Hello from Castrum Lusitania, my fortress in northern Portugal. Welcome to another edition of our weekly newsletter.
This week I got proofs for Phenomena Book 3’s cover, but before we see some pics of how amazing it looks printed, let me warn you that there’ll be no newsletter next week. But it is for a good reason, as next weekend I’ll be:
Signing in Spain
I’ll be in Vigo, Galicia, in northern Spain, signing in a comic book store very appropriately named Banda Deseñada - which can literally be translated as Comics.
The main reason for the signing is the launch of Phenomena Book 2 in Spanish, but as usual folks are welcome to bring anything with my name and I’ll happily sign it. Very excited to be with readers, sharing these stories and then hearing from people is what it is all about.
Phenomena Book 3 cover proofs
A few weeks you’ll remember that I got the interior proofs for the third Phenomena book:
So this time it was all about the cover and the end papers. Everything is looking gorgeous, just like with the first batch of proofs. The colors (by Chris O’Halloran) and lines translate gloriously into the high quality paper of the wraparound cover. See below and notice the added gloss in the title and main characters:
As with the previous volumes, removing the wraparound reveals the black and white cover, which will look like this:
Also included were the maps that, in the front and back, work as endpapers. I did them in grey tones and our designer colorized the different layers. After some back and forth, we got to a very lovely balance of colors and line weights:
The only thing that beats seeing proofs is getting the book. Which, I’ll remind you, you can preorder right now.
Other notes
This week also had me giving a talk to students and general public about entrepreneurship with professionals of other areas. It was a nice chat and a good mix of people with very different backgrounds.
For Project Red, despite the fact that we’re still a long way from any kind of announcement, materials are starting to pile up quite nicely. This week I started penciling another batch of pages and finished three covers. Here’s a tiny video of me inking a tiny section of one of the covers:
Music from the video is from Dark, one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen on TV. Which you can take as my recommendation for this week. I’ve seen it when it came out, but something like that never really leaves your head.
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See you in a couple of weeks!
André
Pretty late on this post but had to say I'm with you on the Dark love. Hearing the music brought me back to how much I was impressed and inspired by that show. I can only emulate writing that good!