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The story might have started earlier, as an idea you had or an experience you lived or as something you saw, read, listened to dreamed about. Ideas come from everywhere, at any time, and we can carry those ideas for a long time before they can actually become a story. When you’re doing comics – when I am doing comics, at least –, the story only really starts to take shape when you have to think about the layout of the pages. As a visual storytelling medium where the size of the panel and its relationship with the other panels on that page is as important to the reading experience as the words you choose, your idea only starts to turn into a comic when you start to think visually, choosing visual beats to guide the reader through the story.

Saturday, I woke up to the sound of rain. After an alarming hot and dry week in these last weeks of the Brazilian winter, the rain was welcomed with comforting relief, but it also changed my outdoors plans, and instead I stayed at home, trying at times to rescue my bunnies from getting too wet in the garden outside, catching them and dragging them against their will back to my back porch, or luring them back to dry safety with a piece of carrot. I finished reading some comics – research material for a short story my brother and I are doing – and then I started thinking about another story, and about the idea I had for that story, and I opened my sketchbook and started to play with shapes and sizes, thumbnailing what could be a chapter in a larger story.

After you have made comics for a while, there are things you learn. How much space you leave on each panel for the words, for example, is one of the things you have to practice and learn, because more often than you would think you’ll have to draw a panel before you know exactly how many balloons, captions or words will be on that panel. Sometimes, you’ll draw a panel without even having written the first word of the balloon inside that panel. After having made comics for some 20 years, I actually enjoy creating pages figuring out how they will be read VISUALLY before I think about how the readers will need the words to really access a second layer in my story. This initial, visual sketching phase, is one of the most pleasurable parts of making comics, it’s like going out dancing and finding your groove as you follow a good tune, it’s identifying the beats and leading the reader through the melodious choreography of your drawings.

I sometimes think about how much I love this initial part of creating a story, and, if I could stay in charge of that part, whether or not I could let another artist take care of the actual drawing the pages afterwards – most known as “writing for another artist to draw”.

This past week Bá and I got our second shot of the vaccine, and are now fully vaccinated against this terrible virus that has changed the plot of our collective story.

We didn’t experience any side effects.

Just relief.

Gratitude.

Happiness.

And hope.

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

Fábio Moon
Moon Base, São Paulo
August 30th, 2021