Houston, we have a problem

and I'm the solution?

After a month filled with long days spent away from the internet, sitting at the drawing board, I finished all the commissions on my last list of the year. When I opened the list, my plan was to do one commission a week and spend the rest of the time working on the new story with my brother. In this initial plan, only half of the list would be completed in time for my Austin trip next week, and the rest would be mailed out at the end of the year. By the end of July, I realized that if I finished all the drawings before the trip, I could focus only on the story with my brother for the rest of the year, so I started doing two or three commissions a week in August to make sure I cleared my schedule, and to then just write and draw the story, hopefully until we get it done. I look forward to the deep dive into creation, and I hope people are patient enough to wait for it.

Drawing commissions helped having something to show online to make up for the long time between books, and it also helped ease my anxiety of never having done enough, or have it done fast enough. It’s good for the artist to have the sensation of finish things. It doesn’t have to be grand, ambitious or groundbreaking, it’s just you expressing yourself and putting something out into the World, letting it leave your head and become something for others to see, to experience, to feel.

One of the commissions I had on this last list was of DKR Batman and Carrie Kelley’s Robin, and I was talking to Gustavo Duarte (who’s also going to Austin with me, or should I say that “I am going to Austin with him”) and he also had a similar request. We wondered if the request came from the same person.

If you’re a collector, what do you collect the most: different pieces of art from different artists, or a collection of pieces that share the same theme?

Houston, you have a problem

and I’ve got the solution!

When you’re traveling from São Paulo to the West Coast of the US, there aren’t a lot of flights directly to where you’re going and you usually have to make a connection somewhere. As an artist who have been to Comic Con in San Diego more than 20 times, I’ve taken all the different options available, but the most common was flying to Houston and changing planes to Los Angeles or San Diego there. I’m pretty sure that, after the São Paulo international airport, the Houston airport is the airport Bá and I have gone through the most in our lives.

For a number of years, as we documented online every time we came and went through Houston to San Diego, we started to attract the interest of a comic book store in Houston curious if we would consider stopping in the city for a signing session. One of the reasons that would make me stop in Houston would be to visit my friend Terry Moore and spend some time with him, and since he was always already on his way to San Diego as well when we were in transit, it never made sense to stop on our way to Comic Con. But Houston’s time would come eventually.

And its time is now

On my way to Galaxy Con in Austin, I AM stopping in Houston for a signing session at Bedrock City Comics. I’ll gladly sign any comics or books I’ve worked on, and probably chat a bit if you have a question and the line of people behind you isn’t too big.

And yes, I plan on visiting Terry Moore while I’m there. Now that his latest series (Parker Girls) is complete, hopefully I won’t mess up his working schedule too much by showing up.

Advices

Last year, after seeing Steve Lieber’s free portfolio review sessions every first Friday of the month at a local comic book store (to compensate for the lack of conventions at the end of the pandemic to proportionate opportunities like that), I decided to do the same in São Paulo. And lately, Steve posted a visual summary on the old Twitter, and then Jim Zub ran with it and made a similar list of simple advices for comic book writers.

These lists obviously don’t work for everybody’s work, but they’re a good start when you haven’t yet stopped to think about your work like that, about the purpose of the craft and how the way we put our art on paper, be it the images or the words, must help tell the reader our stories.

The Space Between

Like I said in the beginning, I just finished my last list of commissions of the year. This trip to Austin (and Houston) is my last convention trip of the year. I don’t know when I’ll travel again, or when I’ll open another list, but when I do think about it, I’m thinking about the space between the events instead of the events per se. If I travel all the time, traveling becomes the norm, and it never feels like the traveling ends. If I open lists of commissions all the time, it’s the same thing and it feels like I’m always drawing commissions, and it doesn’t matter if you miss the latest list because you’ll have another chance soon enough, just like it didn’t matter that you weren’t at my last convention because you’ll have another shot at chatting with me at the next convention next month. I fear a lot of opportunities can be missed when we don’t chase after what we want, and if you have too much of anything, I think you’ll stop chasing after it, and that’s the value in the space between things. That space must be enough so that you miss the thing and want it again. Don’t get used to things, and don’t take things for granted.

I don’t know when I’ll travel to another convention. It would be good if I had a new book out by then, wouldn’t it? (a new book is at least one year away, and probably more).

I don’t know when I’ll open another commission list. I’ll do the smaller commissions in Austin during the convention, and then I’ll be watching for the space between to grow.

Let it grow until it becomes the norm.

Until it’s a big, mysterious void that I can stare at and lose myself in it, wandering around.

I’ve just spent the weekend on a book festival in the Northeast of the country, enjoying the hot weather and the warm audience, and learning local legends about seven virgins needed to break a curse. I used some of the time on the airport going in to start writing this letter, and I’m finishing it on Monday while I wait for the festival’s driver to come to the hotel to take Bá and I to the airport for our flight back home.

This week is the last week of August Bá and I have working on the story before my trip, and I’m looking forward to focusing on our story, our characters, and how to make all our crazy plans work. There’s an aspect of storytelling that is a lot like putting a puzzle together, and I’m anxious to spend some time looking at all the pieces we’ve got.

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

Fábio Moon
Moon Base on the road, Teresina
August 21, 2023