharing and Flickr, so I imagine in the immediate future, there will be another element that's essential and useful. At the same time, I'm really enjoying NOT collaborating these days, doing my current series all by myself gives me a solid sense of conducting the symphony from start to finish exactly the way I want it.

Pictured with 2010 Interactive Big Bag: Morgan Catalina

Other images and panels courtesy of Dan Goldman