Wear your heart out
I look at the studio garden and a sun bean is shining over the trees and it makes me want to stand out there bathing in its warmth, only it isn’t that warm anymore, a sure sign of the change of the seasons.
We’re in May already. This year sure is flying. Talking about flying, the Sparrows are coming.
Bá gave an interview about the return of The Umbrella Academy comics at The Beat. It’s an interesting one, since this is the first arc of the comics to come out after the Netflix series premiered (and ended). Also, it’s the first arc where Bá steps in as co-writer, which presented a good opportunity for the interviewer to escape the regular questions that are always made for artists, and he talks about what changes for him in terms of how to approach the story and what’s fun to draw with this shift. My brother finished the interview recommending some Brazilian comics (as a result of the recent interest in Brazilian culture after the international success of the movie “I’m still here”). It’s well worth checking out.
One thing I thought was a weird choice of the news website was to illustrate the news header with a detail of the Jill Thompson variant cover for issue one of Plan B. I love that cover, don’t give me wrong, and Jill is one of my favorite people in comics, and a close friend, but when you’re interviewing the artist of a comic book, shouldn’t his art be the image you show to advertise the interview? A few days earlier, there was an advance review of the same issue also at the Beat, and they used another variant cover (a very iconic David Aja piece), and it’s fine as the issue had several variant covers to begin with and the review isn’t only talking about the artist of the book. but it’s a different situation when it’s an interview with one artist and you show another artist’s work. For me, it looks like a lack of care of what images tell on their own, or a lack of knowledge of how to cover this visual medium. It made me remember when the Umbrella Academy Netflix series was first announced, back in 2017, and a lot of the news coverage would show a drawing of the Umbrella Academy which wasn’t done by my brother. It wasn’t even a drawing done by a professional, like a pinup or variant cover. It was a fan art found online.
We can do better, people.
When I say we, I include myself. It’s easy to go the easy route of less research, less effort, less worry. We live in this internet age where things that take more time than a click take too much time, and we often forget the advantages of a more thorough production. And, just like I’m noticing the Beat’s reporter (or team) could have done better, my brother told me I could have done better when, a couple of weeks ago, I published a Substack letter of one of my figure drawings exercises, entitled Yellow Sneakers.
I only noted on the letter that my girlfriend was wearing “the same sneakers as Uma Thurman on Kill Bill”, and my brother said that was lazy writing, and that I might as well had written “the same sneakers as that actress on that movie”. Too generic. Too shallow. Two minutes of research online and I could have more information to enrich the text and could have said she had on the Onitsuka Tiger Mexico 66 trainers. My brother is much more of a sneaker head than me and he pointed out to me how much of a difference it makes to care more for the subject matter.
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Going back in time in search of the heart of comics.
My brother and I were testing the Wayback Machine website to see some websites that no longer exist (like our own website), and that led us to spend some time reading some of the texts of our blogs (we had one in English and one in Portuguese), which was a very nice and surprising trip back in time to a period of our careers when we had a lot more time to write about all our hopes ind aspirations, and about our daily routine, and reflect on the potential of comics. I picked one reflection I wrote back in 2004 which I felt was a passionate and inspired piece of writing to repost below. I hope you like it.
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It lives!
It lives in every and each one of us. In our memories and in our hearts. It's there every day and every night, and we need it to stay that way.
Comics.
Everybody who is involved with comics, in any way one can get involved with comics, is in love. Or was, or will be. Comics is an experience that forever changes you, like falling in love for someone. It doesn't mean you'll stay together forever, but you'll always remember with kindness what you had.
the reader
The reader is in love with the stories he or she reads. The characters, their lives, their problems. It doesn't need a regular person to tell the story about how to solve problems. Even super heroes have to solve problems, and they're made of paper. If they can do it, so can we. All we gotta do is try. When we read a story where people, no matter how ordinary or extraordinary, have the strength and courage to try, we discover that we also can try to do whatever we want to do. We may fail, as many will, but we can always learn from it, as we do by following, month after month, the adventures of our heroes.
the writer
The writer is in love with the stories he has to tell, 'cause he's in love with the world. He is fascinated with life, with death, with people. For the writer, comics will be the window he found to show what is the world we live. You may recognize it from your own experiences, you may be surprised by what he shows you, but he's there for that: to show that we are here, we exist, and we are all worth living the stories we tell, as we are as interesting as any character we can create. The writer writes about us, for us and so we won't be forgotten.
the artist
The artist is in love with an idea. A dream, a fantasy, a hope that anything is possible. If we are to see the matter of poetry, it would be by the hands of a comic book artist. The comic book artist is an invisible man, a creator of images that will only reach parts f your brain, of your soul and of your heart, parts that will command the other parts of your body to react to what he's showing you. The story you will remember, in case the artist succeeds, exists only in your mind, between the panels, as one continuous memory you've grown found of, one which can have the most remarkable images be ones you did not even draw.
We are all in love. Comic book is our passion. nothing is easy and simple in life, but for us, touched by comics, how can we fight love? How can we fight passion?
Comics have created a monster in all of us, and it's alive.
(written in our blog on December 7th, 2004)
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Be safe, be kind, be curious.
Pa-ZOW!
Fábio Moon
Moon Base, São Paulo
May 5th, 2025