Ten years at a time
which means we're due another shift soon.
We say in interviews that our career in comics started in 1997, which marks the debut of our independent fanzine publication called 10 Pãezinhos – we had published two fanzines before, one at the end of high school, and one our freshman year at University, but only in 97 we shifted gears into something that involved more of a personal style and less of a “fan of certain comics” vibe – , and also marks the first year we went to the San Diego Comic Con and discovered the American market was much more than the superheroes that crossed over to international markets and were published in newsstands here in Brazil. It was that mix of putting out fanzines weekly in Brazil, learning how to connect the stories and interact with people with the immediate feedback from our readers – mostly our friends at the University – and the eye-opening experience of the vast variety of comics and authors and publishers that we discovered in San Diego, which made clear to us we didn’t needed to fit a mainstream house style of any particular publication and could simply make the comics we wanted to make in order to find our own voices, that set us on the path we continued for the next ten years: if we make our comics, we’ll find our readership.
“If you build it, they’ll come.”
During the next ten years, we worked on our stories and mostly self-published them. We were honing our craft, putting our feelings into the page, chasing a type of story we wanted so bad to exist in comics, but which we couldn’t find enough of. Along with us for this ride, we met several other artists who we shared our passion with, and we met many editors who saw the potential in our raw early work and kept asking interesting questions to help us to think about our own work, to think about what we wanted to say. Developing a personal authorial voice takes time, and patience, and hard work. If you have to juggle this with several other jobs to pay the bill, this road can take years, and in many cases, it’s how the rest of an artist’s life is spent.
Eventually, we were able to publish an anthology of our short stories in the US, a book called De:TALES, and that book showed the readers a first glimpse of what we felt comics could be. Diana Schutz, the editor who championed our work at Dark Horse and convinced Mike Richardson to publish us, planned the release of the book in order for our comp copies to arrive at our studio right on our 30th birthday, on June 5th.
I found this early sketch, from November 4th, 2005, when I was first thinking about the cover for what became De:TALES. Diana probably said that they were too impersonal, too generic, and that it didn’t have the same vibe of the stories of the book. Looking at it now, I just think they look like internal illustrations instead of covers.
The electricity poles in Brazil, specially the ones in big cities like São Paulo, can turn into a chaotic tangle of electrical wires which for me hold a very seductive visual power, like all the lines which lead to all the different narrative possibilities we run into in our everyday lives. The sneakers hanging in the lines record the presence of human life, like cave paintings of our urban times, and two pigeons look curious at their surroundings just like the two twins who were hungry to absorb all that life could throw at them to then turn into comics.
De:TALES came out 20 years ago.
I did another cover for the hardcover edition of the book, which was published right after the success of Daytripper to give the many readers of our hit book a chance to discover all the stories that led to it. I kept the minimal color scheme, and you can see the electricity poles, the two birds and the hanging sneakers in the wires, but I tried to put a little more in this new version, to reflect the magical aspect of many of the stories and to tell the readers that this book was a door into our own personal world.
10 years after De:TALES was first published in the US, it was published in the French market by Urban Comics, and if we have learned anything in all our years working for the French market, it’s that they have a very particular view of what to put in the cover. We almost had a different cover for the French Daytripper edition, but in the end we made our case for the effort we put into the cover of Daytripper which was used in all editions. For “Casanova” and “L’Aliéniste” and “Deux Frères”, we did new covers, which were tailored for what our French editors expected of covers in order to stand out in the weekly sea of releases, and with “Détails d’une vie brésilienne”, it was no different.
They even suggested to use a blown up panel from one of the stories as the cover, but then I suggested I could do a bigger version of that panel. My art had changed a lot in the 15 years between the panel and what ended up being the cover of the French edition.
It’s been another 10 years since the release of the French edition of our personal stories. Next year, it will be the 30th anniversary of a career that begun photocopying, manually folding and stapling all copies of our fanzine every Monday morning before going to class with the fanzines in our backpacks.
I think we’re due another big shift in our lives. We’re deep in the forest, listening to the wild noises and chasing the light that escapes between the leaves of the dense tree canopies.
Be safe, be kind, be curious.
Pa-ZOW!
Fábio Moon
Moon Base, São Paulo
August 10th, 2026
ps: Next week at the New York Public Library, there will be a talk called ‘Exploring The Met’s “Musical Bodies”’ with E. Bradley Strauchen-Scherer, curator of the exhibition, and Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, cultural critic and audience whisperer dedicated to the art of listening. Both of them will talk about the relationship between music and the human body, how it has been represented in art, and maybe they’ll mention the pieces of the Umbrella Academy art by Bá which are part of the exhibition. The event will happen at he NYPL on August 18th from 6:30PM to 7:30PM, it’s free to attend, but priority is given for those who register online ahead of it (click here to do so).