Comic Con Portugal
And a cover step-by-step
Hello from Castrum Lusitania, my fortress in northern Portugal. Welcome to another edition of our weekly newsletter.
Weekly, you say?! How come there wasn’t one last week?!
Yes, you’re right. I went to Comic Con Portugal (more on that in a second) and I forgot to mention that I wouldn’t be able to write Castrum last week. I posted a note about it, but still, my apologies.
Are we good now? Cool. You’re all lovely.
Comic Con Portugal
I was one of the guests at Comic Con Portugal, which returned to the north of the country. After skipping a few editions (daughter, work, Covid, more daughters), returning to it was a pleasant experience. Still well organized, lots of people, growing in dimension and with a proper artist alley now. For all intents and purposes, it was like a mini NYCC. There’s still room for improvement, but it’s clearly on the right path.
I was invited for the usual reasons: panels and signings. One of the panels was about my career, covering all the big milestones and with the usual but always welcome questions. Another talk was less conventional but quite cool - the organizers had a stage right in the middle of the main hall, where every guest would sit down with an interviewer and talk for around 25 minutes. The sound would be heard across the hall, which was a cool way of putting everyone under the same spotlight, whether you were a guest from comics, movies, TV, etc. This is what it looked like:
There was also a healthy line of people for the signing session, which occupied me for 2 non stop hours of sketching and signing. Lots of Phenomena and Righteous Thirst For Vengeance, but also Man Plus, Generation Gone and Marvel stuff. It was particularly nice to sign a bunch of Avengers AI and even sketching one of its characters in one of the issues. And yes, I had to open the issue and use my own art as reference. After all, I did this a decade ago.
It was also nice to talk to a few people trying to break into comics and giving a few portfolio reviews and even quick perspective lessons on the spot.
One of the highlights is hanging out with friends and peers, which alone makes it all worth it.
At my desk
As you might know by now, me and Rick are already working on a new book, but before that I’ll be drawing three issues of something else - which is already underway - I spent most of the week penciling the first issue (up to page 17 already).
I’ve also been working on yet more covers, one of them had me up to my speciality: cities.
New releases
Brian Bendis and Alex Maleev’s Masterpiece with my cover is coming your way. I’ve already shown the cover but I’m revisiting it with a step-by-step.
I went for a scene from issue one, which felt to me would make a good cover: a little girl being taken by two FBI agents. If I saw that, I would want to know what the hell is going on. Hopefully, so will readers.
And now, for something special:
Phenomena French edition
Book one was just released in France and I’ve been getting a lot of nice messages, merci beaucoup. Urban Comics, which has been publishing all my work over there, did a fantastic job with the cover. They usually do something different from the original and this time it was no different - they pulled the opening splash from chapter 2 and went with a black and white cover, which with the hand drawn logo I did in red looks quite good if I might say so:
Finally, on Monday, I recorded a very nice conversation with a fellow artist, Alex Morrissey. I’m looking forward to sharing it as it was unlike most podcasts. It truly was a conversation and only when we were 10 minutes in did I realize that we were already doing it and not just warming up.
Let me wish you a nice Easter and I’ll see you next week,
André