Phenomena & Righteous Thirst

Two very different books - two sides of my coin.

Nov 07, 2022

Hello from Castrum Lusitania, my fortress on northern Portugal. Welcome to the first edition of our new weekly newsletter, where we’ll explore my current gigs, see exclusive previews, sneak peaks, works in progress, overviews of past works, recommendations and more.

Being this my first proper edition of Castrum Lusitania, it seems fitting to go into why what I’m doing right now is exactly what I want to be doing and how I ended up here - particularly since I’m celebrating my 10th year as a professional, having begun at Marvel in 2012 with FF #22.

So let’s go back in time.

How did it all happened?

Well, we’re not about to go into the nitty gritty of a 10 year old career right away (though I’m happy to expand on it on later newsletters or answer any questions you might have). But I’ll say that since the very first time I picked up a pencil, I’ve wanted to tell my own stories. Naturally, drawing for Marvel was a very good thing as well. But already right there what convinced C.B. Cebulski that I was ready was a first (and unpublished) version of Man Plus. The same sample was also used to sell Man Plus at the same time to Titan Comics, where I’d get to do the book a couple of years later.

Since then, I’ve created and developed to different degrees a dozen of ideas, presenting a few of them to various publishers. Meaning, I’ve been trying to do more creator owned works right from the start. See some old examples below (2014 and 2015):

This is for a sci-fi epic that can only be done in the long run.

My love for all things medieval has already produced a few ideas within the genre - (colors by Jordi Belaire)

A spread testing the visuals of a fantasy epic

There’s a lot more from each of these ideas and there are a lot more ideas. All things we’ll get to explore in future newsletters.

So, what happened to these?

I’m glad you asked. Some publishers said no at the time, others maybe, but nothing definitive. So I kept working on Marvel and creating new stuff. What all of these did, however, was creating a really strong and varied portfolio, hinting that there was a lot more about what I was able to do than what was being published. Which got the attention of a few people, mainly people like Rick Remender and Brian Michael Bendis.

“How did they see it if none of it was ever published?” - because I showed it to them, in Rick’s case. Or because they saw it online, in Brian’s case. So it was basically me putting myself out there, something that has earned me countless gigs and the best opportunities of my career.

Which brings us to Phenomena and Righteous Thirst.

Well, yes indeed. Both books are products of my burning wishes to do creator owned comics, both presenting very different things upfront, all of them things I love about comics.

On PHENOMENA (with Brian Michael Bendis) you have the unleashed imagination that only comics allow. A massive city on legs? A million different characters? Dozens of massive wide shots of totally different settings? The craziest battles, explosions, concepts? You got it. There are no budget constraints here. Check a few pages below:

And on A RIGHTEOUS THIRST FOR VENGEANCE (with Rick Remender) we invested everything in a slow and methodical storytelling style that allowed us to explore the narrative in general and the action in particular in its finest detail. Here’s a sequence from issue 1:

So I can safely say that I’m creating what I want with the people I want, which is pretty much the best place you can be professionally, in my opinion. Hopefully, I’ll keep at it for a while.

What all of this means for my current schedule

Right now both Phenomena Book 1 and Righteous Thirst vols. 1 and 2 are out there. After Righteous Thirst was concluded a few months ago, I’ve returned to Phenomena. Me and Brian are working on books 2 and 3 back to back - I’m currently sitting on a few dozen pages of finished art for book 2 (you’ll hear a lot about it through future editions of Castrum Lusitania). This will conclude our planned trilogy for Abrams Books.

Find Phenomena here.

And A Righteous Thirst For Vengeance here.

Recommendations

I’ll wrap this edition with a quick recommendation of some excellent comics I read in the past few weeks. The excellent Daniel Freedman was kind enough to send me his works, which you can see in the picture below. They are all very good, incredibly well written and drawn. I recommend any of these, particularly Kali which I found to be quite an achievement in the medium - and printed in an unusual (for US standards) large format which quite benefited the artwork.