Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá's blog

Sometimes, things go wrong.



Don't expect the ride to be perfect. You'll find a lot of bumps on the road, and you will fail more than once. Sometimes, it will be your fault. Sometimes, it won't. We always learn when we make mistakes, and we're probably going to do a lot of them, 'cause there's always so much to learn.

When we were drawing Roland - days of wrath, we tried to get "real" publishers to publish it. For two years, we went to conventions and talked to editors but, as much as they liked the artwork, it was not what they were looking for at the time.

Luckily for us, when the time came for us to self-publish the mini series, we won the Xeric Foundation Grant, and that helped a lot, but I can see from our initial sales that it wouldn't be worth it for a big publisher to publish us at that time.

And, at that time, the american market didn't have all this small press publishers that started out after, or at the same time, we published our first issue.

Maybe things would have happened differently.

But we learned a lot from our mistakes.



Nowadays, I see comics very differently from the way I used to. I say at lectures and panels that at first I was a big fan of comics, so I was trying to tell the stories I liked to read as a fan, but not the stories I wanted to tell as an artist. I actually remember saying to people that I wanted to draw WildC.A.T.S., and that it was such a great comic book (I'm talking about the early Jim Lee issues). I also remembered admitting to a friend when I started liking Mark Silvestri more than Jim Lee, and how strange it was to start to change the way I saw comics (even if it was, at that time, such a small change).

The type of stories I like to tell have nothing to do with the comics I read as a fan. The style I now finally have, which took years to come to me, is very different from the style I wanted to have when I was a fan. I blame going to college for my personal style, as I learned so much art history that I just had to put something of it in my drawings, so my style had to have all this history in it, and that went on a very different path than the one with the super powers.



I love telling stories, even more than I like drawing. The art, for me, is just part of something bigger. It's not just a pretty image, it's a sequence of choices, of moments, that tell a story of memories.

Memories we are about to acquire and that may not leave our minds after we're done with them.