One year stacking up memories
not being afraid of being you
Like many of the comics creators who have been doing newsletters at Substack, I also migrated here one year ago and started posting from here, curious if this platform would allow for a bigger interaction between all these creators who liked to talk about our beloved medium, and in the process share some stories directly with the audiences.
Below, the extent of my “interaction” with other substacks: the short story Bá and I did for Skottie Young’s “I hate Fairyland” universe (which we had a blast on):
Now, unlike most of my fellow creators in here, I wasn’t offered a grant to publish stuff in Substack, nor did I offered any sort of paid subscription option to my readers (with all sorts of special rewards), and decided this should remain just an outlet for me to put some words down about what I’ve been thinking, what I’ve been doing, and what I’m trying to plan for the future. This place has always been, in my mind, a window to share what happens between two destinations in a journey, and not the places itself, the stories I tell, write and draw. The stories, which are what I’m always chasing, shall remain in the comics, in the books, in the printed page.
In the past year, which, in pandemic years felt like decades, my focus shifted a lot between watching the World deal with the pandemic, worrying about being vaccinated, seeing what the comics’ world was doing both here in Brazil and abroad, and as the World slowly opened up and conventions started to happen again, looking outside of my small safety bubble to see what stories I can find, inspire, create and share. I spent most of last year doing weekly live streaming videos on Instagram and on Twitch (and eventually on YouTube as well), trying to entertain and distract people locked up in their homes, but eventually I realized they weren’t locked up any more, even if they still should be, and were fed up with only living virtual lives in front of screens (as was I). At the end of 2021, I decided I could be more productive spending less time online, streaming work which was only made to stream and broadcast, and that the real work, the hard work of chasing the stories and writing them down and drawing them, required my attention more than the internet. “The internet will survive fine without you for a while”, I thought to myself, “and there are a bunch of people much better at being internet entertainers than you”.
This is the challenge going forward beyond the pandemic: doing what you are better at doing, what only you can do. You survived this far, make it matter, make it count.
Don’t be afraid to be you.
Man Without Fear
It has been a minute since I’ve recommended a Cartoonist Kayfabe video, so here it is again: Ed Piskor and Tom Scioli (without Jim Rugg this time) look through Daredevil: Man without Fear, by Frank Miller, John Romita Jr, Al Williamson and company. As much as I was fascinated by Mazzuchelli and Romita Jr when I was a young guy who wanted to do comics (add 90’s Bachalo to the mix at the same time), it certainly made my artistic life harder, because the very reason of the appeal of these artists, in how they stepped out of the regular house-style dynamic look of super-heroes, made my early comic book pages, in which I tried to emulate their styles, look weak, out of place and certainly not Marvel and DC material. It was harder then to break from any house style, and still today there’s certainly a similarity between most of the artists working at Marvel and DC, so to be drawn to an artists who breaks that mold was leading me, even without me realizing, to other realms of comic book making. Once I saw that, my art started to get better a lot faster, and eventually, after I discovered and started to develop what I can say is my style, I could eventually bring back all the dynamic influence of spending my teenage years devouring every super-hero comic I could find. Today, I believe I could do a good job drawing a super-hero comic, as long as I liked the story. If I don’t like the story, then my art suffers and there’s no way around it, but that’s a subject for another time. Let’s just round this up saying that I have always been a huge Romita Jr. fan, and this mini series in particular was a milestone in his career and in my appreciation of his art, and how important storytelling is.
How can I not think about She-Hulk when I take this drawing I did last week and color it like this? Is my brain playing tricks with me? It is trying to tell me there’s a She-Hulk TV series about to begin on Disney+?
Be safe. Be kind. Be curious.
Pa-ZOW!
Fábio Moon
Moon Base, São Paulo
August 15th, 2022