BPRD Vampire #4 is out today

I took the picture above in a hot November night as I worked my way into the third issue of BPRD Vampire. I tried to find a picture of the period I was working on issue 4, but there wasn't any. When you have to focus on producing the stories, and every day can seem like the previous or the next as you just have to draw and draw and draw until your story is there, in front of you, it's hard not to forget about other things, other people. You dive into the world of your own creation and, for a while, you live in it.
BPRD Vampire #4 is out today in comic book stores and through the Dark Horse internet store. "After what we've put Simon through on issue three, what else could we possibly come up with to top that?" was the question our editor made when we delivered issue three.
I hope you like the new issue.
We did.

Killjoys cover #4

Here's is the forth cover Bá did for "The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys", the mini-series written by our pals Gerard Way and Shaun Simon, and drawn by our super-pal-partner-in-artistic-crimes-awesome-in-her-own-right Becky Cloonan.

Every Right

We help the CBLDF every chance we get, to make sure people have freedom of speech so they can express themselves if they're artists, and so they can help spread the word created by others if they're publishers, retailers, bookstores or libraries.
We create stories to talk about subjects we think should be discussed. Most of the time, they're works of fiction.
Every now and then, they talk about our times.

Last week, we saw our city (São Paulo) become what looked like a war zone, with the extreme violent police response to a public manifestation. Violence calls for more violence, and by the end of a very long thursday night many people were hurt for no good reason, wrongly arrested and terrorized by the police force. Add many acts of vandalism to the mix and suddenly you've lost sight of what people were there for in the first place: for their right to complain and express their opinions.

A new manifestation will happen this monday. My brother and I will be there as part of those who believe in peaceful, reasonable gathering. We believe in people's right to have an opinion and we've turned our opinions, as usually happens, in stories.

Cycles

We still didn't have time to write down the incredible experiences we had in our trip to Portland  - you can have a glimpse of it in this report from Craig Thompson - but I wanted to put this picture of our white board in here to mark the end of a cycle and the beginning of the next one. It takes a long time to make comics, and a lot of planning is required, and the artist just hopes there's no loss of quality when you have to worry about deadlines and schedules. We feel we reached the end of one cycle as our BPRD-Vampire mini-series is done, and as Bá finished all his six KillJoys covers, and as we just delivered our short story for the American Vampire anthology. We're starting a lot of new projects right now, and it's an exciting time, maybe the most exciting time in every project, when we watch these ideas as they are born and start to take shape. This initial energy will feed us for the next days, months and years as we work on these stories.
Back to the drawing board.

Killjoys cover 3

We're back from Portland, where we saw good friends and talked a lot about comics. I've already done two new covers and have yet another to do, but first I can show my alternate cover for the third issue of "The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys", crazy new series written by Gerard Way and Shaun Simon, with fabulous art by Becky Cloonan, due to come out in August by Dark Horse.

We'll write more about our inspiring week in Portland on the next post.