The Last 13

Time to finish Phenomena

Feb 24, 2024

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

The end is nigh. Of Phenomena, that is. I’m almost done with Book 3, which will close the trilogy and wrap what has been a big part of my life for the past 4 years. But it’s not the time to say goodbye yet! There is still work to be done and it’s all hands on deck, so this will be a quick one.

The last 13 pages

That’s all there is to do at this point. 13 pages. And we’re well into the inking stage at this point, with less than 5 to reach the finish line. The plan is to wrap inking Tuesday and the grey tones until the end of the week. No rush though, this is the time to stand fast. Inking it with the same care I did all the pages until now. Better to spend an extra day here than to look back 10 years down the line and see a few rushed panels towards the end of a trilogy of books.

And to prove it, take a look at these sneak peeks and you’ll see that no detail has been spared:

A familiar sight from the first volume returns towards the end of Book 3.

This is exactly where I am at the time I’m writing this newsletter: beginning the last scene of the book.

And now that Substack allows videos, I’ll post directly here two Instagram reels where you can see me working exactly on a couple of the panels shown above:

A shame that you can’t hear the Japanese City Pop I added to both, but check my Instagram for the full effect.

And the addition of videos will be an interesting tool for the future, that’s for sure.

Recommendations

I imagine many of you right now know of Cartoonist Kayfabe (see video below). If not, a quick intro: Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg do daily videos pouring over comics and everything about them, with many interviews and in-depth talks about everything and everyone, from the best known creators to the most obscure things. I recommend everything they do and I’ve watched countless videos from them while inking. This week’s work was mostly done while their stuff was in the background.

From all I watched/listened to this week, I was particularly surprised by this video here below. That’s because I read this comic when I was a kid and the artwork completely blew my mind. I never really forgot it and a couple of years ago I rediscovered it and found out it was an Art Adams comic - no wonder why I loved it so much. It was a lot of fun to rediscover it and I was amazed how well I remembered something I read what must have been 30 years ago.

I guess that’s the power of a great story: