A nice perspective 🇺🇸

It was very interesting having these Jim Lee commission prices going around the internet last week. I, for one, do not think the prices are outrageous. He’s a legend on our field and his originals still show energy and expressiveness. Original art has so much pictorial information that is not that important when the work reproduced (in prints or covers or comic book pages), and it should be valued as a one of a kind object. In truth, I’m usually surprised with the opposite situation of how little most artists charge for their art, artists whose work I deeply admire and wish for it to be valued a little more. It may look like these artists can make these original pieces easily, effortlessly, and sometimes even the artists themselves think like that, but the work you do is a result of years or practice, of studying, of developing your style and refining your taste and your craft, all that working in sync for you to be able to create something unique in what seems like a short turnaround of a few hours or a few days.

Over at the unofficial SDCC blog, they compiled a list of most artists offering commissions at San Diego this year, and you’ll find a very wide range of prices and styles. You can spend quite some time thinking about the quality and value of original art.

Talking about original art…

This image above was the digital sketch I made for my most recent commission, asking for actress Marianne Faithful in her The Girl on a Motorcycle role. I found the movie and watched parts of it, to understand the spirit of the character and to find a piece of dialogue I could incorporate to the drawing to make this girl leaning on a Harley Davidson Electra Glide not just any girl. More research involved getting her bike right (I imagine that, for fans of this movie, her bike is as important and iconic as Kaneda’s bike in Akira). I found a French poster of the movie and liked the logo, so I put that as well. I doodled on my Moleskine during the week to think about the pose, and then went for it on Friday.

My pencils are often loose, and I leave a lot of the light and shadow choices for the inking part. Still, nowadays both my inking and my pencils are more defined than they used to be, and I was talking with Bá about it and saying it was probably somewhat because of how much of our recent output was in color. The abstract and expressive thinking of our work in our earlier stories (before Umbrella Academy and Daytripper) had a lot more to do with what we learned from artists we admired with strong black and white works like Frank Miller or Mike Mignola or Will Eisner. A part of me wants to recover more of the abstract approach to drawing, but I’m still waiting for a new story where this approach will work better. Maybe a part of the new story will allow us to go this route. We’ll see.

Starting out tips

I liked this thread on twitter by Deb Aoki regarding some tips on how American aspiring artists who want to draw Manga and be published can go about it. A lot of the tips and examples aren’t exclusive to who just wants to make manga, and provides a good reflection for anyone who wants to tell stories with words and pictures. Some of the points also work for people who live outside of the US and have to deal with the difficulties of starting out in their smaller markets.

The party

For the longest time whenever I went to San Diego Comic Con (and for the longest time San Diego was the only choice for international aspiring artists), the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund welcome party was there as an opportunity to have artists and fans mingling in the same place. It was there, in 1997, that I saw Frank Miller smoking a cigarette in the balcony wearing his Converse All-Stars, or where Neil Gaiman read a story from some of his first short story collections (also in 1997 or 1998). I made a poster against censorship for last year’s party.

Speaking about posters…

Tomorrow, the final trailer of the last season of The Umbrella Academy will drop online. We got a final poster today. We’re one month away from the debut of the season. Where will you be when it hits?

Be safe. Be kind. Be curious.
Pa-ZOW!

Fábio Moon
Moon Base, São Paulo
July 8th, 2024