INTERVIEW: Daniel Vernon Draws Prime Ministers, Fronts a Punk Band and Wrestles Māui

November 11, 2026

A viral election cartoon, a fake band that got real and a comic book of Māori legends: YeeHawTheBoys is having quite a year.

Daniel Vernon is a Pōneke cartoonist and graphic novelist who goes by @YeeHawTheBoys online. He is also Danz, the frontman of DARTZ ('Crispy' Christan Pianta, Guitar; Clark Mathews, Bass; 'Rollyz' aka Hakopa Kuka-Larsen, Drums), the Flying Nun punk band that turned a stunt into a career. His third book, Local Legends, reimagines three Māori pūrākau as action, horror and romance, and he is introducing it at VerbCrawl this Saturday.

The Accidental Satirist

Vernon's political cartoons began the way most good things do: by accident. In the run-up to a previous election he drew a promo illustration for his band (DARTZ) and made the orange election guy look, in his words, "a bit sexy". It went viral. He already had a backlog of comics, and Lockdown supplied the free time. "I kind of found my voice purely by accident," he says.

The lineage runs through Mad Magazine (a hand-me-down from his dad, "an old 70s hippie"), Al Jaffee, and a lifetime of DC and Marvel. Every face comes with the same gap-toothed grin, so I can spot a Vernon from across the internet. It is now his day job: he gave himself two years to make it work and is a little over one in. "My dream job, so I'm trying hard." Ask what the election means for his next cartoon and he says he'd like to stop drawing, which is the most honest review of New Zealand politics I've heard all year.

Daniel Vernon fronting DARTZ at Parrot Dog Brewery earlier this year / Photo: Tim Gruar

DARTZ: A Fake Band With Real Consequences

DARTZ began as a bluff. In 2019 Vernon pitched a fictional band to open for Australian punks The Chats, and, he says, thought they'd never allow it. They said ‘yes’. He then had to build a band from scratch and write six original songs in a month. Why DARTZ? It's Australian slang for ‘cigarettes’, short, pub-flavoured and a good fit for The Chats.

The band was only meant to play one show. It has since signed to Flying Nun, made two chart-topping albums, been a Taite Music Prize finalist and won Best Rock Artist at the 2025 Aotearoa Music Awards. Not bad for a “bit of a joke”. The third album is finished. I caught them at Great Sounds Great, at Valhalla, in what I'd call sweaty chaos. Vernon calls it a "borderline a fire hazard", and he means it fondly. The deadline taught him a habit he still uses: "an exercise in not overthinking". "That strict time limit," he says, "creates magic."

Gods, Mountains and a Wrestling Match

The leap from satire to Māori myths and legends started small. A single panel of Māui and the sun, followed by one of an old man applying sunscreen, did very well, and Vernon had too much fun to stop. Social media wants four pages. He kept writing and ended up with twenty. Because the stories vary between iwi and regions, he read as many versions as he could and wrote his own, so that no one's version gets sidelined. It is, he says, "Daniel Vernon's interpretation". A PledgeMe campaign raised $15,684 from 287 people against a $10,000 target and bought him the time to finish.

The result is Local Legends, out 18 November, with three stories, each in its own genre. Māui vs The Sun is a wrestling-heavy action romp with a lot of Dragon Ball Z in it. War of the Mountains retells how some of the mountains came to be, set up as a romance dating show. Pania of the Reef goes for horror. It is pitched at adults but made to be accessible to younger readers, and Vernon says graphic novels have shed their old stigma as children's literature. Reality TV, wrestling and heartbreak are an odd mix for ancient stories, and they work.

Whakapapa

For Vernon, who affiliates to Ngāti Kahungunu ki Te Wairoa, the book is also a personal journey. He has been learning about his heritage since university. His connection is through his mother's side, and his grandfather, one of fourteen siblings, rarely spoke of it. The family was raised strictly Catholic and the language was lost. Touring with DARTZ, he asked to detour through Wairoa on the drive back from Gisborne. "A grounding exercise," he calls it. As a visual learner, he decided the best way to learn the stories "back to front" was to write them out and draw them. His hope is that the book works as a gateway: readers go and find the stories, and their other versions, for themselves.

The Studio Is an iPad

Vernon draws on a small iPad in Procreate, which copies hand inking and colouring on a digital canvas. Then he moves the work into Photoshop and Illustrator for lettering and tidying. He takes the iPad to cafés and on the road, so he can meet a political deadline from anywhere. To get the feel of pen on paper, he fits a filter screen that mimics paper, adding "that gritty texture" that he says took a while to adapt to. He works from plenty of reference images, especially for politicians and poses, but the style is his own.

So here's the Vernon method: say yes before you know how, give yourself a month to work it out, and never overthink it. It has produced a prime minister with a suspiciously sultry smirk, a punk band that began as a bluff, and a Māui who takes on the sun like it owes him money, all drawn on an iPad wearing a screen that pretends to be paper. The jokes land, the gap-toothed grins keep coming, and underneath it all sits a man tracing his whakapapa one story at a time. Buy the book, catch him at VerbCrawl, and hope the election gives him a reason to keep drawing.

Catch Daniel Vernon at VerbCrawl

VerbCrawl is Verb Wellington's one-night literary festival, and a sibling to September's Verb Readers & Writers Festival (23–27 September). It takes over inner-city Pōneke on Saturday 14 November 2026, with events running from 6pm to 9.15pm across bars, galleries, bookshops and a fabric store. Tickets are $10 per event, and the after-party at Meow starts at 9.15pm.

Vernon's session, Local Legends, runs 7.15pm to 8pm at Bicycle Junction on Marion Street in Te Aro. He'll introduce the book, talk through his illustration style and the business of squeezing traditional stories onto the comic-book page, and be in conversation with author and illustrator Isobel Joy Te Aho-White. Tickets are $10, and the venue isn't wheelchair accessible.

He may well be the only graphic novelist on the bill.

- Tim Gruar @groovebookreport

Check out Verbcrawl and get tickets here.

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