Casanova snapshot

writing our way in.

As I was looking how many posts we did on each year of our blog's existence, I noticed how much effort we put into getting ourselves noticed early on our career.

As the time passed, we got more work, eventually we had less time left and we started to try to focus on what was important and write on the blog only when we had something to say.

At our table

As Bá dives very deep into the third story arc of Casanova, I oversee Cris Peter's color work for the second story arc. At the same time, we're finalizing the design choices for the Daytripper trade. I remember every other hour that I still need to write a commentary for the new Luxuria collection talking about our new colorful world, and about the handwritten quality of how we do things these days. I imagine all of this have to be done this week.

We just returned from a convention in Rio in which the main international guest was Milo Manara, and he had a huge exhibition of his originals at the show, and it was inspiring and breath taking. "I'm just learning how to walk" crosses my mind as I see the steps taken by this italian giant. Aim higher, mister Moon.

Convention season is over for us this year. The year is almost over anyway, but for us there's this feeling of a journey which is only beginning. New stories, new projects, new ideas we're already working on, ideas that cannot wait till Christmas or New Year's. We're keeping busy, and we're grateful for all the support we have from our friends and our readers. Every time we lock ourselves in the studio, we know you're out there, waiting for us, and happy to find out whatever it is we bring along as we emerge once more.

Casanova in 2011

January will explode with Casanova as both the trade from the first series, LUXURIA, and the first issue of the new series, GULA, will come out and please the readers. In GULA, I step in as artist of the series, and the LUXURIA trade has super cool never before seen bonus material. 2011 is a good year to be a Casanovonaut, as Matt used to call our readers, and it al starts as early as January. This time around, don't miss the boat.


CASANOVA VOL. 1: LUXURIA TPB
Written by MATT FRACTION
Penciled by FÁBIO MOON & GABRIEL BÁ
Cover by GABRIEL BÁ
Meet Casanova Quinn: prodigal son of a law-and-order family hell-bent on keeping the world safe and sound, now blackmailed into betraying his father and the international law enforcement organization he controls. LUXURIA collects the first volume of CASANOVA as its titular star transforms from devil-may-care thrill-seeker into the most dangerous man in the world. What happens when the ultimate player gets played? Find out in this genre-bending sci-spy epic. Gorgeously re-colored and re-lettered by hand, this staggering psychedelic spy-fi epic is collected for the first time as it was meant to be made. By the Eisner award-winning team of Matt Fraction (INVINCIBLE IRON MAN, THOR, UNCANNY X-MEN), Gabriel Bá (UMBRELLA ACADEMY, BPRD: 1947), and Fábio Moon (DAYTRIPPER, SUGARSHOCK). With all-new, all-different, never-before-seen bonus material! Collecting CASANOVA: LUXURIA #1-4

CASANOVA: GULA #1 (of 4)
Written by MATT FRACTION
Art & Cover by FÁBIO MOON
CASANOVA is back. Or is he? Actually Casanova is gone. Gone from space, gone from time. The burning question WHEN IS CASANOVA QUINN hangs over the entire world as E.M.P.I.R.E. and W.A.S.T.E. alike race toward the horrible, inevitable, answer…The second staggering volume of CASANOVA starts here by the Eisner-laden team of Matt Fraction (THOR, UNCANNY X-MEN, THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN) and Fábio Moon (DAYTRIPPER, SUGARSHOCK) taking over art duties. Never before collected! Never before reprinted! Never before understood! In gorgeous full 4-D psychocolor! Worth a million in prizes! Change your shorts, change your life, change into a nine-year-old Hindu boy! Guaranteed!*
*not actually guaranteed
40 PGS./Mature Content …$3.99

BIENVENIDOS A ROSÁRIO!

Here's our two scheduled events at the CRACK BANG BOOM convention in Rosario.

Thursday (Jueves)
19:00-20:15 Charlas de Café Parte II.
Rafael Albuquerque (Blue Beetle), Gabriel Ba (The Umbrella Academy), Rafael Grampá (Mesmo delivery), Fabio Moon (Daytripper), entre otros, cuentan sus proyectos personales y la actualidad de la historieta en el mercado brasileño. Bar del CEC

Sunday (Domingo)
17:00-18:20 Dibujando desde Brasil
Una mesa redonda fascinante con algunos de los mejores artistas brasileños de este momento: Rafael Albuquerque , Gabriel Ba , Rafael Grampá , Fabio Moon… Teatro Parque España

We'll also have a table to sell our comics, make sketches an talk to everyone who stops by. We've brought copies of our brand new self-published comic ATELIER, as well as CASANOVA, Gustavo Duarte's new comic TAXI and a few other things. As soon as we know more details about the table location, number, etc... we will put it here.

Hasta mañana!

Crack Bang Boom around the corner

Here we go.

NYCC here we come

Here we go. Our new monster arrived and we're almost ready to go. Not yet packed, not yet finished with half the Casanova pages Bá is doing, but we'll get there. We always do.



On the above image, I think I remembered all the information about our NYCC trip. Inside the Javits center, at least. I'm not going to list all the pages and covers we'll bring, stop at the booth and check them out (they look nice).
We'll be at the CBLDF welcoming party on Thursday night, and on a Dark Horse party at St. Mark's Comics on Saturday night.

Below, the basic info about our new comic:


ATELIER
by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá
40 pages
US$ 3

I'll leave you with some preview images from the book, and I'll see you soon.

ATELIER and the time machines

It's hard to keep secrets. What's the fun of knowing something only you know? You gotta tell someone, let somebody knows how special you are for having a secret, and how special the other person is if you decided to share that secret with him/her.

At the same time, we do comic books and, as such distinguish creators, we practically live in a cave when we're working, so while we're actually working, it's very easy to work and keep it secret. Comic book artists are crazy scientists creating time machines or interdimentional portals inside their studios, and at some point in the story, we reach the moment for that surprise turnaround scene where we see the scientists actually built two machines instead of one.

We've reached that moment.

We started doing this two months ago, when we were thinking about our convention trips to NYCC in New York, CRACK BANG BOOM in Rosario, Argentina, and Rio Comicon in Rio de Janeiro. We realized we didn't want to go to three conventions in three different countries where three different languages were spoken and have nothing that could be presented, read and understood at all three. We travel to talk about comics and to meet the readers, sure, but the primary point of interest in the comic's world is the work, and we wanted to have work to show (we always want to have work to show and stories to tell). In the spur of the moment, we decided that, in one month, we could crank out a new comic that by the power of comics could work in three different languages, and if we could finish it in a month, we could send it to the printer and have in ready in time for our first stop: New York.

One month later, we were calling the printer to check out if they got the files.

What else can I say?



It's at the printer, and should be ready any moment now. And then it will be real, in my hands, and soon enough. in yours. That's how's supposed to work, and it's the beauty of it. We've just built another time machine and it's time to put it to work. Can you feel the turning point coming?

Now, it's great to have friends, specially if they're in the crazy scientist profession like ourselves, because it's always better, when you're alone at night drawing endlessly and with little to no hope, to know that, if you look through the window at the tower of your friend's castle, lightening bolts and explosions can be seen, heard and felt, and you know that, by the time you finish your monster, there will be a monster friend to keep it company.



As we pack and get ready to travel with our new comic, we know that we'll be in great company as we saw our friend Gustavo Duarte produce his second comic, also in the dead of night, also in secret (not really, but let's keep playing our roles), and also in time for NYCC, where he'll share a table with us to present the world TAXI, his brand new thing. Let me tell you, it's beautiful, but don't believe me and go see for yourself.

We'll be at table F4-F9 on a giant booth at artist's alley, along with Ivan Brandon, Rafael Albuquerque, Ariel Olivetti, Andy MacDonald, Leandro Fernández and the incredible Becky Cloonan. we'll have copies of ATELIER, CASANOVA, and stuff. Fun stuff. Check it out.

See you in a week, or in another convention, or soon.

Hello Kitty

Come out, come out and let us play.

I love comics.

First I'd like to thank all the attention and love we've been getting about Daytripper. This comics really has gone further than we predicted and we couldn't be happier with it.

And I couldn't be happier with the projects I've been working on. Each one different from the other, the creators are exciting to work with and I learn new things about our craft every day. Casanova is coming out in color and it looks amazing, the new letters look great too. I've begun working on the new material and it's like time travel back to crazy land.

But the most exciting thing about the upcoming days is actually we will stop working for 3 weeks just to do the only thing that give us as much joy as creating a new story: going to comic conventions and meeting the public.

Our entire carreer has been filled with a lot of trips to comic conventions, waiting in lines, watching panels, meeting creators and talking to the fellow authors we admire. And the more we produce, more we have to talk about, so the last conventions have been a full plate. And that's the way we like.

Two weeks from now, we'll go to New York Comic Con for the first time and we're really excited about that. We'll be sharing a huge set of tables with IVAN BRANDON, BECKY CLOONAN, ANDY MACDONALD, ARIEL OLIVETTI (Argentina) , LEANDRO FERNÁNDEZ (Argentina), RAFAEL ALBUQUERQUE (Brasil), and GUSTAVO DUARTE (Brasil). We'll be on Artist Alley on tables F4 through F9. Can't wait to talk to whoever stops by.

Two weeks after that, we cross the globe to go to CRACK BANG BOOM, the first international comics convention of Rosário, Argentina. That will be awesome! And finally, in november we have Rio Comicon in... well, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

We have a lot of books on our bags, we'll have original pages and we'd really like to talk about comics and stuff, be it in english, portuguese or spanish. But the language that unite us all, that has been taking us all over the word, that has no frontiers or boundaries is the one of panels and balloons.

Come meet us on one of these conventions and discover what we have to say about that.

Hello, kitty girl

Every girl loves her Hello Kitty bag.

Dynamic duo

Cute

A little cross-eyed, I guess, but still cute. Cute enough, and fun enough, for a warm up exercize. I wish every warm up doodle would come out like this one.

Casanova preparatory sketch

Everybody still looked weird and out of character as I was warming up for the short back-up on the new first issue of Casanova. My hand was cold, stiff. I later also learned that paper I was using wasn't helping, it didn't slide smoothly enough, it didn't erase properly, it made drawing a painful experience.

We're now thinking about the cover for the first Casanova trade. Then, on to the covers of the second arc. This time around, I think I'll jump onboard for the second arc's covers. Let's hope I can do as good a job as Bá.

Also, I'm starting to play around with the colors for the second arc, because soon enough Cris will start on it. How will it look? That's our challenge.

Dream come true.

My brother and I have been wanting to tell stories in comicbooks for as long as we can remember. At first, we just wanted to copy what we were reading, as a way of being part of that magical universe of super-heroes, barbarians, space guardians, street punks and pirates. But soon the need to tell stories became stronger than the simple act of drawing.

We have told lots of stories – well, a few – from princes and fairies, to young people in love, to robots and waitresses. All these stories came out of our need to tell them, without any requests, any pressure, straight out of our heads. All those stories were building the ground for us to be finally able to tell Daytripper.

Daytripper is not a project we have had for a long time. It came from an idea I had some 8 or 9 years ago, but it was not more than that. It was one of the ideas we pitched to Vertigo when Bob Schreck asked us for ideas. It was the one they liked.

However, ever since we started actually working on this comic, it has become the story we have been waiting to tell our entire lives.

Issue 9 just came out, one we're really proud of, and next month brings the conclusion of our story. This has been a terrific journey. This is what comics mean to us. A real dream come true.



Daytripper 9
Written by GABRIEL BÁ and FÁBIO MOON
Art by GABRIEL BÁ and FÁBIO MOON
Cover by GABRIEL BÁ
Brás is going through one of those days that seems like a lifetime; when so many things happen and change so fast and so dramatically that he can't keep track of what the hell is going on. In this penultimate issue to the acclaimed miniseries, can he figure things out before it's too late?

BLOG WAR - peaceful ending

Both Craig and I worked on this last piece together. I inked a little bit he pencilled, he inked a bit I pencilled, but for the most part we just passed the paper back and forth as we kept working on the panels. This was fun.

A did a lot of other incredibly interesting things in Portland, but there's only so much we could put on paper in the time we had. There was also a lot of things I could have done but didn't because of time constraints, but that was not my point when I decided to go. You'll never see and do everything, but you can enjoy everything you end up doing. And I certainly enjoyed my time in Portland, seeing all those Dark Horse people I only see within the crazy rules on the San Diego Comicon, meeting new artists, talking about art, life and everything inbetween.

Time to go back and start all over again. Time to go home, happy, ready for more.

BLOG WAR - part 3

We could see it from very far away, from inside the car, still some twenty minutes before we really got to the beginning of the trail. It was massive, it was strangely alien and different, and it was this one thing in my trip that would actually also be new for all people involved (except for Dan, Craig's friend and our guide for the day).

Have you ever been to a volcano? Have you even stood inside it's crumbling interior partly rocky, partly ashy surface? Have you ever seen a waterfall with hot water?

We stood there, got ready, and went for it.

To be continued on Craig's blog, which includes the full contribution from Dan Attoe (I'm only showing the detail below).

BLOG WAR - part 2

Both Craig and I agree that maybe Blog War isn't the best title (too violent, too macho), but we were just excited to work together on something, so...

This is actually part 2 of our little collaboration, part 1 being on Craig's blog. Check it out to know what we did before we went to dinner.

...

So... Cool, no?

Let's continue.

Mike Allred and Laura Allred joined us right at the end of the music concert, and off we went to this incredible wine bar called Kir. We were greeted by Joe Sacco on the way in, and after a couple bootle of wine, he eventually found his way to our table.

It was an incredible night. The conversation was inspiring, the company was lovely, and we were so jazzed by it that we just kept on drawing. Joe Sacco got the best sketches, I think. We left in high spirit, and we had some challenges ahead of us: could we do this night justice in ours sketches?

And more importantly: could we top this experience on our next adventure?

to be continued...

San Diego bound!

We had a wonderful time in London. The weather was incredibly sunny and everybody that we met were adorable. I joked I brought the sunny weather over from Brazil, but the warmth from the people was the nicest surprise of the trip. We certainly left wanting more, so thanks to all of you who we met, who we talked and who we touched during the past two weeks. The fact that I finished the very last page of Daytripper on my last day in London made the whole experience all the more special.



Now, the time has come again for that crazy thing (which I love) called SDCC. Many people are going, and once again we're excited and ready to rock it brazilian style. We'll share the same booth we had last year, booth #1320, with our usual pals Cliff Chiang (artist on the recent Greendale graphic novel) and Jill Thompson (the über talented artist of the recent Beasts of Burden series), and this year we'll be joined by Rafael Albuquerque (who's really showing some artistic skills on American Vampire) and Cris Peter (our colorist on our revitilized Casanova series).

We'll be there most of the time, signing books, selling copies of the new first issue of Casanova, and selling original art from series we've been working on, such as The Umbrella Academy, BPRD1947, DMZ and Sugarshock. Come around and look at all the lovely things everybody from our booth will have this time around.

Also, we'l be selling a limited signed giclée print that I made on our recent trip to Portugal, which comes in three sizes and looks like this:



Here's a detail. The prints come in small, medium and large sizes (come by the booth, they look sweet):



Our signings and panels schedule is quite full this time, jumping around all publishers we're currently working with. Here's the complete rundwon of where to find us when we're not at the booth:

Wednesday
6:60-7:30 - the EXCLUSIVE all-in Casanova signing with Matt Fraction, Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon

Thursday
11AM-12PM- PIXU signing with Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá at the Dark Horse booth
2-3PM - Signing at the DC booth
6PM - BPRD meet-up for BPRD members (at the Hilton Gaslamp - Terrace Foyer)

Friday
11AM-12PM - Signing at the DC booth
12-1:30PM - Hellboy and BPRD signing with Mike Mignola, Duncan Fegredo, Gabriel Bá, Fábio Moon and Patric Reynolds
5:30-6:30PM - Vertigo: on the Edge panel (room 6DE)

Saturday
11:15AM-12:15PM - Spotlight on Gerard Way with guests panel
1-2:30PM - Umbrella Academy signing with Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá (ticketed event: See Dark Horse employee for details)
3-4PM - Signing at the DC booth

Sunday
1:30-2:30PM - Signing at the DC booth

So, here we go again. I hope to discover a lot of new books, new artists, new people. This trip, for us, is always about discoveries. Are you ready?

London Calling for Daytripper 8

Comicbooks have brought us to London, to be part of Festival Brazil, a big cultural event taking place on the Southbank Centre. We feature both as attractions of the London Literature Festival 2010 and Festival Brazil, which is twice as cool. And to make thinks better, we've been experiencing a lovely summer in London, full of hot sunny days and happy people everywhere.

Fábio and I do all our PR and stuff, so when anyone asks for a promotional picture, we choose it and send it. We were really surprised, though, to find this picture on the cover of the Festival's program, spread out everywhere around the Southbank Centre. It also astonished us to see the cover illustration we've done for the Literature Festival all over the place and in all shapes and sizes. It was kind of overwhelming to bear such an important role on a festival of this proportions.

After some interviews and momentarly tension, our panel on Monday night at the Udderbelly was great. With a terrific participation of Jamie McKelvie as the mediator and a full croud of interested people, we did what we know how to do, which is tell stories and explain why we love comics and Brazil.

On friday we had another challenge ahead of us, and it didn't get any smaller. We were invited to paint a mural and we took this opportunity to tell stories to an audience unaware of our existence. It's not really what we do, but in a similar way on a different setting, we created this big Wallstrip with lot's of tiny bits of dialogues and ideas and reflexions about the world we live in and how we relate to people around us, a mater we usually tackle on our stories as well.

We had the help of young people working aside with the Southbank Centre, as well as pass byers and whoever wanted to chip in. It took us 10 hours to get it done and we couldn't have done it without their help.

After we finished painting it, the whole thing was hung on the wall of the Queen Elisabeth Hall building and it will be there until the end of august, so don't miss the chance to check it out live.

And just like our life never stops surprising us, a new issue of Daytripper hits the stands today and I'm sure you will be surprised with what you will find on this issue as well.


Daytripper 8
by GABRIEL BÁ & FÁBIO MOON
Cover by GABRIEL BÁ

Brás is constantly on the road, but that doesn't stop a caring husband and loving father from having a big role in his family's daily life. Do they miss him? Can they manage well enough while he's away? And how large a hole would he leave if he weren't there anymore?