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.

Brazilian.

Today, we celebrate the "National comic book day" here in Brazil, as it was on this day, in 1869, that the first brazilian comic, called "As Aventuras de Nhô Quim", was published on the newspaper "Vida Fluminense".

The more my brother and I continue to work around the world, the more we want to keep publishing in Brazil. There's so much to say about all things, and certainly there's a lot to say about our country, our people and our friends. I came to realize it's more interesting to talk about what you know (and sometimes, to the people you know) than to try to talk about something you don't know, trying (again) to be someone you're not. The best way to make people notice your work is to be yourself, and be brazilian if that's what you are. They already have enough japanese in Japan, enough americans in the US, enough french in France.

Find out who you are, and how that's interesting, and it's much easier to tell stories all around the world.

And to your friends, who were there when you started.

Becky and the president.

For the portuguese speakers, an interview with Becky Cloonan where she spreads her enthusiasm for making comics.

For the rest, something I did last week on my sketchbook that "could" be a drawing of the current brazilian president, who just got reelected.

Hidden.

Sometimes, you're at risk of hiding yourself behind your work. If you're not doing something which tells the world what you think, what you believe and what you want to say, you're basically being somebody else, other than yourself, that is appearing while you keep yourself hidden.

If you stay hidden too long, you might be forgotten.

What makes your work yours? What makes you recognize yourself on your work, even if year have passed and you're a different person?

I have come to realize not all comic-book artists are storytellers in terms of wanting to write their own stories. That does not mean they're hiding behind somebody else's stories, for what they want to do - which is draw, and draw stories - is what they're doing. They could also just do illustrations and wish for comics, and then they too would be hiding.

That doesn't come to say we can't do several different things, write, draw comics and illustrate pieces, but instead I just think that one should try to find out what it is that really makes one tick, feel alive and makes one want to do more. All this creating, no matter in what form, takes time, takes energy and creates a road, a map and a portrait of each artist. Let us travel the right road, drawing the right map so the portrait we create are of ourselves.

Figueroa Hotel

I hear from Matt that Casanova 7 will come out February 14th. A week before carnaval here in Brazil, and a great way to start the festivities. If you think Bá's artwork has only been getting better, wait until you see the entire new level of awesomeness issue 7 brings. But, while we wait, what can we do?

One of the most different things Bá did last year was collaborate with Grampá and Denis on this huge triptych image on the walls of the Figueroa hotel, in L.A. Grampá did the players and the colors, Bá did the buildings and Denis directed the animation spots for TV, which Grampa did concepts for.



It's strange how this things happen worldwide nowadays. While Bá and Grampá worked together all night long on several nights, they were talking with Denis, who is living in Barcelona, to do this work for a client in New York for something that would be seen and done in L.A.

Last curtain.

If you really like something you did, you feel like you're still working on it in your mind. Every time you look at it again, you are either retouching a brush stroke, or creating an entire new image that continues where you had left off. You are discovering it as if you were the reader, and yet you recognize yourself and all the hours you spent working and creating.

It has been more than six months since I've worked from anybody else's scripts other than my own, and it's nice. At the same time, I see Bá working on Casanova - or on the Umbrella Academy, as is the case this week - and I wonder what would I do differently if I had read that script. A lot of the stuff I think Bá came up with was actually on the script, but I can't imagine myself doing it like that even if that was asked for.

All scripts I read so far in my life were hard to read. They were not prose, nor poetry, nor plays. They were comic book scripts, and they were very mechanic in format. I'm still not used to that, as I tend to only write dialogues on my scripts, like a play, but eventually I get it's rhythm and then everything is okay.

Identical.

Over the weekend, a package arrived with some gifts from Dark Horse, so now my brother and I have identical car key-chains, and it's almost ridiculous how nice it is to have something identical again. Long gone are the days when we were dressed by our mom in identical clothes, and it's been a while since we had just the identical amount of friends, and thank God we don't have an identical art style anymore.

Not that we ever have an identical art style, but I copied Bá's style for a long time and it took me years to find my own look. As I think back, it wasn't so much a matter of imitating him, it was just the easier way to draw and a faster way to worry only with the stories and less with the art.

I only started worrying about the art midway through college, and I only got any good at drawing after the first 1000 pages of comics.

Wait.

I haven't reached 1000 pages of comics yet.

Suddenly, I feel I should be back at the drawing board.

Past and Future.

After working on O Alienista, which takes place in the nineteenth century, I want to do the present or, even more, the future.

One of the greatest things about comics is this possibility of creating, or recreating, worlds. There's no boundaries as where to go, what to write about, what to draw. The only starting point, if any, is a story to be told. Wherever this story takes us, we'll go.

Cortina and the colors.

Working in color is so much different than working in black and white. I'm coloring this story I did last year and, since I knew from the get go that I wanted it to be in color, I left a lot of white on the page. When you're working in black and white, this white means white, or space, or air for the black to breath. Now, this white can remain all that, but it can also become an entire new world.

Very colorful indeed.

My plan right now is to finish all the colors this week, and considering it's just a 5 page story, it should be doable. This year, I plan on doing a lot more comics, so it's essential that I determine schedules even for the more independent projects and try my best to stick to them.

Ba will return tomorrow from Bahia after ten days of beautiful beaches and paradise refueling. Gerard already touched base from Tokyo, so Ba has a script waiting for him when he arrives.

Beginning tomorrow, the twin-machine gets back to its regular working routine, and it's time to start creating more stories.

Out of fin air, if needed.

In color, if necessary.

And lovely, as usual.

2007.

I love the city, its complexity, its rhythm and its memory of all the lives that have passed through it every day. That's probably the reason it's featured in so many of my stories, or it may be just the fact that its such a big part of my everyday life, and of the lives I see go by my eyes every day, being myself a citizen of the city.

But the city doesn't give me everything I need, especially when what I want is precisely not need anything. In times like this, we need to get away and look for another place, far from the city, from the noise and from the rhythm. When you get there, listen.

The silence, at first. The lack of cars, smoke, lights. Then you'll notice what's below this surface: tranquility.

At the turn of the year, I took a few comics with me, but I didn't read them all. Too much time I spent looking at the horizon, in silence, listening the sound of breaking waves. I took some books as well, but I didn't read them all. Too much time I spent walking barefoot, without my shirt. I took my sketchbook with me, but I drew very little. Too much time I spent thinking about the future, smiling for no reason and daydreaming.

It's good to be back.

We all have a lot of work ahead of us.

Be yourself in 2007

The basic.

Looking back at the workshops we did this year, I realized how much potential comic book artists we have if we can just push the right buttons.

If you look at the pictures above, taken from our last workshop in Brasilia, you'll notice how basic are the drawings. This is the kind of class we like to give, stripping the craft to the bare bones of the creation of comics: how do we tell a story mixing images and words? How do we lead the reader's eye through the panel, through the page and into the next? How do you write your dialogues, your narration and your thought balloons (these poor forgotten tools) and how you lay them on the page to help the flow of the story?

Creating a comic book is not about how well you draw, it's how well you tell the story. And all you need to tell the story is the right understanding of the tools you have.

The best aspect to this "back to the basic" workshops is how they help both the aspiring writers and the aspiring writers. You have to think about the pictures to write, and you have to think about the words to draw.

Casanova - the entire first issue.

Click on the link and read the entire first issue of Casanova!

I have learned more about a monthly book with Casanova than with any other book I've done, and I'm not even drawing the book. I watch Ba receive the scripts, I see him go through his thumbnails, and I see all the pages, from early pencil stage to final inks, and finally with "the green". Combined with the back-and-forth talk with Matt that goes around on the internet, Ba is creating an entire work routine here, and a very chaotic one.

But I believe it's from chaos that great things arise.

Merry Christmas.

What's next?

I did a one page story this week, remembering how pleasant it can be to do short stories. When you're creating a longer piece, you may think about each page as a whole and try to compose the panels in a way they'll feel balanced and complete, and yet they must lead to the next page, but when you're doing a one page story, you take this notion to the ultimate level.

One page stories are like comic strips. They're jokes, even if they're not funny.

You have to have a punch-line.

And then, you're done. It's so fast you just want to keep going, keep drawing, creating yet another story, another character, another world.

You don't have to wait the end of the year to start thinking ahead, but when the year ends, you feel something is closing and start to wonder what's going to begin next.

Covering Luxuria.

This is the cover of the first Casanova collection.

Ba has outdone himself with all Casanova covers, specially if you consider that, before starting on the series, he didn't like to do covers, and didn't think much of the few covers he had done before.

Not only the covers have a visual identity, but they also are not just one image made by the same artist who did the interior artwork, which means that this image (and all other covers) has to look like a cover, like one image that tells a lot without showing everything.

You don't need the logo to see this is a cover.

Likewise, Becky's latest cover for "Pirates of Coney Island" is perhaps the most graphic she did for the series, and maybe that's the reason it is the one that works the most to grab the reader's attention.

For O Alienista, which I just finished, Bá and I will collaborate on the cover. Let's see where that will lead us.

twins.

Everybody asks us if we always looked alike. You know, we're twins, after all. Yes, we always looked very much alike. More even when we were kids.

As babies, there was no telling us apart. Our mom knew, of course, but our father used the t-shit colors as his guide.

That was nice, and it still is. The problem was, when we were kids, we had the same art style. Maybe we both lacked the same amount of style and, like many children do, we drew copying from every artist we read. All those poor imitations just made clear how much we liked comics, no matter if they were super heroes, alternative, erotic or european, or even japanese, there were we drawing what we saw.

For a while, that helped. We got to think about the difference in each style, each approach, but it became clear that we were not really showing our personality on those drawings. Even if we were to draw ourselves (we always were our own favorite characters), we were not finding our way with the art. There was no telling who did what, who created what, and that was not good.

Specially if you're a twin and your life revolves around "who's who" and "who did what".

It wasn't until we were mid-way through college that we developed a personal style, one that evolved into what we do today.

Yes?

"Yes?", could be the translation for what the strange guy is saying. "May I help you?"

Like this, I have started a new story. I always wanted to start a story with a question posed with the character asking it looking at the readers, as if he's asking it to them. It's like you're entering this new story, and that's the reason the character is opening a door to welcome us and ask us what do we want.

After all, what do you want when you start a new story?

Are we ready for a new story, or we just want more of the same? Do we know what to expect before entering, or it's out of curiosity that we start every journey? All is considered when one must start a story, be it the artist, the storyteller or the reader.

And then we start it and we discover it to be completely different from what we expected.

Do we continue, then?

That's how I wanted to finish the first chapter of this new story, asking the character, and the reader, if they'll continue on the path that was open for her.

So I ask the question on the last panel of the first chapter:

"Are you in?"



This story will appear on the second volume of De:TALES.

Matt Fraction.

Matt Fraction writes comics, but he used to write prescriptions in Kansas (or was it Missouri) for hurricane victims. While still on his teens, he discovered the magic of books, which he described as " prescriptions with a lot of pages", and decided he wanted to write them. The amount of pages actually involved in those big prescription that people bought in those "book stores" seemed too big for our little bearded man, so he decided to find a middle ground.

Comic books, he decided, had more or less the amount of words he felt were enough to satisfy people and still let them hanging for more - more being the drawings.

But Matt can't draw.

Well, he can, but he doesn't know it yet. Still, comics required drawings, so Matt went on a journey to find people to draw his prescriptions. His journey led him to South America and, since he didn't spoke spanish, he decided to go to Brazil, where they also didn't speak spanish, assuming he would feel right at home.

That's where he found us.

And that's how Ba became the artist on Casanova.

Casanova, on many languages, can be translated to "new house", which was Matt's ultimate prescription to all the hurricane victims he encountered throughout his life.

Nowadays, enjoying the success Matt has acquired, he developed a hobby: biographer. Right now, he's researching Lincoln, but since he's dead, it's really hard to get a hold on him. He seems to be somewhere else, and not available for interviews.

Bummer.

Matt is not easily beaten, and so he decided to practice his skills becoming our official biographer!

He's doing a terrific job so far, but let's hope he doesn't let go of his prescriptions' job just yet.

What are you looking for?

What are you looking for when you try a book you never heard of? I'm sure the cover must grab your attention, maybe the title has a strangeness that appeals to you, but once you have the book in your hands and flip through it, what do you see that makes you want to take this book home to look at it and read it for more than those ten seconds at the store?