This is the cover for Dark Horse Presents 28, out in September 25th. In one of our rare art collaborations, Bá penciled the cover, inked the top image, I inked the bottom part and he colored the whole thing. Click here to see the cover with the logo and everything else.
I'll have a new story on the sixth issue on the Dark Horse Presents anthology, out this month. Also, I did the cover, which looks like this:
The two new stories I did this year were for traditional anthologies. One for DHP. The other story, a three pager, I did for a traditional Argentinean anthology which now has a brazilian incarnation.
September is right across the corner and, while we're really producing several new stories, most of them are still very far away from any clear publication date, except for Casanova-AVARITIA, the new arc which starts coming out NEXT WEEK, but Bá is drawing this arc, not me. So, with that in mind, I'm doing a story for issue 6 of the new Dark Horse Presents anthology. This is the only new story I'm writing and drawing which will be published this year in the US, and it's only 8 pages long. I gave my best to make each page count.
I received the invitation to create a new story shortly after I did the variant cover for issue 2, so I can say the original inspiration for the story came from that cover - or from the idea which inspired that cover - but it went on a completely different direction. A better one, if you ask me.
I thought it was very nice of my editor to invite me to do another cover, this time for the issue my story will be in, and what I came up with is the image below:
I never forget how important Dark Horse Presents was for my brother and I, how in it we discovered Sin City and Hellboy, how in its digital rebirth a few years back I did Sugarshock with Joss Whedon (for which I got an Eisner Award) and how it still publishes and celebrates creators with a personal voice. I'm thrilled to think that in this issue my story is in there's also a new Jill Thompson story.
This issue only comes out in November, but it never hurts to give people the heads up.
Summer solstice at one side of the world, Winter solstice at the other. Both ways, there are stories to be told, thus work to be done.
I just finished a cover, which the editor liked and have already been sent off, and so off I go to this short 8 page story which I've been planning since April, when the idea was born. It's a strange thing, going back to short stories after the 220 pages of Daytripper, but in a refreshing sort of way, I think it's just what I need. These days, it's easy to get carried away and only come up with big epic ideas, ideas which will take many pages - and many years - to get done, and there are some periods in your life, and in your work, where a smaller story is just the right size to fit that moment in which you want to work and, at the same size, still have time to gaze at the world and see what the tides might be bringing my way.
I hope that the next time I have something to write about in here, this short story will be over, and I hope this happens in the next two weeks.
Back to work.
My Space Dark Horse Presents Vol. 1 will finally put on paper my Sugarshock story and it will be out in September. Before the San Diego Comicon, they were advertising the book with my first page as the cover, but I was asked to do a brand new cover for the first volume of the anthology, which they had on display at the convention.
As I just wrote earlier today, doing covers is completely different than doing comics, and you can play on a completely different set of rules.
I had fun doing this cover and I hope you like it.
Click here and read the brand new Umbrella Academy short story "Anywhere but here".
Our story at the February edition of the My Space Dark Horse Presents anthology was conceived as an outlet to discover the fun behind the process of making comics.
As we were starting out and were trying to find some job at the american market, we have tried to get something going with Marvel and DC just like many other artists. We grew up reading super heroes and we thought the natural step as we became artists would be to draw them. In order to do that, we made what people call "submission pages", those sequences without a script or a story in which the artist would show what he can do with the characters he wants to draw. We made Batman pages, X-Men pages, Green Arrow pages, Authority pages, Planetary pages and so on. As much as we enjoyed those characters, the "working without a story" bit didn't quite work for us. We didn't feel like we were telling any story and the artwork was very uninspired because of that. We were discovering at the same time that we worked best with our own stories mostly because the story was the starting point, and not the art or the attempt at a job. If we wanted to do our best work, we needed to tell a story through pictures, and not just draw pretty pictures. That's where the idea behind Wonder Twins came from, and once we came up with a story interesting enough for us to tell using the super hero genre, it was easy. Bá sat and drew the story really fast, and we loved every page, and the story expanded from the original idea because we were having fun and we really believed that story also told the reader about the authors and not just about the characters, which I believe is what we get to know as the author's style. If we were to draw a story, we needed to make it our own, and have it be seen through our eyes, and through our style. Once we did this with this story, it was easy, and it was great.
And then Scott told us we needed an extra page.
We have been traveling, doing some research. We're also drawing and writing a lot. There are lots of possibilities for our next projects, and research is necessary for most of them. Some research can be done without leaving your chair, as all of us start writing from our own experiences, from what we know. Later, we might include opinions from people we know that might be similar to ours, or the complete opposite, or that should fall somewhere inbetween. Then, we might want to tell a story that needs more than just the familiar, the near by information, the visible at eye sight. That's when we need to go outside ourselves and discover more, learn more so we can tell more than we already told.
I'm still drawing Casanova, and I expect to keep working on it at leat until the end of March, so that should keep me busy for these two months, and somewhat away from the internet. I'll try to post more sketches, as I see Becky doing on her blog, and as we have done much more here in ours. We're doing more sketches now, as is customary when you're trying to come up with new stories, and we should have a lot to show because of that.
On my next post, I'll tell the story behind the story we did for the MySpace DHP February issue, online now.