Goodbye Phenomena

The Trilogy is now done

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

It feels great to say it: we’ve completed three Phenomena books and manage to tell the story we wanted, how we wanted. It doesn’t get any better than this and it’s very exciting to have it all wrapped up even before Book Two is out.

(This was the post I was going to write last week, but Akira Toriyama’s sudden death made it inevitable to put some words together about one of my heroes.)

Phenomena Book 3 is done

Done. Finished. Wrapped.

A whole trilogy of books. Doing Books 2 and 3 back to back was an odyssey only compared to the adventures of Phenomena itself, but I can tell you that I am immensely proud of the final results. Book 2 is about to be released (April 23) and is available for preorder where books are sold. And to have 3 done allows us to assure readers and retailers that it is safe to bet in our trilogy because it is a real, finished thing.

Here’s proof of life of book 3, with all the script, designs and pages we worked on for the past few months:

Obviously, all of these pages were then worked on the iPad to lay all the grey tones and finish the artwork. I filmed the actual last touches I did on the very last page:

Me and Brian have begun our promotional press effort for Book 2, with interviews and podcasts. One of them, for PreviewsWorld, was recorded and streamed live this past Friday. You can catch it here if you missed it, with plenty of talk about process and how our collaboration worked.

Meanwhile, I’m already working on something new, but that’s a story for another day.

Cover Work

I’ve done a lot of covers over the past few months and I still have 5 more scheduled until the end of April. Very few have been published yet, but I recently one more was released: Void Rivals #8 (colors by Chris O’Halloran).

This is cover 2 of 6 for this outstanding book by one of my favorite creative teams in comics (Kirkman and De Felici) and if you put covers for issues #7 and #8 together you’ll see where we’re going with this:

Yes. Six connected covers. And they’re done, so I can tell you they worked out really good. I can’t wait to do a proper step by step of this one.

Recommendation

It’s a quick article this week but one that talks about a very important topic, which I’ve alluded to in the past and will surely return to.

The article is about superhero movie fatigue, but the real important bit comes from the mouth of Paul Dano:

“It’s a larger thing, too. As soon as the word ‘content’ came into what we do – meaning making movies or TV – it meant quantity over quality, which I think was a big misstep. And I certainly don’t need that as a viewer or as an artist.”

That’s the fight we’re in right now. The word content absorbed everything we do (movies, TV, books, music, news, videogames, etc) and mixed into a shapeless paste which exists only to entertain and appease mindlessly. Our duty is to keep creating the very best we can, with as much humanity as we can. The material will connect and that’s how will stay above making content and continue to make art.

We’re not filling sausages here.

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See you next week,

André