Joining the band 🇺🇸
More like being allowed on the bus
When I started working, I would take any job that involved drawing. There was no market in Brazil for ( independent, creator owned) comics at the time, and I didn’t fit (and even if I did, I wasn’t ready) in the super hero mainstream side of the American industry, which was beginning to open some space for international artists, so all the other jobs I did (illustrations, mostly, but also storyboards, some design and many other variations on the fact that I could draw) made it possible for me to only make my comics out of love and passion for them. For years, back then, I didn’t make money from comics, but knew that all the stories I told came from the heart. When I look back at them, it’s the passion that best survived the test of time and makes up for my younger self’s almost crude drawing skills.
Once my comics started gathering more readers and better opportunities, I stopped working on other projects, projects that weren’t comics’ centric, to avoid creating a reputation that I was anything other than a comics’ creator. Making comics is hard and it was a job that demanded all my attention (to make it work), so I focused and learned to say no to the other artistic propositions. I just made comics full-time.
More years passed, and at some point, once I thought my career was more established, I relaxed a bit on the “only comics” rule and started to flirt again with projects which were unique opportunities and would stretch different creative muscles: I painted a mural in London; collaborated with drawings over photographs on a fashion shoot; made an album cover for a musician friend of mine (which also served as the background image of the album release concert).
Working on the mural involved British teens involved in a community arts program at the Southbank Centre. For the fashion pieces, I followed the photographer around his studio for two days during the shoot to create alongside with him the photos I would later draw over. I heard all the songs of my friend’s album and talked with him about his musical influences and the what the songs, and the album, were about. In all of these projects, creation grew out of being exposed to the world the work existed in.
I was allowed behind the curtain to meet the wizard and, in some extent, to be the wizard, and help create the magic.
This is the type of experience I wanted out of this newsletter.
The stories I write and draw exist in the books they’re published, and in the reader’s mind once they’re read. Here, in the newsletter, I always saw as a different place. A place that felt like the corner of the studio where you could stay and see the band rehearsing, the couch you would sit besides the painter while he mixes his colors and the model sitting for him sighs , the stool by the bar where your poet friend shares an inspiring story about the search for the perfect word.
The tour bus.
I’m performing an experiment this year. I’m activating the “paid subscription” option of this newsletter to see how many people, if any, will “get on the bus” to be part of the creation of art as it is created. Why only see the paintings hanging on the gallery walls when you can see the mess of the studio they’re painted at and understand a little better how they came to be?
I set the monthly paid contribution to the minimum Substack allows, as I’m more interested in learning how collaborative this community of ours can be. It’s the price of a drink in a Brazilian bar (one of the reasons gringos go crazy when they come here, as it’s so much cheaper to drink here than almost anywhere in Europe or North America), and I intend to make it a delicious, tasty one. (I have, somewhere in the sketchbook notes of a future story, envisioned a page where a character prepares a Gin & Tonic. Maybe I’ll draw that page next and learn how to make that drink)
Some posts will remain open to everybody, as always, but I intend to make some original stuff for people “on the bus” to keep the ride interesting.
COMING UP…
• I have agreed to do a variant cover for a book from a creator a really admire. The process of doing that cover is the type of stuff I’ll talk about “on the bus”.
• My musician friend just formed a new band, and their debut album is about to come out. It’s been more than ten years since I drew him and that album cover, it might be time for a new collaboration.
• The strange and not very logical process of accepting (or not) the invitations for international conventions.
•Carnaval…
Be safe, be kind, be curious.
Pa-ZOW!
Fábio Moon
Moon Base, São Paulo
February 10th, 2025