Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá's blog

Another step, and the new breed. - another Rock'n'Roll story.


Rock'n'Roll was the first comic book my brother and I wrote together that others worked on the artwork as well. Before that, we only wrote for ourselves.

When we started self publishing our stories in Brazil, which basically means doing the "xerox, fold and staple" kind of publication, we did some fanzine with other artists, and we soon found out that everybody has a different attitude towards the work. We don't all work the same way, commit the same way, talk about your comics the same way and sell your work the same way. Sometimes, we felt we were working for others, and not with others, when we did a collaborative fanzine. And the differences between everybody involved was the reason all the fanzines we did with them stopped being made.

At that time, everybody did "everything": I wrote and drew my own story, Ba wrote and drew his, and so on. We were all complete creators, for good and for bad.

When we started the next fanzine, in 1997, we decided to do everything, and be responsible for everything, so we would not have anybody to blame. We kept doing everything, but we were the only ones in it. It was our comic, our name, our fault. It worked much better. And we really developed the working relationship between ourselves that to this day we can't find anywhere else.

But things change. We have grown into professionals of the comic book form, and professionals will eventually work with others, so we started talking about it with our friends. And then we made Rock'n'Roll.

Now, there's another thing about working together that's not as bad as different attitudes towards the work: you create an environment and a vibe that you share and that helps your work, that improves your work. We were all excited to be working together, to be seeing the other guy's artwork, his different view, his unique approach. We all wanted to do good, and it shows when you're reading the comic book.

. . .

Now this is something completely different, but since I mentioned it this morning to talk about my journey, here are other people in their journeys:

The Xeric Foundation has announced its most recent grant recipients. They'll receive a bunch of money and some free ads at some important comic book related magazines, as well as a good spot on the PREVIEWS catalog, and will get the attention to publish their independent comics. Let's hope they do well. Here they are:


They are

Catherine Hannah - Winter Beard
Lance Christian Hansen - Don't Cry
Melody Shickley - In the Hands of Boys
Albert Benjamin Thompson - HUSK

And congratulations for Melody, for actually having a website for people to go to in this internet age.

. . .

And to finish up for today, I notice some strange visitation coming from Image Comics' website, which just re-openned, and so I had to check out and discover they already have us listed there with both the Rock'n'Roll credit and the Casanova credit. Now I'll have to tell you all the stories about how I discovered Image Comics when I was a teenager reading comics. But that's for another day.