Project Red Gaining Steam

And a new blank cover commission

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

And speaking of weekly, next week there will NOT be a newsletter as I’ll be at a talk plus signing here in Porto, Portugal. But this week there is, so let’s get down to it.

Project Red is gaining steam

Listen, first issues are hard. You have limited space to set, basically, everything. At the same time, you need to tell a compelling story. Balancing the need to show the basic blocks of what your story is with the need to have a fulfilling plot and structure is hard work.

Sometimes, things collide and having one prevents having the other. To solve such matters, you need an hierarchy - something will take precedence and dictate what goes. And in the business of stories, storytelling is king. All decisions must be guided by this simple question: does the story need it?

All of this to illustrate some of our concerns during the last few weeks. As Rick Remender and I debated wether to include certain things in issue 1, we went back and forth with different ways of doing it, but in the end we asked our storytelling choices what was needed and we got our answers, loud and clear. One scene that we really wanted to have in the first issue was robbing space from another scene to breath. And that couldn’t happen, as it was a pivotal moment. (You’ll excuse the abstract nature of the conversation, but for now that’s as far as we can get without revealing anything.) So we dropped the new scene to allow things room to grow organically and not rush anything - a compromise some of you will recognize from Righteous Thirst For Vengeance.

With that out of the way, we have now the full script for the first chapter and a bunch of stuff for the following ones. With a solidified beginning things seem much clearer and easier - though surely we’ll have other challenges as things move forward.

I’m already sitting on more than 20 pages of material and I have just as many to draw until the end of the year, but I’m supremely excited with what we’re cooking. I’ve spent this week doing layouts and thumbnailing every scene - it will be lovely to spend next week fleshing it out in the pencil stage.

A true highlight of the past few weeks was the moment I saw the first piece of artwork for this book colored. Happy days.

New blank cover commission

I’ve recently also done a commission on a blank cover of Avengers A.I #1. This was for a good friend and the inspiration behind the name of the book’s villain: Dimitrios. It’s always nice to revisit these characters and reminisce about the great moments I had with my dear pal Sam Humphries (who wrote the book and knew the real Dimitrios in the first place).

For this commission, I was asked to draw the fictional character’s body but with the face of the real Dimitrios. And I decided to throw in some screen tones for good measure. After all, this is the second time I’m doing this commission - the first one vanished after I had completed it without any explanation - so I wanted to do something extra this time.

For curiosity, this was the original one (I managed to snap a pic of it before its mysterious disappearance).

I like the composition so much that I kept pretty much the same exact drawing. See below a quick real of me adding some highlights to the screen tones:

Recommendations

Me and my wife entered a marathon of Yellowstone and its spinoffs a couple of months ago and we’re now caught up with everything. It can be uneven here or there, but when it found its footing, the show started to hit some real highs. Kevin Costner is outstanding in every scene he’s in, but the real gold is how it highlights the cowboy life and what it is all about. By hiring real, actual cowboys as actors - not just extras - they created an impressive sense of realism. I found the spinoffs very good as well, with some great characters and moments - 1883 ain’t no comedy though. 1923 has a pretty interesting setting, with all that was going on at the time, but above all it has Harrison Ford. Like Costner, his star power elevates everything around him.

We’ll be trying The Penguin next. I still find it unbelievable that they went through all that trouble to create basically the most average of guys with those insane prosthetics, but I won’t deny Colin Farrell does a memorable job with the character.

See you soon!

André