Poetry every day

I have a strip to finish this week, but aside from that, most of what I’ve been doing recently is writing, which is the most important part of the new stories I’m working on, but it falls short when it comes to decorating these letters, or filling the visual demands of social media, so I banged out the drawing above on my coffee break here at the studio. To think that I can finish a drawing like that in less than thirty minutes makes me wonder: why don’t I draw more often on my sketchbook?

30 years of magic

Strangers in Paradise is celebrating 30 years, and Terry Moore gave an interesting interview about his ride over the years. I discovered SiP a few years after it started, in 1996, and it was very influential in my interest in telling relationship stories “with a twist”. I was studying philosophy at the time, and there was this notion that straight up normal stuff usually pass unnoticed by people, because they are so familiar with it that they don’t give enough attention or value, and only when something goes off the rails we’ll notice. In SiP, Terry made us notice the day to day relationships between the main characters by throwing them in a devious international crime organization backdrop (among many other incredible situations). Neil Gaiman would also use similar narrative devices in his stories: making the alien awkwardness of young teenage boys trying to learn how to talk to girls at parties a fantastic detail of a story to change the way the reader would think about those ordinary situations, for example. Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary has always been a good way to make people pay attention in the details of the characters’s lives and, as a result, reflect on their own lives.

In literature, some of these stories are classified as Magical Realism. I like to think our own lives can be magical, and that we just have to be pointed in the right direction.

Poetry Girls

Speaking of magical realism, here is an interview with my former editor Diana Schutz to catch up with what she’s been up to now that she’s been inducted in the Will Eisner Hall of Fame this past July. The interviewer also linked to the last time she gave a big interview like that to the Comics Journal. It can be interesting to see what has changed in the twelve years between both interviews.

(when Bá and I did How To Talk To Girls At Parties, we called the project “Poetry Girls”)

When we were young

In the most recent Kayfabes shoot interview with cartoonist Seth, I found it really interesting how he, like myself and many others artists who have worked on our own creations and have a very distinct style that veered away from the mainstream super-hero comics that we read, got into art school in his late teens with the desire to work on super-hero comics. I remember very clearly when I showed up in one of my art classes trying to show my teacher what I wanted to do, and I showed him a giant pencil drawing of the teenage mutant ninja turtle Leonardo sticking a blade in the back of Colossus of the X-Men (Joe Madureira era), and Colossus wasn’t impressed with the turtle hanging on the blade stuck on him. My teacher looked at the drawing and told me that that drawing didn’t tell him anything about me, about my history, about what I felt and wanted to say with my art. At the time, I realized, I was still much more a fan of comics than an author, and eventually, just like Seth discovered other cartoonists like the Hernandez brothers, I saw outside of the super-hero spectrum artistic expressions and styles that spoke to me more, and helped me see what kind of stories I wanted to tell and how my art can help tell these stories.

Planning ahead

I just reserved a hotel suite for a little trip in November. It’s as far as I can go outside of my head – which is always planning stories to tell, moments to draw, characters to create–, and I often leave this “real World” planning for when I’m done working on a new story, which is not the case now. At the same time, there are many things I want to do and places I want to go and all these experiences in one way or another enrich the interior world of my stories, and the pandemic put a different sense of urgency in going after what I think is precious and important, so I’m growing outside my comfort zone and venturing more into the regular World of the other people instead of just working most of the time and only planning trips when I’m invited to a convention.

Tomorrow I have a zoom meeting with my editor, and a different sort of planning will take place, one which I’m more familiar with, and which helps point the way in the creative storm my brother and I are right now. I want to finish at least another page of my script tonight, so this is where my letter leaves you.

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

Fábio Moon
Moon Base, São Paulo
October 2nd, 2023