Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá's blog

KNOCKED OUT BY THE COMPETITION.



He is just great. Every page is a explosion of action, every face is an emotion, every gesture tells the story. He is the artist we follow in whichever book he works on, and we love and hate him at the same time. We love him because he brings to life, like nobody else, the characters we love so much. We hate him because, after we see his work, how can we thing our own work is any good?

Can that great artist make us give up on becoming comic book artists ourselves?

Not if we're smart. The first thing we need to learn is a good example to follow. A bad example will do - and you see more aspiring artists from this category than you'd want to -, but a good example will make more than impress your eyes with nice pictures: it will impress your mind with new ideas. The good art is the one that makes us think, remember and makes such an impression on you that you will be forever changed.

If there's one thing I learned from having worked with my brother, it's that competition is good. Even if your competitor is miles ahead of you, it gives you a point of reference with your own work, and it makes you always remember that your work can be different, and that it can be better. I might not have started to draw if it weren't for my brother, and I might have stopped a long time ago if we weren't always competing to see who was the best. The best at what, you might ask? The best at being ourselves, for competitions are not about being equal, it's about being different. The work is the only one which wins.

Working with comic books makes me very critical of the medium, but I still fall flat on my face with a lot of artists, for they are just that good, and getting better. We should all be so lucky to have such incredible people making your profession look good. Strive for greatness, in your own time. Don't ever forget that the artists we admire, who still amaze us with every page they do, who better themselves work after work, they just remind us that comics are just great and infinite in it's array of possibilities. The poetry of a good comic book you will carry forever, even if it wasn't one of your making, and sometimes even if it was one of our own.