Pencilvaganza

And words on a few movies/TV shows

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

This was a fairly demanding week.I imposed certain goals that I knew were going to be hard to hit, but I needed to for my peace of mind. That is because I’m taking next week off and I always like to leave with something done and the next step ready to be picked up.

And as the title implies, I spent most of this week penciling away manically, but more on that in a minute.

If you missed it: last week I wrote about an exhibit of my work. And next week, since I won’t be working, there will be no Castrum Lusitania. It’s for a good cause.

Pencilvaganza

I’m currently on my 3 of 3 issues for The Sacrificers and I wanted to pencil it all before taking a week off. That meant 16 pages to do in a week, which is not unheard of ever since I started doing pencils digitally. But it’s still an effort and these were not easy pages. These were fairly complex pages, full of details, cogs and machines. And when I did layouts/thumbnails, I did what’s best for the story, not what was going to be easy to pencil. So I was left with a bunch of shots like this:

And trust me, there were far worse panels. To make things harder, another secret project I’ve been writing on and off over the last couple of years (not comics related) moved forward to another stage and that demanded an entire morning, which was not ideal. Then one of the kids decided to get ill and school ended on Thursday, leaving a lot of chaos to be dealt with on Friday.

Luckily for me, when I know scheduling is going to be very tight, I always push very hard in the beginning to make sure I don’t have to do it in the end. That meant that around Wednesday I already knew I was going to be able to hit my goals on Friday night, which I did - even with the unforeseen events.

I’ve been applying this tactic since my architecture student days and it works very well. Push in the beginning of that last stretch of project, not in the end. That avoids putting you under extreme pressure when you are most tired and allows you time in the last couple of days to work at a human pace, with peace of mind and able to make sure you don’t forget anything.

Of course, nothing really would have happened if I left a couple of pages to be penciled after vacations, but this way I don’t have that nagging thing in the back of my mind. That little voice going if only you had worked a bit faster every day…

As usual, a reminder that this is not me complaining. Just detailing the routing as it went. I had PLENTY of fun with the kids at home and penciling all of this madness. Just look at all these levers:

Extremely cool character and setting. Before all of this, because Rick hadn’t finished the script in its entirety, I had already penciled and inked the first five pages of this issue a couple of weeks ago, which finally came with the chance to draw Pigeon…

… and with him came my favorite panel in this series (here seen only partially):

With the end of my Sacrificers run in sight, I can already see the next thing from here. Shhhhh….

Recommendations

Over the past few weeks, I’ve watched a few things that have been on my list for years at this point. And, goddamn, don’t you just love when stuff matches and/or exceeds your expectations? Because that’s what happened with the following:

The Northman

Robert Eggers blew my mind with VVitch and The Lighthouse. Naturally, The Northman was high on my list. But having missed it in theaters I ended up waiting for it to pop on streaming. A couple of weeks ago, I went for it and found it sensational. It’s overall much more straightforward than Eggers’ other movies, but it is a visual feast and it delivers on every single promise it makes to the viewer. I quite liked the gritty realism overlapping with the mystical/supernatural side of this epic Norse tale. The movie masterfully builds up to the final duel by the volcano, ending in a lighting and movement masterclass.

Hell or High Water

I remember this movie making the rounds years ago and wanting to see it ever since. The feeling grew after watching Outlaw King (same director and star), a movie I looooove and which deserves way more than it got. Finally, I caught Hell Or High Water on TV and it’s everything they said about it and even more. Perfect casting, great dialogues and perfect storytelling. The way everything is framed means that you’re never lost, even if some of the answers come well into the second half of the movie. The brutality of the unexpected makes it especially memorable.

Handmaid’s Tale

I can’t talk much about it, because I’ve only seen seasons 1 and 2 (it’s all Prime had available around here), but at the core of everything good this show has (and it has A LOT of good), is the way it picks a simple yet horrifying premise (stripping women of all their rights and creating a full blown patriarchal society) and then proceeds to detail how such thing could be possible. It makes for some harrowing bits, as you can imagine, but how they allow for the humanity of each character to permeate it all is absolutely the work of geniuses.

P.S. House Of The Dragon is becoming a serious case of quality and high stake storytelling. The way it keeps you on your toes, not knowing what will happen and who will die is very reminiscent of its older sister, Game Of Thrones. Such promising first couple of episodes.

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Well, time to do nothing but read, eat and play with the kids for a week!

See you soon,

André