Casanova step-by-step

This week, both Bá and I did new original drawings for the annual CBLDF auction that takes place in San Diego during Comic Con. We took some time from our crazy-busy schedules (made even crazier by the fact that World Cup is going on just outside our studio window) and created two new images with characters we have created. TFAW, who always helps coordinate this, will make prints of the images that the artists will be able to keep and sell, so I decided to make a full color image that would make a great 10 x 17 print.

My first idea was to do a Sugarshock image. Everybody seems to really love those characters, and you could say that right now Joss Whedon, writer of Sugarshock and nowadays writer and director of the Avengers movies, has never been as popular. I sketched the characters on my notebook and started working on the final image, but something wasn't clicking and I wasn't happy with where I was going with the drawing. I decided to call it a day and get back to it the next morning, and I'm glad I did.
Next morning, I went looking for inspiration at one of my sources: Pinterest. I used to keep thousands of images in folders on my computer, but nowadays it's much easier to keep everything I think might inspire an illustration or a story on my Pinterest page. If you go check it out, you'll find elements of my recent CMKY stories for Vertigo, as well as research for the short Hellboy story, and many other images from across the internet that I keep in handy to mix up in my head when I'm at the drawing board.
The new wave of inspirational images made me decide to change characters, and the drawing became a Casanova image. It's easier to imagine Casanova in any situation, anywhere, with anyone. Much more pleased with this second sketch, I showed it to Bá:
"It's great", he said, "but lose the cheetah and the boat". I agreed and started working on the final piece.

I took pictures of the process to post on twitter, and it's a great way to see the way I was thinking visually, how I left many decisions for the inking stage, how I helped to make the characters pop by using cool darker colors on the background, how the red elements united the characters, how dripping and large expressive brushstrokes help give it a "drawing" look, a "hand-made" look.

After it was done, dry and ready, I scanned it, adjusted the colors on photoshop and sent it over by email. The original will be going with me to San Diego, where I shall say farewell to this painting, hoping it will find a great new home on the collection of some lucky fan.

Fábio's Usagi auction to help Stan Sakai

Usagi Yojimbo.
Ink and watercolor, 2014
The original is being auctioned to help Usagi's creator, Stan Sakai. 9 days to bid on it and take the piece home and help out on a great cause at the same time.
Details of the auction here.
This artwork will be published in the upcoming Dark Horse Comics special book, "THE SAKAI PROJECT; Celebrating 30 Years of Usagi Yojimbo", Being release in July, 2014 (at San Diego Comic-Con) with all proceeds also going to Stan & Sharon Sakai.

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.

Daytripper

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

Oktoberfest! Taking over Germany!

Finally the time has come to talk about our trip to Germany! We are very excited, as we are about to discover the world of book publishing and its renowned Frankfurter Buchmesse, the Frankfurt Book Fair, largest book fair in the world.

We will stay for 20 days in Germany, the entirely first week in Frankfurt as part of the big group of Brazilian authors present in the fair (because Brazil is the homage country on the fair this year), and then we will tour through some cities promoting our books, signing and talking to the audience. And the best part of it is that we will do all that with two of our books freshly released in German! Daytripper has been published by Panini and De:Tales by CrossCult. 

Ever since we started publishing in the U.S. market, it has been easier to find our books all around the world, but often only in English. Some titles have never been published even in Brazil (even though it has been changing, there's only Smoke and Guns, Sugarshock and BPRD left). It is always better to go somewhere where people can find your book on their own language. Germany has seen the publication of BPRD and Umbrella Academy, and now we can land there with our two most personal books published on their native language. That's really priceless.

So, back to our trip, I'll list here all our commitments during our trip, so maybe you can find us, listen what we have to say, learn a little bit about our work, about Brazil and the special connection these two elements have in our hearts.

First of all, we're really proud of being on the selected group of authors Brazil is taking to Frankfurt, as part of being this year's Guest of Honour country. I love the fact that comic have taken me all around the world, but also they're still a strong connection I have with my country and my culture and that's something I take everywhere I go.

So, we recently discovered the Book Fair is open for the public only during the weekend. During the week, it is only business between publishers and agents, bidding, gambling, buying and selling titles and moving the entire reading market forward. During the week, we will have lunch with DC and their partner publishers around the world, which will be very educational. And we will be part of a celebration on the Kobo booth, since we also discovered De:Tales is available on Kobo. But it is only from friday on that our agenda with the public really begins.

11/10, friday:

17h Signing session on Comics Shop X-Tra BooX 

(Berliner Straße 20  60311 Frankfurt am Main)

It is a signing on a comic book store, outside the Book Fair pavilion, so it's open to the general audience. Anyone can go. 

12/10, saturday:

10h45 – 11.25 Talk: Brazil and it's Comics scene - Gabriel Bá and Fabio Moon

Where: Comics Center, 3,0 K17

11h30 – 13.00 Signing session: Gabriel Bá and Fabio Moon

Where: Comics Center, 3,0 K17

3.30 pm to 5 pm - signing at Panini - Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon (Daytripper, Brazil)

Where: Panini booth Hall 3,0 G & F 143

13/10, sunday:

10h - 11h30 HQ & Graphic Novel: reunion of Generations.

with Ziraldo, Maurício de Sousa, Fábio Moon, Gabriel Bá, Fernando Gonsales, Lelis and Lourenço Mutarelli (these are all the invited Brazilian comic book authors present in Frankfurt, some with over five decades worth of comics work, and then there's us, we're the younger ones among them, the new generation with our 15 years comics experience.)

Where: Brazilian Pavilion

2 pm to 3.30 pm: signing at Panini - Gabriel Bá & Fábio Moon (Daytripper, Brazil), 

Where: Panini booth Hall 3,0 G & F 143

And here's where our book tour takes the road (or should I say the tracks, since we'll be going everywhere by train). 

14/10, monday:

Hannover

16h-18h  signing at Comix Hannover, (Goseriede 10, 30159 Hannover) 

It's a signing in Hannover. We're only passing by the city, so please stop by and say hi, discover our books, get a sketch.

17/10, thursday:

Berlim

19h  Modern Graphics - Europa-Center, (Oranienstraße 22  10999 Berlin)

(the shop Modern Graphics located at shopping mall Europa-Center aside the memorial church in the heart of the city)

We will talk with Lars von Törne, from newspaper Tagesspiegel, followed by a signing session. It will be our last night in Berlin, so come and celebrate with us.

18/10, friday:

Munich

16h - 18h - signing at ComicCompany, (Fraunhoferstraße 21, 80469 München) 

It's a two hours signing in a comics store. Come by, get to know us, and then also go to the Literaturehaus to listen to our discussion panel.

20h - Cultureclubbing Brasileiro

Discussion panel with writers João Paulo Cuenca and Luiz Ruffato and comic book authors Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá. There'll be a signing session after the panel as well.

Where: Literaturhaus München, Salvatorplatz 1, 80333 München)

And afterwards we will all be heading to a club nearby to party, as João Paulo Cuenca spins his DJ set.

We will be guests at the Comic Action, (at the Messe Essen, Norbertstraße 2  45131, Essen), a comics convention that takes place in Essen, and we will have some siginings at the Panini Booth to promote Daytripper. Fábio will have two signings on Thursday, and I'll have just the one in the afternoon. And we'll both have two signings on friday.

24/10, thursday:
Essen

11:30h - 13:30h - signing at Panini Booth (Hall 2, 2-C150) 

14:30h - 17:30h - signing at Panini Booth (Hall 2, 2-C150) 

25/10, friday:
Essen

11:30h - 13:30h - signing at Panini Booth (Hall 2, 2-C150) 

14:30h - 16:30h - signing at Panini Booth (Hall 2, 2-C150) 

And this is it for Germany. There's a lot of places to go, lots of people to meet, lots of different things to discover. We have heard only good things about Germany and we can't wait to get there. German people, German food, German beer, here we come.

Walter White

A Breaking Bad inspired image.
Farewell, Walter.

rehearsing a sketch

The Strain at DHP#28

This is the cover for Dark Horse Presents 28, out in September 25th. In one of our rare art collaborations, Bá penciled the cover, inked the top image, I inked the bottom part and he colored the whole thing. Click here to see the cover with the logo and everything else.