At the end of another day, we remember.

Going to San Diego is great. We see our old friends and we always meet new ones. We have a great time, even with the long hours working at the booth. We were tired every night, but away we went at dinners and bars, because that's when you have time to relax and talk to the people you know you never see during the convention because everybody is busy working.

Every morning, we were early eating and getting our strength back, for another day of awesomeness was waiting for us.



Now it's time to get back to work. All of you, go! Let's make more comics! Let's be great, let's succeed, fail, make mistakes and learn. Most of all, let's tell more stories.

Let's continue.

SDCC, BPRD and Daytripper at the Vertigo panel

We're having a great time at the Comicon this year. Had a awesome signing (thanks to everyone who stop by) with people bringing Roland, Casanova, De:TALES, Umbrella Academy and BPRD. It really show that people are starting to follow our work. It shows we have a work.



We were on the Vertigo panel about the new series and the crime line.
Here's a little of our share of it.

SDCC 09

We won't have a booth this year, which means we'll be everywhere. Look for us, stop us on the street, be friendly. You'll have plenty of chances to find us. If we're not on a panel or not signing, chances are we're hanging around at the coolest booth of the con (#1322) with our friends Becky Cloonan, Jill Thompson, Brian Wood and Cliff Chiang, so make sure you stop at their booth, 'cause they have the coolest looking books out there!

!! EDIT !!
WE WILL HAVE A BOOTH!! And it is exactly booth #1322 with Becky Cloonan, Vasilis Lolos, Jill Thompson, Brian Wood and Cliff Chiang. We won't be there all the time, but now it is much easier to find us!!

We'll be bringing new originals (from Umbrella Academy, Sugarshock and other projects) to sell, but we're still not sure how or where we'll do it. After the convention, online sales and shipping of originals will continue with the nice folks from Beguiling (link for Bá's originals and link for Fábio's originals)

We think we have all the information about our panels and sigining schedule, and they go as follow:

THURSDAY, July 23rd

- 4:00pm-5:00pm - Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá signing at the Dark Horse booth (#2615)

- 6:00pm -7:00pm - Vertigo New Ongoing Series/Crime Line (Room 5AB)

It's a new beginning for Vertigo with the launch of new ongoing titles such as The Unwritten, Greek Street & Sweet Tooth. In addition to these titles we will be launching the highly anticipated Vertigo Crime Line with some of the top talents in the industry. Hosted by Senior VP - Executive Editor, Vertigo, Karen Berger and Senior Editor Will Dennis, this panel is not to be missed, especially considering the talent present: Peter Gross (Unwritten), Jeff Lemire (Sweet Tooth, The Nobody), Jason Starr, Chris Gage, Gabriel Bá, Fábio Moon and others!

FRIDAY, July 24th

- 12:30pm-1:30pm Spotlight on Fábio Moon- (Room 10)
Meet Eisner Award–winning Brazilian cartoonist Fábio Moon (Sugar Shock!, 5) as he shares his love for comics and talks about working with his twin brother Gabriel Bá (Umbrella Academy), collaborating with high-profile creators Matt Fraction (Casanova), Joss Whedon (Buffy), and Mike Mignola (Hellboy) and what's next. Lots of images to show, with a fun Q&A to follow.

I think I'll have a signing right after the panel, somewhere, somehow. I'll update this space as soon as I know more.

- 5:30pm-6:30pm - Vertigo: View of the Future
 (Room 5AB)
Vertigo, DC's edgiest and most provocative imprint, returns to San Diego! Come and discover what's going on at the imprint that birthed The Sandman, Preacher, Y: The Last Man, Fables and more? Wait 'til you hear about what new projects the Vertigo team is going to thrill us with next! Hosted by Senior VP - Executive Editor, Vertigo, Karen Berger, Group Editor Shelly Bond, and Senior Editor Will Dennis, with Jason Aaron (Scalped), Mike Allred, Mark Buckingham (Fables), Josh Dysart (Unknown Soldier), Peter Gross (Unwritten), Amy Hadley (Madame Xanadu), Jeff Lemire (The Nobody), Chris Roberson, Matt Sturges (House of Mystery), Matt Wagner (Madame Xanadu), Bill Willingham (Fables, House of Mystery), G. Willow Wilson (Air), Brian Wood (DMZ, Northlanders), and others (WE ARE THE OTHERS)!

- 6:00pm - 7:00pm - Umbrella Academy signing with Gabriel Bá and Gerard Way at the Dark Horse booth (#2615)

8:30pm - The Eisner Awards
Lots of friends were nominated, and Bá was nominated, and here we go again to see what will stand out in the middle of an outstanding year for comics.

SATURDAY, July 25th

-12:00pm - 1:00pm - signing at the Vertigo booth (#1915) (maybe?)

-5:00pm - 6:00pm - signing with Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá at the Comic Relief booth.

SUNDAY, July 26th

-12:00 pm- 1:00 pm - PIXU Signing at the Dark Horse booth (#2615)
Fábio Moon, Gabriel Bá, Becky Cloonan, Vasilis Lolos

Paraty sketches

We had some time to sketch during our weekend at the Festival in Paraty. No pressure, no worries, no plan. Drawing is fun, you know, and some times we can forget that part.

Recent mirror

photo by Tomás Rangel, taken this past weekend during the literary festival in Paraty.



photo by Sergio Fonseca of our talk (which opened the festival's program).

July has begun with horror!

Our new enterprise into the helms of horror will hit the stores this week.

PIXU: Mark of Evil!, the collected, hardcover edition of our Harvey nominated mini-series done last year with Becky Cloonan and Vasilis Lolos. Beautiful book!
And BPRD: 1947 part 1 of 5, the dream of every cartoonist, working with Mike Mignola on the Hellboy-verse, and there're Vampires!

As the publishers start to announce their panels on the San Diego Comic Con, we start to have a notion of how busy (or not) the convention will be for us this year. Since we won't have a table anywhere, if you want to find us you better go to these panels.

So far, That's what we know:

Thursday, July 23rd:
- 6:00 -7:00 Vertigo New Ongoing Series/Crime Line
It's a new beginning for Vertigo with the launch of new ongoing titles such as The Unwritten, Greek Street & Sweet Tooth. In addition to these titles we will be launching the highly anticipated Vertigo Crime Line with some of the top talents in the industry. Hosted by Senior VP - Executive Editor, Vertigo, Karen Berger and Senior Editor Will Dennis, this panel is not to be missed, especially considering the talent present: Peter Gross (Unwritten), Jeff Lemire (Sweet Tooth, The Nobody), Jason Starr, Chris Gage, Gabriel Ba, Fabio Moon and others! Room 5AB

Friday, July 24th
- 5:30-6:30 Vertigo: View of the Future
Vertigo, DC's edgiest and most provocative imprint, returns to San Diego! Come and discover what's going on at the imprint that birthed The Sandman, Preacher, Y: The Last Man, Fables and more? Wait 'til you hear about what new projects the Vertigo team is going to thrill us with next! Hosted by Senior VP - Executive Editor, Vertigo, Karen Berger, Group Editor Shelly Bond, and Senior Editor Will Dennis, with Jason Aaron (Scalped), Mike Allred, Mark Buckingham (Fables), Josh Dysart (Unknown Soldier), Peter Gross (Unwritten), Amy Hadley (Madame Xanadu), Jeff Lemire (The Nobody), Chris Roberson, Matt Sturges (House of Mystery), Matt Wagner (Madame Xanadu), Bill Willingham (Fables, House of Mystery), G. Willow Wilson (Air), Brian Wood (DMZ, Northlanders), and others (that's us)! Room 5AB

Ther'll be the first ever, awesome Spotlight on Fabio Moon
Friday, JULY 24
12:30-1:30pm
ROOM 10

We'll have some signings as well, and we'll post them here closer to the event.

2009 Harvey Award nominations!!

The 2009 Harvey Award nominees were announced and we're on the list:

- Best continuing or limited Series - Umbrella Academy
- Best Artist - Gabriel Bá
- Best Anthology - PIXU #1 (by Becky Cloonan, Vasilis Lolos, Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá)

AWESOME!!!!
FODA!!!!

Voting is due August 28th.

The ceremony and banquet for the 2009 Harvey Awards will be held on October 10th, at the Baltimore Comic-Con.

Sketchbook frog

A piece of the interview

If you click HERE, you can read an excerpt from our interview for The Comics Journal #298, which should be out for sale on Wednesday, June 24th. We did this interview over the course of many days, and each days could be weeks or months apart. Most of it was done before last year's SDCC, and some of it was done at the beginning of this year to talk about all our current projects (Daytripper, BPRD 1947 and Umbrella) and to also talk about all the Eisners we got last year, which took us completely by surprise (the "getting all those Eisners" part, not the "being interviewed about it" part).



The reporter conducting the interview, Diego Assis, is a brazilian reporter, and I think this fact gave the questions an interesting "foreign" point of view. The interviewer is an outsider, and so are the artists being interviewed. Also, he had a much better view of our career both in the US and in Brazil, while an american reporter would only have an idea of what we have published in the US market.

One interesting detail caught my attention: we did this interview in portuguese, and I'm guessing Diego did the translation. You can say we have a much stronger "accent" on his translation of the words.

What caught Bá's attention was that they had Eduardo Risso's name misspelled - and we know he's from Argentina.

We have a brazilian literary festival coming up in a few weeks, and two weeks after that, the San Diego Comic-con, so I think we'll have to really bury ourselves in the work for the following month in order to finish up everything we need to do. the hardcover edition on PIXU- the Mark of Evil should be out now or soon, and in July, BPRD 1947 starts coming out. Keep an eye out for this releases, and enjoy our interview at TCJ.

Thanks for reading, and back to work.

33

They say 33 is a special age. I feel pretty special today, and I hope my brother knows how special he is too.

We feel like celebrating, and we will, but we also feel more like making awesome comics, which is what we've been doing most of the time instead of talking about our love for comics on the internet. I wish I had more time to scan and show sketches, talk about creation, fun stuff, but I rather make comics. They can tell you how awesome they are, and how fun, and how creative.

I can't stand not sharing something, so here is the step-by-step of our Buffy- Tales of the Vampires cover, which came out this week and has an amazing story by our best buddies Becky Cloonan and Vasilis Lolos.

1-The initial sketch: we considered doing one single image, but we ended up deciding the split image was cooler, moodier and easier to divide the chores between the both of us.



2- Bá studies his part of the cover: Both of us could do this part of the cover, or even the other one. But we felt the other one was simpler and it would gain some personality with my brush inking, so Bá went after the characters in the love-triangle (it's all about love for us here). It looks awesome as it is, right?


3-Black and white ink is GOD: We love inking, period. We love black and white.

4-Colors. Ta-DAM! We have been watching our pal Dave Stewart do his magic on our books and we've been dying to get a chance to do some color work to see what can we do with colors in our post-Dave period. I have to say I'm pretty happy with the results.


Well, that's it, back to work, see you some day, thanks for reading.

Happy 33rd birthday, brother.

The next big thing: JEFFERSON COSTA!

Great thing about comics is that you can do anything you want, there's room for all kind of different styles, genres and formats. But with so many stuff out there, it's hard to keep up with everything and even harder to really catch those few gems lost among the independent, less promoted comics. Independent creators have not only to bust their asses to do a great job, but also they have to make the extra effort to promote their own work, even though no one will listen to what that unknown wannabe has to say. I know I had to scream and shout in every way I could for years until someone would look at me.



So there's a new comic just about to be released and that can't go unnoticed, Terra Major's new graphic novel, an adaptation of Kiss Me, Judas, the first book of the critically acclaimed neo-noir trilogy Phineas Poe, by author Will Christopher Baer.

But the reason this book needs your attention is it's artist, a Brazilian artist called Jefferson Costa. He may have past with no big ado with his 30 page story on the western anthology Gunned Down in 2005, but there's no way he can go ignored with this massive stand-out 272 page graphic novel.



Jefferson's compositions are expressive and hold great knowledge of the use of black and white, tremendous balance and deep emotion.



If you haven't noticed yet, there's been a great deal of outstanding Brazilian artists working on all kinds of comics in the last 2 decades, from mainstream superstars like Mike Deodato, Roger Cruz and Ivan Reis or up-and-coming creators like Rafael Albuquerque and Rafael Grampá. And there's a bunch more where those guys came from.

So you might want to take more attention to the talents hailing from our shores and the best way to start doing that is checking Jefferson's work on Kiss Me Judas.



This book is available online only and has a limited print run, so reserve your copy
today! You won't regret it.

ORDER YOUR COPY TODAY @ http://terramajor.myshopify.com

Like this it came.

Some times, it happens like that: We have a limitation, which in this case was page length. 2 pages. No problem, I say to Bá, 'cause we've been doing one page stories every month. I suggest a character which has more graphic possibilities, even if the other one was Bá's original choice and he will actually draw the 2 pages. Then, because of what I suggested, Bá remembers an old picture we found that could be used in the story. It makes sense, I think, and in the sense it made in my head, I tell him how we could include the old picture inspiration into the original character idea. The idea instantly gets better. It was the missing link, and we suddenly have not only an idea, but a story.

I wish all stories came like that.

The Twins on the Comics Journal

There's gonna be a big, long and extensive interview with us on the next issue of The Comics Journal and we were asked to provide a new image, never before seen or published, to use on THE COVER. We did try to get something from our beloved and secret Daytripper allowed by Vertigo, but secret things are meant to stay hidden and safe. So we had no choice but to make a brand new drawing.



It will be available in June and you can pre-order it here.

Here's a nice video the guys at Fantagraphics have made:

Umbrella Academy: DALLAS TP

Soon in a store next to you.
colors by awesome Dave Stewart

Figure Drawing.

Fresh Start.

New days are refreshing. New issues are refreshing. We're all starting new issues here at the studio (by studio, it's just me and my brother), and it's good to start anything as it gives us that energy of the new. It might be even better than that great feeling of job well done when you finish an issue, or a story (as put beautifully here by Becky).

We've been crazy busy, as always. Which is good, it's the best kind of busy we could possibly hope for, and we're making sure we come out of the busy period with stuff we're proud to have done.

We're thinking about the Daytripper covers, and they should be wonderfully different, that's what we think, but thinking this "different" has been giving us a hard time. We don't like anything easy, so we're getting ready for battle.

To battle!

Eisner Award nominations!!

I've been nominated for 3 Eisner Awards this year:

- Best penciler/inker
- Best cover artist(!!!!!)
- Best reprint for the big fat Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite Special Edition.

So that makes 3!


Shouts for Matt Fraction (New series), Josh Dysart (New series), James Jean (my nemesis on the covers), Dave Stewart (colors), Jill Thompson (painter), Scott and Sierra (best Anthology, inside which Fábio and I have one story each). Yeah, you too, Rantz (Anthology and Publication Design).

Mignola got 3 nominations!

Long live Cyril Pedrosa (best graphic album-new; and best writer/artist), he's soooo gooooood!


The sky will fall, for Todd Klein has not been nominated for best lettering. How long has it been?

Thanks everyone for this. I'm gonna work even harder now! I love comics!
FODA!

We love CASANOVA

We'd like to thank all of you who, unfortunately, fell for our April fool's joke about Casanova. Don't get me wrong, we're not sadistic heartless pricks, it's just that with that false post, we had the notion of how much love people have for Casanova, since it increased our blog visit a lot. People believed in it and hate us when they realized it wasn't true, just because they really wanted it to be true.

Just the way you all do, we love Casanova. I can speak for Matt, Fábio and myself when I say we are doing all we can to bring Casanova back the best way it deserves to come back.

And I can tell you this: It WILL come back.

Once again, thanks.

Tomorrow is now!

Finally, some comics!

Yes, we have been quiet at the blog, but only because we're so busy drawing comics. That's what is expected of us, right? So we're doing our share, and we keep the drawing board and the paper and the pages away from the computer so that, when we're drawing, everything else disappears and we can create.

So, we have created. And it's time to start showing.



New Casanova is coming. Starting tomorrow, out of the blue, we'll be starting the new story arc. IN COLOR. Yes, you read correctly. And it's going to be online, FOR FREE.

Where?

Here at the blog.

We wanted to do it over at Casanova.com, but that was taken. And, hey, it's the internet, so it's just a click away, no matter the url.

Matt is back, I'm back and, in time, Bá will be back too. It's going to be different and exciting. Where will you be tomorrow when it hits?

WHERE?

Fabio, by Kako

Kako is a illustrator friend of mine from way back, and you should all check out his work. We worked together on the Rockn'Roll one-shot (published by Image Comics), and he had the best story on the Comic Book Tattoo anthology last year. When we were all 13 years old and wanted to draw like Jim Lee, he was the one that, at that time, was closest to reaching that goal.