Looking ahead.



So, the script I was writing began with a church bell. That's a very graphic way to start a story, if you ask me. I had the entire first page in my mind and I only had the sound of the bells written down.

Then, I wrote a page of dialogue and decided that was not the story I wanted to tell. The dialogue was not bad, neither was the beginning with the church, but that's the beginning of a story which I don't want to finish right now.

Why?

I think I might rush it. I want to do a story in a certain amount of time, and for that purpose I need the script as soon as possible, and for that I either have a great idea that's pretty much complete, or I will just ruin good beginnings with crap endings just to have a story.

"That story will have to wait." I concluded.

Then, later that night, I had another idea. It had a beginning, a middle and an end. It was visual, it had a lot of room for dialogue, and it dealt with a subject I wanted to address on the story: the future.

And the future became the present became now.

It looks promising.

Today's dream.



I had another dream with Diana Schutz. Again, we were talking about the new Dark Horse book, and this time around we were talking about the cover I just did for it.

As most of my dreams about serious conversations regarding professional matters, it took place in a bar. We were all drinking heavily, and there was smoke on the air.

We were both very pleased with the cover, so I woke up with a smile on my face.

I was late for work, of course.

Red light means STOP.

Today, I'm writing a script. I should have finished it some months ago, but other things kept calling my attention and, when you see, all this time have passed and you've done nothing.

Well, you did a lot of things, actually, but not the script. And if there's no script, there's no story.

I keep telling myself that, after I finish the last touches on the projects I already finished (which still require so much attention after I'm done drawing it), I'll focus only on the writing.

Yeah, right.

The ideas keep coming, but I just don't seem to have the free time to sit for hours until I can organize and write everything down.

Maybe I should do it now, I often think, but then I remember I'm already skipping some work I should be doing (drawing) to write something here.

Pulsing in our veins.



Jennifer Contino loves rock 'n' roll, but then, who doesn't? It's such an international language of music, one that attracts the young and the bold. Just like comics, right?

Anyway, she did an inverview with me at the Pulse, to know more about our ROCK'n"ROLL one-shot being published by Image Comics this month. If you're not sure yet if you want this comic book, check out the new preview pages at the interview and get excited.

Get very excited.

Self portrait.



I guess I can blame art school for that. All through history, artists have made portraits of themselves.

Then there's this very strong autobiographical tradition in brazilian comics, one that certainly influenced me while I was growing up. The fact that, at a very early age, the first characters my brother and I created were various versions of ourselves is a proof of that.

How much of yourself do you discover when you do a self portrait? What is the image you have of yourself? How much of it represents the image and how much, the personality?

Girls in comics are sexy.

Hey, do you want to know more about woman in comics? Diana Schutz talks about her new anthology, Sexy Chix. You can check out some artwork from the female authors, and try to learn something about this very strange job of bringing the girls to the world of comics.

When I was doing my fanzines in college, I had a lot of girls reading it, because art school is full of girls. But the girls were also the ones who gave more feed back regarding the work, what they had liked and what didn't work for them. Maybe that made my work go to a more girly direction.

That, and the fact that I tell love stories.

Progressions on Fell.

For those interested in the process of making comics, Ben Templesmith shows how he approaches the covers and the pages of Fell, his new comic book with Warren Ellis. And, as he is behind all the art, from pencil to color, it's a good example of how an artist leaves a lot of stuff out of the initial penciling to keep the work from getting too repetitive, and how it changes from one step to the next.

Sketching and warming up.



Sometimes, I miss the exchange of e-mails from Larry Young while I was doing Smoke and Guns. The fact that I did two thirds of the book in one month resulted in one very intense month, with two pages a day, e-mails late at night and some "behind the scenes" pencils I'd send him every now and then because I just had to share the progress of the book. I was so excited.

Compared to that month, I'm now sailing on very calm seas.

And today I missed the storm.

Sharp eye.

Augie De Blieck is checking what's coming out in January 2006 acording to the latest edition of PREVIEWS. And he caught something there.

I'm wondering how long it will take for others to do the same.

And then they'll start asking questions.

One week away.


Next week, our brazilian independent comic book will see a bigger release as it will be published by Image Comics. So here I am talking about it some more.


Artwork by Gabriel Ba. Click on the image for a bigger version.

Our brazilian version of the comic book was self published. We did a print run of a thousand. The fact that we sold out of it's initial print run in Brazil had already left all the creators involved happy, even if we were sad we didn't have the comic book in our hands anymore, but we know the size of our market and how our readers behave regarding independent publications, so we knew that it wouldn't be worth it for us to do a second printing of the book.

Out of that initial run, we brought a hundred comics in our trip to San Diego in 2004 to use as a "exotic" comic we made, and to use as a "portfolio". I can't tell you how much more impact our portfolio caused on every editor that looked at it. Much more than any other time we showed them our work. I believe that when you present a complete comic book, you can really see if your work can tell the story or not. It's there, ready, and there's no excuses.

Like all comics should be.


Artwork by Fabio Moon. Click on the image for a bigger version.

Take a look at these preview pages from ROCK'n'ROLL and see if you like it. And make sure to check your local comic book store next week when the comic hits the streets. If you're feeling bold, you can even leave some comments. I won't bite, you know?

Does your face shows your heart?


The cover for the new book is moving forward. I sent Diana eleven sketches and she really liked one. It's the first time I had to send the cover ideas for approval, and I was wondering what would happen if none of my ideas were accepted. Maybe they would do a cover using images from the interior art. Maybe they would do a "designer's cover" with clever lettering and no art. And maybe they would just tell me to keep thinking.

But I really like the cover idea Diana chose. Now it's the same old thing all over again: making sure your finalized piece retains the energy it has when it was a doodle the size of your thumb.

The two cover ideas I'm showing she did not like. Or just felt were not the strongest ones. Either way, the were rejected for this particular book, which is not to say they would have been bad covers. Maybe someday I'll use them for a completely different book, or maybe for a monthly series, as they seem to carry the same idea and would work well month after month.

Thinking about my time at the saloon.



This year, I worked on Smoke and Guns and on a short story for the western anthology Gunned Down. I saw both printed at the same week, when I was in San Diego, and both turned out to be beautiful books.

My brother also worked on Gunned Down in a story 41 pages long.

Also, the western anthology has stories by Kako and Bruno D'Angelo, our partners in crime on ROCK'n'ROLL.

It's funny how we first did ROCK'n'ROLL as an independent comic book in Brazil, and it was picked up by Image Comics and is now being published in the US in two weeks. Gunned Down, on the other hand, was first published in the US, even with an all brazilian cast of artists, and just last month was published in Brazil.

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.

Colorful world.



It's strange how, at first, we think color is very important for our comic book. Maybe it is, but I think it's very common to start thinking that good colors equal a lot of them.

All of them, if you can.

Then, you have your work with all those colors and you lose that impression you had when you did your black and white image, that notion of background, foreground, light and shadow, positive and negative. You had to make all this choices when you were making your black and white image, and then you made no choice at all while coloring it and just put all the colors you saw on your rainbow in every page.

What a mess.

Coloring, just like drawing, should primarily be about personal style, personal expression, and the choices you make so your work looks constantly yours.

Some things have changed.

I already spent too much time redesigning the site, so here you have it. It has a bunch of information, some pictures, some history, and soon enough it will have some more fun stuff (fun for who is a question for another time).

I'm behind on the schedule for the Dark Horse book cover, so that's what's ahead of me for the week. Also, I have my final rehearsal for the dance show tonight, and the actual show tomorrow.

Something strange is happening.


Prepare yourselves for Monday.

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.

The ball drops- a Rock'n'Roll story.



I just realize that my Rock'n'Roll comic book is coming out from Image Comics in twenty days and that I haven't been talking about it non stop as I should be. I wonder why that is?

I know that, in the issue of previews it was solicited, it had a big preview (at least that was the impression I was given, as I never really saw the previews catalog), so it clearly should have grabbed people's attention there, mostly the retailers'. Hopefully, those retailers will order a good bunch of the book and everything will be alright, but it's never 100% safe in this world, is it?

Rock 'n' Roll is the closest thing my brother and I ever made to a perfect one shot comic book, it's the most fun idea we could come up with, with the most interesting characters we wanted to use, with the elements we all loved to read in comics as we were growing up.

It is also a big tribute to how much Mike Mignola changed the way we understood comics.

We came a long way since we saw the first issue of Roland - days of wrath go out into the world. Back then, we were completely unknown artists, self-publishing with a completely unknown writer from Santa Barbara, there was no big internet world to spread the word on your work, but since we had won the Xeric Foundation Grant, we had our share of media attention and we got some five thousand orders for the first issue, which to this day I think is a great start.

That was in 1999.

I wonder how many initial orders Rock'n'Roll will have.

the voice.

Today I did the first drawing for one of the projects I'll be working on next year. This will be the "I'm only the artist" project, as I plan to focus on writing more. I miss writing longer stories, as my last writing efforts were not longer than 10 pages of comics, but at the same time I don't want to hurry on the writing just so I have something new to draw. The artist must be drawing so his style stays fresh, so I can't stop. Not now, when I finally think that I do, after all, have a style.

Which is something I'm not so sure when it comes to my writings. I really should write more often to acquire, just as with the art, a sense of style and personal flavor. I feel that every time I start writing, it sounds and reads like the last thing I read, or just like somebody else. I remember feeling that I had a style, that I had a voice. Nowadays I feel like I mostly have a view.

That has to change.

automatic face.


I had plenty of ink on my brush after finishing one page today, so I did this drawing, without any preliminary pencil. It's my automatic Gunned Down drawing, mostly done on the inside of other people's copies, next to a nice dedication joke.

Not that they were any funny, my dedications.

But at least I tried.

I gotta get back to the next page. I have only two left, then the story is done.

Spreading like rats.


artwork by Fabio Moon, all rights reserved.

Comic books are a popular medium. Telling stories are popular, or at least they should be. They should be made for the people, and for as many people as possible.

We should find ways to spread our arms and reach out.

We should always do our best to tell the stories we have.

We should always keep going.

Rise and shine.

No sleep, just keep on dancing.



Dancers.

Done between three and four in the morning, for a job I thought I would hate. I didn't hate it, but I just lost an entire night of sleep to finish it.



Some drawings are ugly. At least, they're meant to be ugly, but in their ugliness they turn into something quite interesting.

Deep.

That's what you'll get after my hands ache because of how fast I had to ink.

I really need some sleep. I'll probably eat breakfast first. I really like breakfast, and I can make some mean fried eggs.

Hungry.

Green gun illustration.


illustration by Gabriel Ba, all rights reserved.

Here's a illustration Ba did for the biggest newspaper in Brazil. The story covered the upcoming election on whether or not selling guns should be prohibited in Brazil.

Black and white with flat colors. That's how Casanova will look like (with just one flat color instead of two), only that it will look completely different since Ba will draw stuff he never had to come up with before.

September Smoke.

Brian, that big Khepri.com guy, just wrote me a note to tell that Smoke and Guns was his top graphic novel of September. It's also nice to see my first american work, the Roland - days of wrath graphic novel, on the same top 10 list, and at number 3 no less. I think that maybe your current work do attract attention to your older work.

Today I shall finish my first set of super-heroes pages. I got delayed by some unexpected family matter, but the pages are now getting back on track. After all is said and done, I'll go back to this first swim to tell you about the fish and the wonders I saw at the bottom of the ocean.

Tapes.

Matt Fraction and Joe Casey talk about Casanova at their weekly Basement Tapes. The pitch, the bible, the choice of artist.

Interesting.

Ba is reading the first issue, Matt is writing the second, stuff is happening.

Interesting.

The monsters you have inside.


I was creating some monsters today. Not as easy as I thought it would be.

Riot.



Just a quick note on how cool that Riot comic book store looks. It makes a good impression on the ladies, that's for sure. My girlfriend, and my sister, would both be vary comfortable in that store, and they would even feel inclined to look at some comics.

It's not bad either that there's a Smoke and Guns poster in there.

Almost spring time.



Unlike the drawing I did today, which i did because it's very cold today, I'm happy. I feel like I'm moving forward, even if only slowly, and that I am, indeed, telling stories.

I did a wonderful page today.

My book is almost ready.

This just in:

I didn't want to create a post just for this, but it's well worth the read: Erik Larsen urging creators to create.

Search for the ARTIST.

other view of the same work.

Funny stuff I saw on the net. I feel like that sometimes, and I'm sure a lot of you also feel the same, so I thought I'd share.

So...

Do you want to see the first scripted pages of Casanova? It sure shows how Matt Fraction writes his comics. If you're interesting, click here.


I can't wait to see Ba drawing this thing.

Practice 6.



For a moment, I thought I was doing this little exercises for others to see what you have to attend to when doing a comic book. After I had fun with the first two ones, I realized that I was doing it for myself.

I'm the one practicing.

I'm the one learning.

You're just watching along the way as I go.

You should always practice. Even if you already have published work somewhere else, if you're not working on something that will make you use a specific kind of artistic muscle, this muscle will lose it's strength.

And the practice I'm doing is the only one we should never stop doing.

That's where the story is really told.

Practice 5.


I'm curious.

When and how did you decide to become what you are now?
When did you decide to become a doctor? A lawyer? A publisher?

Where were you, and what were you doing, when you realized that was the path you should follow?

Practice 4.



There's no easy way to comics. No matter how you get into comics, you'll always have to work hard. Even if you suck at it, you'll have to do it day in, day out, more days than you would want, more hours than you'd like.

Only working hard you'll get anywhere.

You'll fuck up a lot.

That's the only way you'll learn.


artwork by Fabio Moon.

One day late. Remember the mistakes of the past so you don't repeat them in the future.

Practice 3.


I wonder if this could be a trend and if it could spread. A also wonder if, this way, some artists who have no idea of what storytelling means will finally see the light.

I wonder if most people who dream of becoming comic book artists realize it's not a day in the park, it's a life sentence of never ending hard work.

Beaten.

artwork by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba.

Fight the laziness. You might get a little bruised along the way, but it's worth it.

You'll see. With your good eye, at least.

Ouch.

Practice 2.


I should play more often with letters and sound effects. They can also be very graphic if used right.

Practice.


I've been thinking of doing something like this for a long time, and every time someone starting out complains to me that they only "write" comics and so they can't really show their work, I remember this idea.

Expect more of this soon.

The new wave.

sketchy artwork by Fabio Moon.

I'm doing this illustration about surf. I tried the "comic book approach", but it did not work. They want a single image with all the moves. You know, from the distance. Front view. Tiny little surfers on a big chunk of blue.

Boring.

Not so boring is the super hero script I just finished reading. Quite the opposite. Expect more on that soon, as I start working on these characters.

And, to continue our regular broadcast of reviews, click here for the latest one about Smoke and Guns.