Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá's blog

Smoke signals.



When I started drawing Smoke and Guns, I set myself to try and write down the process behind creating a comic book. Of course, some twenty pages down the line, and some eighty still to go, you can tell I haven't really started writing a single line about it. What can I say? Life happened. But it's a good life, so I can't complain.

My brother and I have a new book to be published in Brazil, and the final touches of it are taking huge amounts of our time. It's going to be a great book, I believe, different from everything we did before, and when I finish the cover I'll post it here. But let's go back to the smoky new book.

I can't remember exactly when Larry sent me the script, asking if I wanted to draw it, or when I finally said yes, but I remember the sensation of reading the script for two nights and thinking how visual the story was, and how much fun it would be for anybody who turned out to be the artist. Turns out the artist will be one of the brazilian twins, after all, but I really had no idea how I was going to approach the story visually.

That's something artists will go through: the images they have while reading a script and the sensation that it's a very visual story won't always translate well for certain styles, which poses the question: How do you know which style is best for the story?

Of course, most questions asked inside the crazy deranged mind of the comic book artists don't have an answer. What they have is a door, or a variety of doors, that open a great number of possibilities in front of then. Luckily for me, Smoke and Guns opened a door in which I could see myself drawing the book, and doing it in a way I always wanted to do: with class.