missing New York🇺🇸
Like a lot of my friends who work or publish in the American market of comic books and graphic novels, New York Comic Con (NYCC) is on my mind this coming week, (even if I’m not attending, which I’m not this year), just like I spent the past weekend thinking about the biggest literary festival in Brazil which was happening while I was at home, working.
Or trying to work, at least.
Not getting a lot done, really.
See, it rained a lot in São Paulo on Friday, and the lights went out in large areas of the city on Friday night. Around my house, the lights came back only on Saturday night, more than twenty four hours later. My father’s building is still without energy as I write this on Monday. (nobody deserves to be 75 years old, a little overweight, going up and down eight flights of stairs for three days).
São Paulo is a very big city, so a blackout like this creates a massive chaos and damage. More houses were without energy this weekend in São Paulo than the houses affected by hurricane Milton in all of Florida.
Anyway, New York.
São Paulo is a big, cultural melting pot just like New York, which I think is why I like NYC so much. I’m a city creature and I like to be surrounded by art and people who appreciate, discuss and create art, all across the city, at any given time during the day or night.
But
Just like the convention in São Paulo, the convention in New York is really big and it’s a lot more about entertainment than it is about comics, which can be good, as it attracts a wider variety of crowds, but it can be bad, because you have to navigate a lot of people in order to (potentially) get to that thing you love. I love going to New York, but I rather go any other time than during NYCC, but this coming weekend is when most of my friends will be there.
Over the years, I met a lot of creators and readers going to conventions (mostly at San Diego, but eventually in other conventions as well), so nowadays, in this strange new reality of cons where selling books isn’t the main goal, I find myself going to conventions mainly to see my friends and connect with my community. The effort my brother and I made to make it in the American market resulted in being part of this American comics’ community as much as we’re part of our Brazilian community (perhaps, even a little bit more), so I often plan my books to come out in English first, and I try to keep up with the English market my books will be part of. The Brazilian market is also much smaller than the American one, so I can’t really base my choices on what is published here, even if I’m constantly trying to expand the general readership of Brazilian comics (mainly going to literary festivals and book fairs, where I interact with a lot of “book” readers who don’t read comics just because they don’t know that the types of stories they like can be found in comics as well).
Talking about finding ways to expand readerships and NYCC, one of my friends going to New York, Jim Mahfood, has a current Kickstarter I would love to see come to life, Savage Street Vigilante. He’ll have stickers, comics, prints and other cool stuff at his table in Artist’s Alley. Crowdfunding campaigns successfully established a direct connection between the creators and the fans and made a lot of projects possible which otherwise wouldn’t fit into conventional publishers’ types of books and expanded what’s available for people in discover and identify as comics. Jim has one of the most expressive works out there, and I’m happy his campaign is already funded with still two weeks to go, but I can’t help but think about what does the numbers mean for our market. Some campaigns are wildly successful reaching thousands of supporters, and others just satisfy the most niche fandom. Brazilian crowdfunding projects have on average 300 supporters (I remember being around 600 some years ago), and Jim’s, in the bigger American crowdfunding landscape (of an average of more than 3000 pledges, and some times many more) is around 650 supporters so far.
I wish I was going to New York just to talk to Jim and brainstorm how to get more eyes on his project.
(Having a fan-favorite Skottie Young variant cover would certainly help.)
let’s play a little game?
Online, I saw a picture of this girl pointing to a catchy phrase on her t-shirt. She was wearing socks, and that reminded me of a friend’s character, a girl who was always wearing socks to avoid being too grounded on reality. That was the starting point for this sketch, followed by the fact that I have also bleached my hair and I have been noticing all these “Targaryen” looks a lot more because of it.
“Maybe”, I thought, “I’ll draw this pose without anything written on the t-shirt and post it online, and let people put whatever their own personal mantra/mood is on it.”
Let’s see how creative you people can be on your mantras. Get crazy, get poetic and have fun.
(I did one already, in Portuguese as a reaction to the three day blackout in my city.)
If you decide to post the image with your own writing on it, tag me or use the hashtag #moongirlmantra and let’s see how many people have been paying attention to these little letters I write, and how much I get them inspired to say something.
Be safe. Be kind. Be curious.
Pa-ZOW!
Fábio Moon
Moon Base, São Paulo
October 14th, 2024