Tour de France 2013 - the video

The final chapter of our great adventure in France, now with images, sounds and a lot of traveling around.



Thanks to everyone who came to our signings. Thanks for the stores who opened their doors to us: La Bulle, Expérience, La Parenthèse, Bulles en Tête and Apo(k)Lyps.
And thanks for Urban Comics for everything they did for us. It was amazing.

Angoulême - part 2, or the French tour

There were two halfs of our trip to France. Going to the Festival at Angoulême was just the first one, and the second half was definetely the most different.

Using our lovely Parisian apartment as our home base, the Urban Comics crew sent us in a small signing tour around France: four cities in total, including Paris. Every day, we would wake up early, take a TGV train and cross the country to visit another city, give interviews to the local press and sign at a local bookstore, where we were always met with a mix of readers who had already read Daytripper and those who were discovering the book for the first time but, either out of a recommendation from the bookstore owner or out of their habit of going to signings.

It's incredible how every city in France appears to have a great bookstore specialized in Bande Dessinée and comics. We visited Bulle at Le Mans, which I think was the oldest one in our tour and was located in the oldest part of town, a beautiful medieval village near the remains of the wall built during Roman times. In Lyon, we visited Experience, a great bookstore with a ceiling filled with drawings from their visiting artists, a most distinguished collection from all around the world. We saw Craig Thompson's drawing, and Bannister's (he's from Lyon), Cyril Pedrosa's and so many more. Moebius also left his markings on that cave of wonders, and so did we.

Nancy, the smallest city in our tour, had the biggest bookstore, La Parenthèse, with a lot of space for the readers to discover all kinds of comics, old and new. One room, where we did our drawings and met the public, was filled with great automates, those wonderful handmade dolls which, when you press a button, move by themselves in the most ingenious ways.

In Paris, we visited two bookstores: Bulles en Tète, the newest in our trip, and Apo(K)lyps. Luckly, their were close to each other and we walked the distance from one another, but still that was our longest signing day, signing for three hours on the first and for almost the same time on the second.

We finished the last night of our tour with dinner with Pôl and François from Urban Comics at a great restaurant, eating well, drinking champagne, wine and talking about comics, past, present and future.

We don't know when, but this wasn't our last trip to France. This was the beginning of our french road. And our work has put us on this road and, if we continue to do good work, it's the work which will keep sending us across the globe. The work is the author's voice, the author's face. Our work is our passport.

Angoulême 2013 - the video

We did a little video with some images from the first part of our trip - the festival in Angoulême, the artists we knew, the town. I hope you like it.

Angoulême - part 1

Bá and I returned from our first trip to Angoulême and its Festival International de la Bande Dessinée a week ago, in the middle of Carnaval, and after 10 days in the cold french winter, we recovered by the beach for a week, feet sunk in the wet sand seen through the transparent waters of our beautiful sea. We had an incredible time in France, inspiring every day, and more and more we fall in love with the respect and love the french market has for the books and the artists.



Festivals that take place in smaller cities, or in just one determined part of a big one, are great because you can - and should - do everything by foot, and Angoulême is this beautiful little medieval city and the festival takes over the entire town. All around, you see people that love comics, artists, readers, editors and everybody else involved, and you cross them in the streets, in every restaurant, in all bars and museums and in the giant tents (called "bulles" over there) where you'll find the stands and booths of all the publishers. The prize most people are after is a very beautiful original drawing - done on their book or on a sketchbook or on a separate piece of paper - from their favorite artist. The artists take turns in the publishers booths, and a place in the line for one of the signing sessions of three hours (or more) is very disputed.
We were at the Urban Comics booth every day, signing copies of Daytripper or Casanova, and from Umbrella Academy and many of our work in english. The response from the audience was incredible, and it was great to see what the french responded more in Daytripper: Olinda, the exotic girl from the waters of Salvador, and Brás first love, was more successful than Ana, and many people asked for drawings of Dante, the dog.



Another guest Urban Comics brought to the festival was Bill Willinghan, of Fables' fame, who came with his lovely assistant Stephanie. Every night, as we gathered together for dinner, the guests and everybody from the publisher, we had an incredibly funny time with Bill, a human well of jokes, and he told very interesting stories about his time serving in the army in the seventies, which was the last time he had visited France. After two or three Vertigo panels together in San Diego (all of them passed without us getting to properly talk to each other), it was really nice to finally have an opportunity to get to know Bill a little more. Those dinners at Angoulême were always delightful, and everybody at Urban Comics loves what they do, and it was nice to feel that comics (or bande dessinée) are such a passionate world in France.
It's great to feel the good vibe when it's there, spreading, oozing from the artists, from the readers, from yours friends. It was great to see people we already knew so we could share this wonderful feeling that comics are great and there's something magical happening in comics right now. We had great talks with Cyril Pedrosa over late night drinks, and a great conversation with Mark Siegel over wine, and a wonderful lunch with Bannister in the basement of a italian restaurant. There were those we wished we could have seen more, and talked more with, like Frederik Peeters, Annabelle, Joe Keating and many others. On the last night, we had a very interesting and motivating conversation with Jessica Abel and Matt Madden about the differences of comics, of comics markets, of different artists, authors, and how that, instead of limiting, is nowadays actually liberating, even if still hard to accomplish.


Another great thing about this year's festival was the presence of so many brazilians. Call me patriotic, or sentimental (or blind, or crazy, or stupid), but comics are living a great moment in the world theses days, where new stuff by new people is finding its way in the hands of the readers all around, and when something great happens to you, you wish somebody close to you could share all these wonderfull feelings, and it was great to have other brazilian artists around, our friends, and it was a special moment that we shared in those four days of festivities, a moment we can bring back home together, hoping that, by talking about it, we can inspire others the same way the trip inspired us.

Angoulême 2013 - books and watercolors

It's not every day that we travel to France, so we decided to take some of our more independent publications to sell at Angoulême. Since Atelier, our latest mini-comic, is also in french, it was a perfecy fit.
Look for us any time we're at the Urban Comics stand (most afternoons from 2pm to 6pm) to check it out.


We'll also have a very limited amount of watercolor girls, which are only found personally with us during conventions and festival.

   

(click on the images for bigger versions)

Nous nous voyons lá-bas!

Sélection Officielle - Angouleme 2013

Daytripper just made it into the official selection of the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d'Angoulême 2013.

The festival will take place from January 31st until February 3rd, 2013, and we will be there! When the time comes and we know more about it, we'll put our whole schedule over here.
Thanks everyone for this never ending amazing ride.

Merci beaucoup.
Nous sommes très heureux. 
Nous voyions en Angoulême.