The Monday Muse

don't go breaking my heart

This is how it starts.

Me, compiling different ideas and sketches and notes I’ve made over the years. Thinking about books I read, stories I heard, movies I’ve seen, lives I’ve lived, and what in all of this I think stands out, resonate in a distinct enough hum that can be whistled by a drawing and heard by the reader’s heart.

The heart of the story comes from all sorts of different places. It beats strong to all sorts of different tunes.

I had found a manuscript of a short story I never drew a couple of months ago. It was written in 2006, the year comics really started to pick up steam with Bá and I when Bá started to draw Casanova and we did a Graphic Novel in Brazil adapting Machado de Assis’s O Alienista, so I can see why at that point the shorter story ideas started to give way to the bigger, more high profile books and opportunities, and so this script stayed in one of my many notebooks and got forgotten.

Cut to 2021, and I’m doing what I do, looking at all the different creative outlets I have in search for elements to conjure a new story, and I’m reading a book about the boiling artistic life of Paris in the first decade of the twentieth century, and how some painters started to collaborate with some playwrights, designing the costumes or painting the backgrounds, and I remembered this idea I had back in 2006 that involved a play inside of it, so I went to the place on my studio where I keep my notebooks and I found the manuscript.

When people say that authors have a voice, or a identifiable style, or recurring themes in their work, I can see in the manuscript what they mean. There are subjects I deal in this story that eventually found their place in Daytripper. Some notions about time, choices and the force of being aware of your present self in order to become your future self have reappeared ten years after that story was written in the play my brother and I wrote, called Three Worlds, which was performed for five months in 2018.

I was watching an Apple TV series this weekend, and I told my wife something on that show reminded me of this story I wrote in a notebook back in 2006. As we kept watching the one hour episode, I thought that I have to go back to that story (which, two months ago when I first went back for it, I started typing) and figure out if it can fit into that hole I have right now on another story.

Maybe it can.

We’ll see.

Talk to your muse

I’m always looking for you.

Even if don’t realize it. Even if you don’t notice me, or don’t care.

I’m confident that I’ll find you, and eventually you’ll be aware of my existence.

You’ll feel it.

Feel the shift in the air because of my proximity.

Feel the warmth of my touch against your thin, cigarette-holding cold finger.

Feel my gaze, the intensity of my eyes staring at that place at the back of your neck where your copper red hair ends and my desire starts, and where I wish I could get closer and softly blow the whistle-like whispers of all the stories my mind conjures while in your presence.

Can you feel it yet?

Tu-DUM!

As part of this past weekend special Netflix event, the cast of Umbrella Academy made a video answering some of the most frequent questions. If I copied the right link, you can watch them clicking here. If you, like me, follow all these actors on social media and have this impression that they really are close, have fun and enjoy being around each other (an impression I think was reinforced with the video linked before, even if they’re all shooting their bits separately), I can say from my rare visits on the set that indeed they get along great, which is a blessing for Bá, Gerard and the show’s crew. Having a cast that really wants to be there bleeds into their performances, and the actors have been developing this strong bond with each other which makes them really react like a family.

Even a dysfunctional one.

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(it was nice to see the first teaser from the Sandman series on that video as well)

Lively diversity

I read a friend of mine complaining on twitter last week about illustrators and how they portray people of asian or indigenous descent only by changing the color of their skins, and asking for artists to be more attentive, and look closer, and realize there’s so much more diversity in features and shapes and body language than just their skin colors. I’m taking up my friend’s suggestion as the theme of my live drawings sessions today, on Instagram at 10AM EST, or on Twitch at 7Pm EST (beware the fact that I try to answer questions people make in the language they make it, and as most of my audience asks stuff in Portuguese, that’s the main language spoken in these lives, but I can answer questions in English, or maybe even try it in Spanish or French).

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

Fábio Moon
Moon Base, São Paulo
September 27th, 2021