Carnaval of emotions

find the funny

I said in Portuguese on twitter this week that it was hard to talk about my own work, or about the creative process or about the joy of drawing or something silly about our silly business while so much horror covers the World, from the pandemic to the horrible people who now feel empowered to come out crawling from their holes to scream their prejudicious ideas online only to hurt and disrespect other people and to the war that burst out in the Ukraine and to all other armed conflicts around the Globe. Yet, it’s also in times like these that inspiration, hope and kindness is most needed, so it’s important to be open, listen to those who are screaming for help, and be willing to learn (and to accept that we don’t know everything and that we ALWAYS have something new and important to learn).

My Badly Drawn Life, by Gipi, is being published by Fantagraphics (translated by Jamie Richards). Gipi is one of my favorite authors, I’m happy whenever a new book by him is published in English (because I can recommend it to people who don’t read Italian), and here you can read an interview with him reflecting on the times when he first created that story, and how it reflects to the person he is today.

An interesting part of the interview deals with how he had to develop a faster, looser style to convey in the drawing, and not only in the words, the comedic aspect of the story. It made me think about my own work, and how it contrasted with so many of the Brazilian artists I admired growing up, as well as many of my contemporary artist friends, because a lot of the Brazilian production of the 80s, 90s and early 00s revolved about funny drawings: comic strips, political cartoons, sport gags, caricatures, kid’s illustrations, etc. The Brazilian cartoonists of my youth and early teens were funny, and they drew fast enough so that the joke wasn’t lost in all the details of that unnecessary building on the background. As I searched for my own style, it went a different path, and as the years went by, I wanted to pay more attention to the world I was creating, making it more detailed, more complex, deeper and, hopefully, more interesting. The world I’m drawing is as much a character as the people inhabiting it, and the stories I wanted to tell always needed more space, and more detail, then a joke.

Recently, specially because of my interaction with the audience online (an interaction which increased because of our pandemic isolation), I think about how much time I spend on a drawing which could say the same thing, or maybe even more, if I could draw it faster and looser.

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

Fábio Moon
Moon Base, São Paulo
February 28th, 2022