An arrow from the past.

In 2001, I made some submission pages of Green Arrow to send to the then editor of that title. I did four pages in about a month and a half. Even if the actual time spent on the drawing board came closer to a week, that week stretched itself into all that time, and even with all the effort I put on those pages, you could see the inconsistency this lack of routine leaves on your work.

But something changed on those pages. There I was, trying to come up with a heroic situation, a interesting villain (I created a big robot) and one simple action that would lead the reader (aka the editor) panel after panel, page after page. It was more than just making the art "readable". I was thinking about how to make the readable art the most interesting way I could.

I'm not cut for super hero work, as far as I'm concerned. At least, not right now, and specially not then. But it was then that I started to focus a little more on the art, or try to focus both on the art and the writing, and my style started to grow on me. I was interested on the results of some of the panels of those submission pages, panels that nobody would ever see, but that fueled stories that I did afterwards, or even stories I'm still going to do. As I watch Bá hard at work on his Umbrella Academy pages, which many will call to be "super-heroes" pages, I think how much his style have changed since 2001, how much mine changed, and how much we changed the way we work. Since our days now consist basically in drawing comics all day long, our speed of work is much different, and the way our brain thinks about each page is different as well, and not only faster, but better. It's easier to create pages when you're creating pages every day. You do it without noticing, without that much effort, and the link between the thinking and the doing becomes a much peaceful one.