working through it
I woke up early last Monday to find a message from Jimmy Aquino letting me know John Cassaday was on the hospital, explaining me what had happened, and for the first time in a while I was distressed that I have so many friends who live in another country and we don’t keep in touch with any frequency.
I tried to get some work done on Monday, but my thoughts always went back to John. By the time I finished writing my newsletter for last week and hit the “send” button, I received an update from Jimmy. Two hours later, the news was already online. Had I waited another half an hour to send the letter, it would have been completely different in content and tone (in truth, I probably would not have sent it, because I wasn’t able to find words that night about how deep John’s passing affected me.
Over the next day, I manage to find some pictures of John and I together (I went to sleep thinking that maybe we didn’t have any) and posted a little tribute on Instagram:
That afternoon, I went to oversee the class I’m curating at the park’s library, and the students had an exercise about working with grids. Having them all do the same exercise is always a good way to extract from each drawings and pages the style from the artists, because that’s where they differ from each other. The panels at the beginning of this letter are part of my version of the exercise, and on the following class, last Thursday, I went through my process with the students to talk about how to read scripts, how to see what’s in there that must be on the page, what doesn’t need to be on the page, and what isn’t on the script that can be added with the art to create more layer to the finished page.
Working on a small one page exercise helped me focus last week, and it filled a part of my week with enough passion for comics to make me work through the grief with my art.
My week ended with Jimmy Aquino sending me another message, asking for an audio bit about John to be included in a special tribute episode of his podcast Comic News Insider. I sketched it out on my notebook, to keep it short, organized and so I could read it (winging it crossed my mind, but would end up longer and with a lot of pauses).
Today, as I write this, I notice it’s Mike Mignola’s birthday. I think about him, and I think about many other friends I know who live far from me. And I think about the friends that live near, but that I don’t see often because I’m always working. After the pandemic, that feeling that “WE”RE ALL GOING TO DIE”, which made me go on ZOOM calls or take my bike and pedal across the city to people’s houses, dialed down a bit inside of me, and the conscious effort I had made to reach out to friends to let them know I was still here, and to make sure they were still there gave way to trying to get back to working through the week. “I’ll see you next time”.
Maybe we have to make a bigger effort to get in touch with people we know and care even when we’re far away.
Be safe. Be kind. Be curious.
Pa-ZOW!
Fábio Moon
Moon Base, São Paulo
September 16th, 2024