Warriors of the page

and a lot of reading

I don’t want to jinx it, but Bá and I have been working on our story steadily for the past few weeks. Hopefully we’ll be able to go back to our pre-pandemic workflow and share more news as new chapters of our stories get finished.

Yemanjá’s day, on February 2nd (that celebration by the sea which we portrayed in the second chapter of Daytripper) came and went, and I didn’t find time to get of of town and go to the beach to properly celebrate it.

(my mom went, and lit candles for all her children)

I always think it’s a funny coincidence that Bob Schreck, Daytripper’s original editor and champion of our work at DC for years until we got the project approved, celebrates his birthday on the same day.

As much as I wanted to spend a few more days at the beach (even if I had to work from there, which my line of work definitely allows), I see how much more productive my brother and I are when we’re working together at the studio. Like I started this letter saying, we’ve been making progress and I want to move along on the story as much as possible before we have to step out of our writing seats and get back into full drawing mode.

commissions of the week

Zephyr Quinn

I had fun with these latest commissions. Zephyr’s request was for one character only, but I decided to include the dead demon monster at Zeph’s feet to give the image a more dynamic composition, thinking about how the image places her as part of our Acedia storyline as much as Cass, which perhaps shows that I miss drawing her and wished we got to the part of the story where she comes back. I ended up changing her pose, because I thought I’d already drawn Olinda with one foot up on the boat. I considered trying to draw that psychic snake effect, but it would look like I was drawing Jean Grey of Psylocke. The final pose makes me think of the classic Elektra Assassin cover, which I think has more to do with Zeph.

Groo and Usagi Yojimbo

This was a really fun one, too.

I think I nailed the idea pretty quickly, but, as my brother pointed out, I could make Usagi smaller so that Groo popped out more on the foreground and the final image would get more dynamic. Now this is one of my favorite commissions.

Groo was such a big part of our pool of influences when Bá and I were young. Aragonés drew his own comics, and also cartoons, gags and all sorts of funny stuff in Mad Magazine, he drew himself occasionally on the pages of his stories, and all that was so much similar to the Brazilian comics’ scene in the middle to late 80s and early 90s, and it was just another example for us of the potential of comics to reach many countries, many cultures, and be relatable.

Bá and I drew this dragon so many times.

Umbrella?

I just want to put down on this letter that Umbrella is moving forward. Bá is working on new issues, and if you spend any time scrolling around the internet, you can see that shooting of the final season has begun as well. Bá has a bunch of scripts from this season’s episodes to read, and I shall read them, too. We always learn when we read other people’s scripts, be it comics scripts, or tv series, or movies. Once you get into the headspace to look at the scripts as homework and as research, you see narrative patterns, you see creative choices, you see visual references on the written page.

More scripts than meets the eye

I also have been reading a lot of scripts for some covers I’m doing, and I few others for projects which I was considered as the interior artist. It’s a very different thing to read scripts instead of the final comics, and you start to learn how much the writer is writing as direction (or suggestion) for the artist, and therefore you see what sort of visual storyteller that writer is, and how much the writer writes as dialogue or narration (so much narration in these last scripts).

Maybe you’re on the opposite side of the creative table, and you are a writer looking for an artist. You want to learn about the artist? You can try to find a script the artist worked on (which I think informs on how the writer thinks and creates), and you compare it with the finished comic, trying your best to see how the artist interprets the script, what choices are made visually to be faithful to the written story, and when any change or visual choice has to be made to turn ideas into pages. You can always learn about an artist just by looking at the pages drawn, but if you have the script to compare the pages with, you can learn more.

. . .

I might skip the next couple of weeks and write my next letter only in March. I have a lot of pages, covers and scripts to work on, and maybe, when I’m not working my ass off, I might also use some of my time to enjoy Carnaval a little bit, too.

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

Fábio Moon
Moon Base, São Paulo
February 6th, 2023