Laughing Out Loud

that's what I thought it meant whenever I heard about the LoL phenomenon.

“Hello crazy people”, like my musician friend would say, which is a fitting start to this letter following the small clip I grabbed online of his new band’s show in Rio this past weekend where you can see glimpses of the artwork I made for the band projected on the screens behind the stage.

Let’s start our week, shall we?

I feel like I’m always catching up. Catching up with the films I want to see (old and new), catching up with the books I want to read (constantly wondering if I’ll even get back to the always growing number of books I start but never finish), going to all the places, seeing all the people, making all the art. There’s just too much of these things I want to do, it’s not even funny anymore.

Anxiety, it’s more likely what it is. A frequent feeling I acquired during the pandemic and can’t seem to shake off. Doesn’t go quite well with the patience required in my work, getting in the way of the focus I need to get things done.

While I work on the big story with my brother, I think about what type of story I want to tell next, what I can do next (will it be a comic book or something else?) or even what I can do at the same time as the big story without disrupting the main story workflow. This weekend, I was thinking about this one particular convention invitation and what would I have to show if I accepted, what could I do in time for it if I didn’t want to only have “old” books at my table, something exclusive to the convention that reminded the audience (and myself) that I’m a storyteller, not just a pinup artist who sells prints, and that got me thinking about a time in my career when I had a lot of plates floating in the air and managed, and you would never tell because the important thing was the work and not the hustle and I didn’t worry that much and simply got shit done.

And that’s how my mind went back to my LoL story.

This is probably my biggest high-profile project, considering the millions of fans of this game around the World. I mentioned it on my newsletter at least once (probably before I migrated to Substack) that I worked on a League of Legends story (you can read it online clicking here), but I never went deep into the process at the time. Since then (I did the story in 2017), a lot more people have been reading these letters, and two seasons of Arcane at Netflix have increased the interest in these characters, so let’s see what a little bit of my time in Piltover looked like.