Attitude.
and a bit of memory loss.

If the previous strips were based on some of my girl friends' experiences, this one was entirely mine. Sometimes, you're asked flat out about something and, suddenly, you forget the answer that you always knew. If you're at work and your boss asks you something you know but just can remember right there on the spot, it can cost your job. If you're at a bar, it can cost you the girl you saw.

Doing comics is a serious matter.



I guess yesterday was a serious day. The "I get a new book out" day. As such, we decided to try and look serious. It was the least we could do, and our best shot at being taken seriously at our new book's party. We do comic books, after all, and there's a limit to how serious we can get. But we try.

You went and made a joke and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.

Okay, that's that for being serious. Now I'm back to trying to come up with girl situations. I'm not much of a words on a t-shirt kinda guy, I preffer my tees flat, but I'm always trying to figure what the person wearing the t-shirt is really saying.

Or maybe what each one reads.

This is not realy something related to comics and it is not something you will enjoy at the most, but we have changed our website 2 weeks ago and there are lot's of interesting things about us and our work there.

What;s the problem, then? Well, the site is in portuguese. There is ONE page in english where we point people the way to end up here.

My point is, even if you don't understand the words, there are a lot of nice images and we put some effort on the design and usage of the site, so if you have the chance, go there and take a look.

Free time.

What are you going to do with all your free time? You can rest, for your day must have been hard. You can go out and have a good time with your friends. You like them and they like you. I'm sure you're all busy people and always wish you had more time to spend with each other. You can find yourself a hobby for your free time and spend quality time improving your body and soul.

That's right, there's a lot of things you can do with your free time.

You go and enjoy it.

If you want to become a comic book artist, when you get some free time, you'll always be drawing. Or writing, if you have any dream about becoming an writer. You can do both, of course, I sure do try, but you only have so much free time and you'll have to squeeze everything in it in order to work (free) time enough so someone will be interested in looking at your work.

"If I do my comics on my free time, am I working for free?", the smart ones may ask. Yes, you are. And you'll probably work a lot for free before someone hires you. Try to see it as practice. We all need to practice. The comic book artist needs to do comic book pages in order to learn how to be a comic book artist. No sketchbook, no illustration work, no story-boards, no other drawing job, nothing teaches you how to do comics the way you learn when you do comics, so you'll need to practice doing comics. Those ones, you'll most likely will do for free and there's a good chance they'll suck.

We have to do several bad comics before we can do a good one.

Next week, my new brazilian book comes out. It's a collection of short stories I've been working on with my brother for the past three years. This book is the result of a lot of well spent free time. Here is the cover.

I like it.

What single women think.

I've been playing here with this ideas for comic strips about girls. Not always funny, they were made so that I could explore more female characters, trying to find more about the way girls think, the way they behave and how interesting they can be.

And just so nobody starts thinking otherwise ('cause I read his blog regularly and wouldn't want to hurt anyone's feelings), I have nothing against gays. Two of my best friends are gay. But I also have a lot of female friends complaining about the lack of men in their lives. That's how this strip started. When I showed this strip to my gay friend, he just said that he was having trouble finding gay man as well.

In the absence of men, I suddenly found myself in a Vertigo book. I better go look for my monkey.

Weekend girls.

My favorite subject, as an artist, is without a doubt the woman. I just love drawing women.

When you stop to think about the super heroes, you'll see that the guys, in their tights and uniforms, are made of shapes. Muscles and more muscles define the super guy. The girls, on the other hand, are made of lines. The line of her hair, the line we trace from the top of her neck to the bottom of her back; their shoulders, delicate yet strong; their lips, drawing a smile from which we ourselves can't resist and follow. When I'm drawing a guy, I'm building. When I'm drawing a girl, I'm following a line.

I guess that's why I don't see myself as a big super-hero artist. When it comes to drawing the strong guy who can break a wall, I prefer drawing a girl who can break your heart.

Ursula.

In Brasil, there's a lot of love for Ursula. Some say it's their favorite story (from the ones we made, that is). It's great to have it published in english as well so we can continue spreading the love for Ursula.

We already sold more than a thousand copies of Ursula in english.

I'm happy.

Work in progress.



Even one panel (this one is from a new story) is several at once. It's the panel you imagine when you write the story,it's the doodle you make on your thumbnail, it's the panel on the actual page once you pencil it and it's the same one, again, when you ink it.

You better like what you do in order to stand seeing your work over and over before it even gets out to the reader.

Another review on URSULA and the first bad one, for that matter. Reviews are always a good thing and they show us that different people like different things.

To read the review, click here.

The best teacher.



If you really want to do comic books, and you want to draw them, you must know Will Eisner's work. I'm not telling you that you probably know who he is and what he did, I'm saying that you have an obligation of knowing how he did - and still does - some of the most innovative and atemporal comic book pages of our times. He's the kind of artist that, if you look at his work over and over, there will always be something new for you to learn from it.

Eisner always put the reader inside the story, making a world we all believed in. His background showed us people lived there. His characters had the best body language you'll ever find in a comic book, and his style was everything at once: modern, classic, classy, bold, expressionist, minimal, poetic and sincere. He would do whatever it took to tell his stories. And he told them well.

Go buy yourself a Will Eisner book. NOW!

While doing the Smoke and Guns pages, I picture how would this particular page be if it were drawn by Will Eisner. I know my version will look different, but just the sensation to be working on the kind of story you can image Will Eisner doing always makes my day.

Good Luck today.

or
Meanwhile in Iraq...

The colors of war.



this is a pin up Ba did for a comic book here in Brasil. I think it looks great, but I'm a suspect on this particular matter.

It's funny how it relates events that happened here, but it could easily be about the civil war in the US.

Another weekend.

Enjoy your weekend. May it bring that special look from someone you love, or from someone you're dying to meet, there at night, staring from across the room. Happy halloween for all with another one of my old zine covers, which remains to this day one of my favorites.


May of 1997.

She shot me down.



Smoke and Guns sketch. The character, however, is feeling kinda sad in this one, and she is everything but sad. She's the girl with an attitude, the one you look and know right away she's not not to messed with.

Do you want to dance?



The comic book artist should be like a dancer, with attitude, confidence and initiative. The dancer walks across the floor and asks the girl to dance with him, he does not wait for somebody to discover him, to ask him, to lead.

You are the storyteller. Your story is up to you.

Silence, you fool!

Doing comics has a lot to do with talking. When you're working with someone else, be it the writer you're drawing the story for or the artist you're writing for, you have to tell the other exactly what you want, what you have in mind and what don't like. You can tell what you like as well, but that is more or less obvious if the other looks at the stuff you've already done.

Don't think anyone will think you're stupid if you don't understand what's the writer hidden purposes for a certain scene. Always ask away every single question you might come up with while reading the script. Remember that everything you don't know the answer for (and that needs an answer for the story to be told) won't be rightfully portrayed if you don't know what's the story you're telling.

I talk a lot with my brother about our comics. Maybe we talk too much, but it seems to help our work, so we just keep on talking. Sometimes, we argue, we fight and shout at each other.

Some answers just won't come quietly.

Just a little something else...

People are now talking about the new DEMO, which I believe is already issue 11. Another great cover in what I believe will be a series of really well crafted covers that will enter the history of comics, right there with the Watchmen covers and the Sandman covers.

I just had a conversation about covers during my coffee break (yes, I take coffee breaks, I'm human and brazilian coffee is delicious) with an artist friend of mine, in which we were talking about how different covers are from the interior art, not necessarily in style, but in weight and in the amount of density it needs to sell the book. Great covers will tell a story on it's own, a little tale curious enough to make everybody feel that need to open the book and start reading it.

Fish.

The bell ringed at the studio and I answered.

"Hi, is this the place where I can find Fabio Moon or Gabriel Ba?", said the voice of a man who certainly wasn't from the city.

"Who may I say is asking?", I replied, suspiciously.

"I'm a cartoonist and I wanted to talk to them about the market and to show my work."

Market? Does he think I'm selling fish over here?

As I opened the door and let the guy in, I noticed he didn't smell nice at all, reinforcing the image of a fish market in my mind.

I prayed for rain.

At the end of this week...

or

How to be inspired by great work.

I live in Brasil, as many of you know. As a result of that (and, let's face it, on account of too much work on my table right now), only last wednesday I had a chance to see Kill Bill volume 2. On the same day, also as a result of the lateness of arrivals around here, I finally read The League of Extraordinary Gentleman volume 2.

Both were great.

It's amazing how they both work the audience. That's their job, and they're really good at it. Perfect timing, good dialogue, the mood and the twists and the great and interesting characters. They both remind us creators that you should do your best and that your best should be fun.

It was a long week, I'll be back on Monday.

Go have fun.

And...

as a weekend bonus, a old cover from my mini-comic days (eventhough, when I was doing them, they were called fanzines).


April or May, 1997

When you know what you want, you know where to go.


What's the first step to our addiction? Reading. We all start as comic book readers, one way or another, and there's not a single artist or writer in comics who never read a comic in his life. And, for the time we remember kindly in our minds, we loved the comics we read.

Okay. Time passes, we grow up - to the eyes of some, anyway - and we decide to do comics. When that happens, we probably don't even know how a comic book is done. If we're lucky, we already know there's a person, or a bunch of people, creating the stuff, but we may not know their names at first. When we do, it's always puzzling who does what. To me, it still is kinda blurry what's really the artist's part, what's the writer's function and so on.

That's the point where many people get lost in their quest: they don't really know what they want to do in comics. Mostly all begin with the hope to become the famous artist, even if only famous among the small comic book market. Those who discover very early their complete inaptitude to draw will think about becoming writers, but if you follow these ones from early on on their lives, you'll probably see that they were bound to become writers all along. But what about the rest of us? What about the guy who draws something, even if it's not pretty? What about the guy who can do a great Jim Lee page, and a great Mike Mignola page, but can't do a dozen of any? What about the guy who just can't write any good stories, can't draw well enough to be a super-hero artist, can't draw enough to tell his own stories, and still wants to do comics?

Many colorists in the industry are failed pencillers or failed artists. Many letterers are failed artists. Okay, you can say that lettering is an art in itself (and it really is), and that there are great colorists out there, that's not the point.

So what's the point, really?

I don't know. What I do know is that I see many artists who love comics and they just don't know what they want to do in the business. I don't think it's good for an artist to have many different styles and try many different types of comics, from the super hero type to the newly born kid's comics. You can work in any type of comics, but you don't really need to change your style, or try to create a different style for every comic you're trying to get a job in, because that may distance the artist from his own personal style, which is his most important skill, in my opinion. The artist, no matter what he draws, must have a style clearly his own to translate everything he shows in the page with it.

How do one gets there?

That's the question everybody wants to know the answer. All I can say is that, even if you don't know, the only way you can get anywhere is working it. If you want to draw, go draw. You may not be fit to draw super heroes, but if you keep drawing you may find out what's really the stuff you SHOULD be drawing, what stories you should be telling, who you should be.

Not just anybody's help.



The best feedback an comic book artist (and writer, for that matter) can have comes from the reader. He's your target audience to begin with, and he will eventually buy (or fail to buy it, in case you suck) your book.

Comics should, at first, work as a medium where a story is told. If you give your work to someone to read and he (I'm sticking with the "he" bit 'cause most comic book readers are male, even if my most avid fans aren't) does not understand your story, even if it's only a part of it, your story has a problem. It's easy to assume he "didn't get it", but it's always good to stop and think about "why didn't he get it?" in the first place.

When I was beginning, my audience consisted mainly of my friends at college and most had never read a comic book before. That was a great bouncing board for me, as they would ask me questions I took for granted and made me think about all aspects of making good comic book that everybody can understand.

Do my comics got dumber because of that? No, they did not. They just started working on another level. For me, the joy of creating a new story consists in layering several levels in the story, so there'll be something there for everybody.

A late farewell.

Scott Kurtz put this over at his site.

Beautiful image.

Coincidentally (or not, for those who believe in this type of stuff), we did a Superman-like character last week for our weekly children's magazine's job.

Falling in love all over again.



Newsarama talked with Steve Hamaker about coloring Bone for it's new Scholastic edition. All I can say is that the color previews look very nice.

In fact. That's not true. Yes, the colors look nice, but I have MORE to say about it. Bone was, in my mind, probably the best realized comic-book in the hands of one artist. In the same way Sin City was created to work in black and white, so was the adventures of those three Bone cousins, and Jeff Smith succeeded effortlessly at making that colorless world come to life in front of us. Now, in a way I think Sin City wouldn't work, Bone gets a color version that's also very beautiful to look at and doesn't diminish the accomplishment of the first version.

It take a very god artist to tell the best story he can tell in black and white, and that goes to say that he only have himself to rely on. And, if he's really that good an artist, his work will remain his even if somebody works over it, and that's what's happening with the colored Bones.

Steve Oliff had this slogan for his Olioptics company: "the better you draw, the better we color", which tells the core of my argument. Coloring something is easier if the drawing in back and white is well realized.

Today, I think artists got used to colored comic-books, so they're leaving a lot of the work for the color: notions of light and shadow, of mood, hour of day, foreground and background definition and even texture. These artists, when working only n black and white, will fail in telling a story that require stuff that they don't do anymore, let alone stuff that they never learned or tried to do.

I love working in black and white. There's a classical feel in black and white stories that I love, and I do my best to tell my story using only that. If I put any consideration about color in my work, it's the one I learned with Jeff Smith: do the best black and white you can, but make sure it will ALSO look great in color. After all, you never know.

Crazy person.

Sometimes, I picture myself writing - if not thinking - like a crazy person, and it reads a lot like Rorschach:

Fell out of bed today. Woke up and went to work. Been working since. Can't stop.

I suppose I should be eating cold beans from a can with a spoon to complete the picture.

. . .

Now, really, about the work.

At the end of August, I wrote a script for a short film. Later this week, we'll start shooting it. Last week brought a delightful round of actors and actresses for our casting test, and we met wonderful new friends. I already learned a lot from then. I just hope they'll be able to learn something from me as well, just so everybody can leave this new experience with another story to tell.

You meant COMICS?

It's time to show something so I don't upset my readers (what readers, you crazy fool? Get back to the dungeon!).



My new brazilian book is ready. It's gorgeous. I'm proud. Now, all I have in my drawing board is Smoke and Guns. I'm sure those girls missed me while I was away.

I missed them.

My brother and I have been asked to be part of an anthology to be released next year. We'll probably work on two different stories, just so we have more to show. It's fun when we realize two can do twice the work.