Creative fuel

free-styling in front of the audience

The initial grid is nothing but just that, a grid. You can look at it and imagine what is the script that called for this grid as I start to layout this page – and you’ll find lots and lots of grids scribbled on the side of artist’s scripts, as it’s indeed very common for them to figure out the size of the panels on the page as they’re reading their scripts, like I do on my Casanova scripts I get from Matt –, but the truth here is that there’s no script.

Not in this case.

Here, the initial spark is establishing a beat. Tick-tick-tick-tick-Boom.

Some stories have an experimentation aspect to their creation. You set yourself a formal starting point, which has nothing to do with the content of the page, the plot of the story, and them you create the plot and the story around it to follow your intent. Comic strips, due to their limited size, often have a structural layout which is repeated every time, like telling a joke which builds up to the punchline. I did a weekly newspaper strip for eight years, and one of my self-imposed challenges was to play with the limited space of the strip and try to break free from the rigid layout. It exercised the same part of my creative self I used when I did short stories, as I took advantage of the shorter page count of those stories to be more experimental, to let other aspects of the story take the driving seat of the creation instead of the plot.

I thought it might be interesting to create at least a page like this in here to show you a little of my process. Many stories which are created with such loose boundaries, like this one, often get lost during their makings, and you lose steam as you get to a wall and can’t easily find your way around it and you may abandon the story and move on to another story with more constant or more challenging creative rewards. It might be the case here, because this page begun after a quiet sunny Sunday afternoon while I was browsing my Pinterest list of images and thinking about how to simultaneous reflect how I felt during the week I just had and my intentions to create a reaction on the readers of this letters, and as my new week begins I’m already thinking about the big story I’m doing with my brother, and I’ll channel my energy towards the big project, but still, as a creative exercise, and as a window to my creative space, I think I can have a little fun in here, and you might tag along and be entertained for a little while.

I found on my Pinterest folders a wall covered with folkloric masks. One of these masks jumped to my attention, and it had a fish in the middle of it which made it work as the nose of the mask. “I want to draw that”, I thought. I want to draw the mask floating into the abstract white of the page, talking to characters which will be somewhere else, like in the beginning of Labyrinth when the Goblins are waiting in another dimension as Sarah wishes his baby brother to be taken away.

How many characters can I draw on these panels? How many is an interesting visual number? I want them to minimally interact with the mask’s request, so I decide there must be more than one, and as I scribble them on the panels, I settle on three.

The Pinterest folder is still open on the laptop in from of me as I draw this on my iPad, and I notice this picture of an old and dark beaten-up wooden door, with a painted written sign painted above it. It’s the door of a bar (I saved that picture because I liked the color combination of the door, the wall and the painted sign). Maybe because I passed through a bar I know with a similarly exotic painted signage on one of its walls as I rode my bicycle on Saturday, the online picture stood out next to many others, and I decide to include it in the page and incorporate it into the story.

I worked on my quarantine story for most of my weekend. My Sunday was coming to an end, but before I went to sleep, I went back to this experimental page and inked the first panel, the mask. It was already late and I didn’t feel like working on the rest of the panels. I thought I could work on them throughout the week, probably on one of my live drawing sessions. Right now, these characters are just stand-ins, faceless stick figures helping me define the rhythm of the page. The challenge is putting a face to them, and figuring out who they are. That will help me find out the story one of them is telling, and what’s behind that bar door.

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

Fábio Moon
Moon Base, São Paulo
November 8th, 2021