DELUXE

At last, the Daytripper Deluxe Edition HC is here! We're very proud of it and we know how much the readers have asked for a premium version of our beloved book.




You can see a step-by-step of the new wraparound cover image here and Comics Alliance has a preview of the Sketchbook section here.

And a little video of the book.




We couldn't be happier. This really push us to keep telling our stories. We love comics.
And a big thank you to all our readers. They made this possible. This book is for all of you.

Daytripper in the University

I love surprises. They fuel my creativity and challenge my work. I love when things I could have never imagine happening do happen. Daytripper keeps surprising us.

University of Tennessee has chosen Daytripper for the 2014 Life of Mind program, a program to help first year students transition successfully into college. All freshman students – around 4500 – will get the book in August, then be asked to present a little essay about it and then participate on small group discussions about the book and its themes.

Daytripper is the first graphic novel ever to be selected for the Life of Mind program.

The official announcement has been done last monday, April 7th.

I love surprises.

How did we get to India?

Here's a video with our full presentation at Comic Con India, in New Delhi, last February. We talked about all the choices we've made throughout our careers that led us to this point.



Even though we have now a very successful international career (quite unbelievable, really), the core of what we do remains very much the same from where we started almost 20 years ago.

We had a great time at the convention and we learned a lot with everyone we've met there. We can't wait to go back.

We're going to India

We're going to India.
As guests of the 4th Annual Indian Comic Con, we'll be in New Delhi from February 6th till February 9th, and we'll be at the festival at various times all three days. Come say hi, bring your copy of our favourite book, or find us at the festival to buy from us some of the exclusive stuff we'll bring along with us. It's an incredible opportunity to cross the world and discover a new culture. We figured Daytripper and Umbrella Academy, being our most popular books, are more well known, so we'll be bringing with us a few copies of our independent comic Atelier, along with a few copies of our books Ursula and De:TALES. We'll have a few copies of our favourite posters to sell as well: Daytripper, Umbrella Academy, Killjoys and Weapon X.
On Saturday, February 8th at 4PM, we'll have a panel to talk to the fans, tell a little bit about our journey, our passion for comics, how we ended up doing the books we did, and to answer questions from the audience.
Time Out Delhi interviewed us last week. You can also read our answers in the image below.

After the festival, we'll dive into the heart of India for a week before getting back to work.
See you in a bit, I hope.

2014 after a long day and a bottle of wine.

I will be done with the artwork of the Hellboy story I’m drawing this week. Today was a long day in order to finish inking two pages from it. I planned on finishing this pages much earlier, but life got in the way – in a good way, at least – and I had to pull a late night shift in order to keep up with my self-imposed schedule.
After I finished inking the first page, I made myself dinner. I opened a bottle of wine to relax a bit, and the fact that the bottle had “Aragonez” written in it struck me as a good sign. Not quite Aragonés, but close enough. I wondered if drinking would help or ruin the inking of the second page. It didn’t do any of the above, I guess, but I did relax as I worked well after midnight.

I’ve been working, on and off, at this Hellboy story since the beginning of the year, but the very first page of art I made this year was for something completely different. If you follow the news or attended the Image Expo convention that happened in San Francisco on January 9th, or if you follow this blog, you already know.



I got the following email from Matt on December 28th, already at the beach house:

“With the Image Expo coming up, Image is wondering if we (you) can generate a promo image they can reveal. Even if we just end up showing the logo and everyone’s name and a date that works but, y’know, art is always preferred.”

The page above was the result of the email exchange that followed, talking about the plot and the visual influences Matt wanted for the new arc. Even in the middle of my vacation, I decided to put in the extra effort and make this page. It was worth it, and it was a good reflex of one of my new year’s resolution:

-This year, I want to produce more.

If I focus, I know I can do more than what I’ve been doing. I know answering emails is part of the job, and making decisions and signing contracts and going to festivals around the world where I meet wonderful people and have incredible experiences, but I know I can produce more if I put my heart into it. An I plan to do it this year. The Hellboy story is part of it, as is the new Casanova arc. As is a short story for a Vertigo anthology, a one page Little Nemo homage piece, and some other secret projects we can’t talk about it yet.
We can do more stuff outside the “comics” realm: an music album cover, more live drawings, a tour poster, and whatever feeds our muse.

A recent email I received fed my muse in ways it haven’t been fed in a very long time, and it helped everything make sense.

As I finished the last inking page I set to myself for today (tonight), I went back to the bottle of wine and started thinking about my upcoming trip to India. I’m sure many stories are waiting to be discovered there, and Bá and I are counting the days.

We’re counting the days, and we’re making plans, and we’re dreaming of stores yet untold.

Monsters and Other stories

I've known Gustavo Duarte for a long time. We're good friends. I admire his work a great deal and try to support it every chance I get. It's original and it's funny. We've shared booths and tables in several conventions and festival around the world, always a great experience, and it's wonderful to see this collection of his work be published by Dark Horse.
This book will be out tomorrow in the US, UK and Canada. Go out and get it, and start laughing.

New Casanova back at Image

Casanova volume 4, called ACEDIA, was announced today at ImageEXPO. Matt and I will work on the main story, with backup stories by Michael Chabon and Bá.
It feels good to be back at Image with this book.
Well, back to work.
Happy new year.

Daytripper Deluxe Edition HC - the cover

We couldn't be happier with Daytripper. It became everything we believe comics can be and it has been reaching people all over the world. We really enjoyed its run as a mini-series, but the collected edition is the one really going the distance. We love this book.

It took us long nine months to get the first cover of Daytripper right, making a lot of sketches, having to lots of different approaches, but in the end we couldn't have done a better job. The cover for the first issue had to portray a little of the whole series as it could be used as the cover for the trade. Well, it did happen and it has become the "face" of the book all over the world.




Except for the American edition, in every country it has been published, it got a harcover treatment. The same book, nothing different inside. Well, if we would have the american hardcover edition, it should be special, since this is such a special book.

And it will be.




It was very hard coming up with a new cover for the new edition, because I really love the old one. So the new one had to be special, to tell more than the first one, to embody the whole story. Four years have passed since I've done the first cover and this book became something larger, so the cover would have to step up too.




With the release date of April 2014, the Daytripper Deluxe Edition HC will have a dust-jacket wraparound cover, three piece case, better stock matte paper and 16 extra pages sketchbook section. Go to your local comic store and make sure you order it.

KILLJOYS LAST ISSUE!

January 1st will bring the sixth and last issue of "The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys", written by Shaun Simon and Gerard Way and draw by Becky Cloonan. Here's my last variant cover.



KILLJOYS 6, a photo by 10paezinhos on Flickr.

New tricks, or the lettering magic

Here's a recent video I made with Bá for a lecture we did about comic book lettering. After years lettering my comics in the computer thanks to the fabulous work of letterers and font wizards like Richard Starkings (who I had the pleasure of meeting recently in Leeds, his home town, during Thought Bubble), Nate Piekos (whose great fonts and balloons have been helping us tell Umbrella and Sugarshock stories) and many others, I have recently decided to apply myself on the art of hand lettering. I always had crappy handwriting, which distracted the eye from the drawing when put together on my comics, but after meeting Craig Thompson, Dustin Harbin, Cyril Pedrosa and many other artists whose lettering also helps to convey their art styles (which is the case in most of the european artists), I decided to figure out what my stories would look like if I hand lettered them, so I've been practing and experimenting with different tools. A part of me – the part that inks everything with the same brush – wants to letter with the brush and see how would that go, but I guess I would have to draw a little bigger to pull that off. Seems to work with Paul Pope, and I know he draws pretty big.
I'm still not satisfied with my skills, but it's fun to learn with the mistakes you make while you're discovering a new world.

Bá joins in on the hunt

This saturday, Bá joined in on the "art hunt" game, doing the image below and hiding it somewhere in São Paulo. The clues to the hiding spot weren't the easiest ones – it was hidden on a subway station, and there are a lot of stations that look alike in SP – and we were happy that the drawing was found nonetheless.

My girl

A detail from a larger image.
Every character looks better when I'm using a new brush.

Yet another art hunt girl

I did another art hunt this week in São Paulo before I did a presentation in a theatre. The last hunt of the year.

The art hunts

Inspired by friends who did the same thing, and wishing I could do something fun to interact in some real way with many of the fans and readers that I have only reached virtually via twitter, instagram or facebook, I started an "art hunt" game during the last two big festivals I went. The first one, FIQ, happened in Brazil, in downtown Belo Horizonte, and I tested the waters for this game first there because I was more confident my brazilian audience would responde to it. Brazilians spend a lot of time on the internet (maybe too much time, in my opinion), so I decided a brazilian festival was a good place to start.



I did one drawing each day at FIQ, which is a five days long festival, so I had to find many different places for the drawings, and also I tried to make drawings that would always be worth looking for.
The one that took the longest to find was Jon Snow, hidden inside the beer fridge of the bar of the festival.

  


It worked out so nice that I did it again at Thought Bubble, the festival that happens in Leeds in the UK. I also did it daily, for three straight days, but this time, since it was my first time in that place, it was harder to choose where to hide the drawings. Two of the art hunts happened at night, since it gets dark at 4 PM around this time of year.
All the same, I think the english crowd also had fun, and all the drawings were found.


These two conventions happened in two consecutive weekends, so after that I was beat and had no energy left to continue my art hunt game during the four days I spent in London.

I had a great time doing this game, and I hope to do it again.

Casanova: GULA in France

This is Bá's brand new cover for the french edition of Casanova: GULA, the second album published in France by Urban Comics.
Pa-ZOW!

Don't open it yet

Not yet, anyway.
We're preparing some nice stuff for our next conventions and appearances. We have a great brazilian festival next week (FIQ), and "Thought Bubble" right after it. And, since "Thought Bubble is in Leeds (in the UK),  before we go back to Brazil we couldn't help but do a little something in London as well.
We'll post all the info soon. Keep your eyes open and let's rock the comics world.

Super sketches

We're back from Germany, and we survived. Thanks to everybody who stopped by to talk, to have your books signed and to ask for sketches. We don't usually do super heroes sketches, and I'm not entirely sure why we decided to say yes to all these requests for super heroes, but I'm glad we did, as we liked most of the drawings we made, and they seemed to make those who asked for them happy.

Thanks to everybody from Panini Germany (Alex, Rebecca and Gunther in special) for taking good care of us, thanks also to Pipo from Cross Cult for a great job with De:TALES and Umbrella Academy, and for being such a nice guy not only to us but to all the other brazilian authors who needed translation at the Frankfurt book fair.

It was great to hang out with Scottie Young, Phil Noto, Esad Ribic, Bill Morrison and Nei Ruffino during the convention. Great conversations about the love for the aesthetics of Tony Scott's movies, TV series, cats and dogs, meeting your idols and who drinks manly drinks or girly drinks.

Back to the drawing board.

Girly sketches

Some of the girly sketches we made during our German tour.

Jon Snow

Looking at my facebook page, or at my instagram feed, a german fan discovered I'm a Game of Thrones fan. When we met in Essen, Germany, during the Comic Action convention, he asked me for a Game of Thrones sketch. Not just any sketch, he asked me for a sketch of Jon Snow and his wolf, Ghost.
Little did this fan know that, of all the characters he could have asked me from GoT, these were the only ones I would certainly say yes.
And so I did, and I'm very happy with this sketch.

Space Boy

Spaceboy sketch Bá made for a fan during our German tour.