Big Announcement: My 2024 book

What's coming post-Phenomena

Hello from Castrum Lusitania, my fortress in northern Portugal. Welcome to another edition of our weekly newsletter.

NYCC is in full motion and I’m in FOMO. Seeing everyone getting together and not being there always brings the feeling of missing out, but work and kids made it impossible this year. But among the cats already out of the bag, comes a huge one for me, regarding my post-Phenomena future.

Drumroll etc etc:

Me and Rick, back at it in 2024

That’s right. I’ll be working on a brand new book with Rick Remender after finishing Phenomena. Rick did a Giant Generator panel at the New York Comic Con where he announced an excellent line up of artists that he’ll be working with on a myriad of new titles, with yours truly among them. You can read more details here.

You might notice that the article mentions how the artists are all exclusive, which is unusual in creator owned. What does it change? In my case, absolutely nothing. I’m always exclusive to whatever book I’m drawing because I can only do one at a time. We just made it official this time. But in practical terms, I was exclusive in Righteous Thirst For Vengeance and I’m exclusive right now with Phenomena.

Me and Rick know what we’ll be doing but any announcement about it will be for a later date. All I can say is that it is something I’ve always wanted to do, so it’s exciting.

But it’s also far away, because right now all I’m working on is:

Phenomena!

And what a week it was with this book. First of all, last week I showed you a new, non-spoilery, inked page so allow me to show you a bit of the grey tones in it for completion’s sake. This scene is where our story turns to face its epic ending,

I also got a substantial chunk of script from Brian Bendis and I have to say he superseded my already high expectations. The plot needed some well crafted dialogue to put things in motion (there’s only so much a punch and a kick can do) and oh boy did Brian deliver. Yes he did. In fact, despite having already drawn a lot of crazy things for book 3, I can tell you this dialogue bit is what excites me the most to draw so far.

I’ve spent most of the week drawing thumbnails and everything is flowing nicely, with lots of expressive faces to draw on my immediate future.

The new script also introduces a new character, which I can already feel will be one of my favorites to draw. Because you’re all so nice I’ll even lay it here:

More sketching

Despite having less time to sketch this week, I still managed to fill two more pages with various types of faces. The exercise is a lot of fun but I’ve started to have different ideas to draw, so expect something other than 6-faces-per-page in the sketching department. Sketching is about having fun, so I’ll go with it wherever my head points to.

And finally: more writing

As a creator, ideas don’t stop. I take notes all the time and develop things whenever I can. So this week I’ve also been doing a lot of thinking and writing, compiling in a coherent form ideas that have been on my head for the past few months. And all of a sudden I have a document with overviews for 6 entirely new things.

My aim with these is to expand beyond comics. As a storyteller, I’m interest in other visual mediums as well, so some have been conceived as other things that are not comics. And it turns out I have a meeting scheduled next week precisely about some of these, so fingers crossed!

For now, time to start penciling some more Phenomena pages.

See you all soon,

André