Working method
Schoening lays out his line work with Col-Erase pencils and finishes the art in Photoshop. He roughs pages in blue, scans and reprints them in a lighter blue, then tightens them in black pencil before the finished line work goes to Luis Delgado for color. He builds characters and backgrounds separately and combines them afterward, which gives him more freedom with composition and makes edits easier. The first few days on any issue are spent thumbnailing from Burnham's script. Schoening averages around 14 hours per page; together, he and Delgado take roughly 3.5 weeks to complete an issue's full run of artwork from script to finished color.
Ghostbusters comics
Schoening drew the bulk of IDW's Ghostbusters output. His earliest Ghostbusters work was the short "What in Samhain Just Happened?!" and the holiday story "Guess What's Coming to Dinner?" He then became the regular penciler on the Ghostbusters Ongoing Series, drawing the first volume across issues #1 through #16, and continuing into the second volume, published as The New Ghostbusters, across issues #1 through #20.
His later interior pencil work for the line includes the crossover miniseries Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Ghostbusters and its sequel, Ghostbusters Get Real, Ghostbusters: Mass Hysteria, the Ghostbusters Annual 2015 story "Daydreams and Nightmares!", Ghostbusters International, Ghostbusters 101, Ghostbusters: Interdimensional Cross-Rip, Ghostbusters: Dia de Los Muertos, Ghostbusters Crossing Over, Ghostbusters IDW 20/20, the Ghostbusters 35th Anniversary one-shot, Transformers/Ghostbusters: Ghosts of Cybertron, and Ghostbusters Year One. Several of these stories were later collected, including Ghostbusters: Total Containment.
Beyond interiors, Schoening produced a large run of covers for the line, contributing the regular or main cover for most issues of the Ongoing Series, The New Ghostbusters, Get Real, International, Ghostbusters 101, Crossing Over, Transformers/Ghostbusters, and Year One, as well as covers for one-shots and crossovers such as Ghostbusters: Infestation, The X-Files: Conspiracy: Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters: Deviations, and the various 35th Anniversary variants.
He also illustrated and wrote backstory material for Ghostbusters: The Board Game from Cryptozoic Entertainment, and contributed character and figure designs for Ghostbusters: The Board Game II. He wrote the Ghostbusters Annual 2017 story "All That Glitters." Earlier in his career, before the IDW line began, Schoening's work helped inspire the graphic style of the stylized versions of Ghostbusters: The Video Game (the Wii, PS2, and PSP releases).
The rejected pitch
In March 2009, Schoening and animator James Eatock began work on a pitch for a ten-issue Ghostbusters arc for IDW, set five months after the first film. Louis Tully, Dana Barrett, and Walter Peck were planned to appear, and the team aimed to avoid repeating events from the movie, keep Slimer to a minimum, and stay grounded in New York City. Titled "The Things I Could Tell You About Ereshkigal," the story opened with the team finishing a downtown bust involving a Class 7 entity with six tentacles that fired eye beams, followed immediately by an interview with a reporter named Cynthia Crawford. The early issues centered on a woman named Jennifer who becomes merged with a female spirit called Ereshkigal, with later arcs planned around Riker's Island, Ellis Island, and a set of new characters with shady plans. Four sequential pages were prepared to illustrate the pitch.
The pair pitched the comic later that year, but it was not green-lit, as a ten-issue series was considered too risky at the time. Eatock and Schoening instead produced the standalone story "Guess What's Coming to Dinner?" for the Haunted Holidays trade collection. The rejected pitch drew attention online afterward.1
Easter eggs and tributes
Schoening built a reputation for hiding references and cameos in his Ghostbusters pages, a habit the comics themselves eventually acknowledged. In Ghostbusters Get Real #2, dialogue about occasional transference of P.K.E. between the Real Ghostbusters' containment unit and the IDW universe served partly as a tongue-in-cheek explanation for his recurring easter eggs.
Schoening himself appears in the comics from time to time. He makes a cameo with his daughter in Ghostbusters Issue #2, and his photo appears beside Janine Melnitz on a subscription cover for the second volume's first issue. In the Ghostbusters Annual 2017, a character is drawn as and named after him, poking fun at his tendency to slip accurate, pre-existing characters into the IDW books, and a drawing on one page is credited in the script to his daughter, Paige.
Several in-story nods carry his name. In the Ghostbusters Annual 2018, Kylie Griffin introduces a protocol called "Code Dan," a joke about Burnham writing a scene with no background characters for Schoening to draw. A four-book reference set in the comics, The Schoening Omnibi, is named after him and turns up as a research tool in Ghostbusters 101. In Ghostbusters Year One #3, the doorman character Shawn Doning is drawn as Schoening might have looked as an adult in the 1980s, and his initials, "DS," appear as graffiti on Optimus Prime in Transformers/Ghostbusters #3. In Ghostbusters Crossing Over Issue #8, a menu standee visible on a table lists "rye by Dan Schoening" for $4.99. On August 9, 2018, Schoening was featured on Crossing Over Virtual Trading Card #50, representing the Ghostbusters Comics Team of Dimension TH-151.
References
Some content on this page was researched using the Ghostbusters Wiki on Fandom.
-
"Dapper Dan Schoening, James Eatock's rejected Ghostbusters comic book pitch gains fans online," New York Daily News, March 3, 2010.
