The Call.


We're always waiting for the call. One that will change your life, that will make your day. Maybe just one that will pay the bill.

We're always waiting.

I guess the most important call is the one that tells you what you really want. This moment of revelation might not be per se a single moment, but it eventually happens and, when it does, you'll see everything else differently.

Some people tell me we'll see everything green. I'd prefer blue, or even a very delicate pink (on a waving elegant just-above-the-knee skirt wore by a pretty girl). The point is, you'll be more focused, you will have found your path, your yellow brick road.

So your call came and you found your way. Now what?

That's what I'm constantly trying to find out, and there's where the great joy of life is: finding it, every day.

Get together.

I think it's great when artists can get together. More most of the time, we stay in our dungeon, trapped in our little world, with pages to do and stories to tell. Too soon and too easily we forget there's life outside our thick walls, and meeting with the rest of the world, especially the rest of the comics world, is always refreshing and interesting.

Yesterday, my brother and I gave a lecture about comics together with our other comic book brothers, Bruno and Kako. The four of us worked together on ROCK'n'ROLL! last year, and we're already working on something new. It's always great fun too watch us get together, the exchange of very useless knowledge and sharp dry jokes, and swearing. And we always start by mentioning the guy who was our first comic book teacher and the place where we first met. His name is Domingos Takeshita (or Tak), and Ursula is dedicated to him because he was the first who would encourage every one of us to create a dream and follow it wherever it may take you.

Yesterday, Tak went to see us speak at the lecture, and we all got together to tell jokes, laugh and swear a lot. and the night was young after the lecture was over, so on we continued into the nearest bar, and away we drank into the night.

It was lovely.

But now I have a problem. Now I want to see all my comic book friends who I haven't seen in some time. Maybe I should see what's up with this whole "Rann/Tanaghar war" by asking my friends Ivan Reis and Marc Campos if they are having fun with that interstellar action.

First, I need to finish the Will Eisner tribute page, which, as I mentioned before, changed completely from my first idea, mainly because my brother Ba's idea was so great. All for the best, in the end.

Doing it again.

Today, I reworked a page I had already pencilled. The first version was done a month ago, in the same day I had already finished a page. I was tired but wanted to keep going in order to finish the week with a certain number of pages in the can. I did the page with the original thumbnail in mind, and it actually went pretty fast. The only problem was that it sucked! were I too deliver the page on the very next day, I would have finished one of the worse pages I've done in the last five year. Maybe the worst. Ever!

The page featured two hot girls, and they both looked like guys on the page. Enough said on how bad it was.

And that's a good thing about working with a more flexible schedule. I was not happy with that page, so I moved on with the story, working on other pages I "liked" more. Once I was feeling good about myself (because doing good work can make that to your ego), I went day to the abandoned page and did a complete new version. It's much better. There's a killer panel (one of the best on the story so far) and a much better flow on the story.

And the girls, as one should expect, look hot.

Waiting.



She's waiting. Her time will come.

Dream of the stolen painting.

Smoke and Guns panel.

This week, I mostly did comics. It's always refreshing to be able to work so much on the pages, not be driven away for some illustration work, or for any other of the thousands of things we usually have to do eventually.

I had a dream about going to the comic book convention. the airport looked more like a train station, and I seemed to be trying to run away with some important piece of fine arts, probably a painting. I don't know by whom, but it was a big deal, since the terrorists appeared in my dream trying to steal it. Right at that point, I noticed I had a gun in my hand and, as I'm sure many of you would do (in your dreams, of course), I started fighting the terrorists.

I ended up getting caught by the terrorists, but I hid the painting. Im smart like that, and much more clever than those stupid terrorists. The strange thing is that the one terrorist that caught me was a beautiful woman.

That's what I get for drawing girls with guns day after day.

San Francisco weekend.

If you're going to San Francisco this weekend for Wondercon, make sure you stop by the Terra Major booth, which will be manned by Brian Scot Johnson of Kephri.com. They'll have Roland (our first mini-series in the States), Hattin, Takeyama, Prey... and even some ROCK'n'ROLL! And for those curious of things to come, there'll be xeroxes of one of the new stories from the first ever Terra Major anthology (featuring the all star cast of artists from Terra Major, us included). Don't miss it.

Of course, don't forget to visit the AiT booth as well. If you still didn't get Ursula, they'll have it, and I'm sure that, if you're nice, Larry could show you some Smoke and Guns pages.

Have a good San Francisco weekend.

UPDATE!

So, as it seems, there won't be a AiT booth at Wondercon. But Larry (Young, you know, the guy making comics better) will attend the show as a fan. He'll hang around the Terra Major booth since he and Brian are pals, so if you want to bump into him and ask him about Smoke and Guns, that's your starting point. And, since I'm a nice guy, I'll give you a secret password when you come across Larry: ask him about "kra-ka-pow".

Swimming

I received an e-mail from one editor today and a message from another. They were all very nice and sounded interested in my work, which is good. Of course, I sent messages to them earlier, but to know they replied is good. It shows they liked the work I've been doing enough to write back and tell me so.

This is something I learned already: you have to show your work constantly to the editors, so they can see what it looks like, and also so they can see that you're constantly working and have a professional rhythm. If you want to work as an artist, and now it's the strange sounding part, you already have to be working as an artist. It's like swimming: you gotta be on the water to swim, you can learn how to swim on the ground, where it's safe and warm.

Sometimes, you have to get yourself wet.

Exciting ideas.

I've been drawing Smoke and Guns like crazy. If there's one good thing about doing a story is the joy of creating, page after page, the events only you saw on the script.

Okay, maybe the editor also saw the script, the writer should did, even before it was written I guess, but you get my point. The artist is the one providing life to this idea we're all very excited about.

And we are all very excited about Smoke and Guns.

Sometime between this week and the next, I have a one page story in tribute to Will Eisner to do for this magazine. I already have the idea and did the thumbnail, but sometimes I let the thumbnail (or the idea) sit distant for some days and see if I like them when I get back to it after a little time. Maybe I can have a better idea, and maybe I can fall in love even more for the idea I already had. We'll see.

My story is told with images.

poetry is bliss.


Images talk.

They say an image is worth a thousand words. Maybe a good image, and that's what I want: I want good images, a big range of expressions, faces, hand movements and even eyebrow disposition. The characters are actors, and maybe they need to be really bad at acting, maybe they need to be those over-the-top exaggerated actors who gesticulate too much, and make too many faces, and move too much.

Sometimes, you need to make it bigger in order to tell your story.

Lines in a drawing are like adjectives in a sentence. They add to the story, but the trick, as in adjectives, is in choosing which lines to put and which to leave out. Too many lines won't help tell your story, they'll just confuse the reader.



You have to motivate the eye. Where do we look, where do we go after that image, all must be thought about and decided by the artist. When one character looks a certain way, he's motivating the artist to show, in the next panel, what he's seeing. Like the character, our eyes must follow the story the pictures are telling, and must see the images we're choosing.

We see what the story wants to show.



I like to draw the story that doesn't always show everything. Following the images, we put the story together in our minds, and some images, maybe the most important, the most moving, don't even exist on the page. They are between the panels, after that look and before that smile, when that hair moved and I knew exactly what she was thinking.

Comics is not without it's poetry. To say more than meets the eye, to use words to convey more than just their meaning, to create images that tell more than what they're showing, all that is to be a poet, to make us feel and believe in something that we made up, something the reader made real in his mind and in his heart.