Where we are now...

...and where we're about to go.

Hello from Castrum Lusitania, my fortress on northern Portugal. Welcome to 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.

Since this is the second edition, I felt it would be best to put out an analysis of the work I’m currently doing. Basically, where I am right now and where we’re about to go. That will provide a landscape for the immediate future and clarify what things you can expect.

Where we are

From 2020 onwards, I’ve been working pretty much exclusively in creator owned books: Phenomena (with Brian Bendis) and A Righteous Thirst For Vengeance (with Rick Remender). I presented both books in some detail on the previous newsletter, so feel free to go back and give it a read if you missed it.

I’ve worked on Phenomena Book 1 for slightly less than a year, having begun Righteous Thirst in the end of 2020. After some preliminary work (talks between me and Rick, designs, etc), Rick sent me the first script for it. The day after, my twin daughters were born (November 29). So after a chaotic beginning, I caught some speed and worked relentlessly for roughly a year and an half, completing the crime saga and returning to Phenomena this Summer.

This means that since July I’ve been working on Phenomena Book 2. Me and Brian have a trilogy planned and due to the scheduling we agreed with our publisher Abrams Books, we’ve decided to work on books 2 and 3 back to back. The decision came from my end, because otherwise I’d have only a few months between each book, insufficient to do any substantial work. I’m now looking to wrap Phenomena (at least for the time being) towards the later part of next year.

Current Status

At the moment, the bulk of my work consists on drawing Phenomena pages. That’s what I do most of the time. After discussing with Brian roughly what was going to happen on book 2, I did some designs for it and he has been sending me large chunks of script (between 20-30 pages). Currently we have the first batch completed (26 pages) and I’m right now pencilling the second batch, which will be ready to ink in the end of the week (up to page 54).

Here’s the breakdown of my usual process: When I receive it I draw layouts for every page and quickly workout the storytelling (including the grey tones) for the entire thing and show him. I’ll use a couple of pages from Book 1 as an example (we’ll go into Book 2 later on):

My layouts for pages 2 and 3 of Phenomena Book 1. I work out storytelling and all of its aspects at this stage: anatomy, perspective, camera angle, composition, tones, balloon placement, facial expressions, etc.

After that, I will pencil the entire batch of pages, pencilling around 10 or more per week. My pencils are pretty loose in some areas, slightly more detailed in others, meaning that I leave a lot of decisions, details and rendering for the inking stage. The most important part on this stage is to make sure the perspective and anatomy are tight and secure.

I did not scan the pencils for Book 1 (a mistake I regret), so I’m adding a photo of a panel from Book 2 that is a good example of what things look like:

As you can see, my pencils can be a bit messy. That’s because they’re meant to be inked by me as well, otherwise they would have to be much tighter.

I’ve been scanning all pencils for book 2, so expect a lot of those in the future. With that done, I begin inking. I ink at roughly the same pace (10 per week) but more detailed pages can take some time. Here’s what the inks look like after scanning and level adjusting:

Finally, I’ll open these pages on Clip Studio on my iPad Pro and fill all those grey tones you see. They’re mostly flat tones, with some gradients reserved for skies and other subtle effects.

This is what my desk looks like right now, as I pencil a big spread, establishing yet another fantastical location of this crazy world.

What else is going on

Despite Phenomena occupying most of my work time, it’s far from the only thing I’m working on. I’m usually working on a number of other things, but they rotate depending on their priority. I allocate a small chunk of time each day for whatever needs to get done. Example: today, it’s this newsletter. And last month I took a week off from this book to draw and color 3 big pieces of conceptual art for a movie (NDAs won’t allow me to show it to you, unfortunately, but it for a rather fascinating project).

But I also have two covers to get done in the next following weeks, a commission to pencil and ink, a script for a thing (not comics), among other stuff.

Where we’re about to go

For the immediate future, I’ll be inking and laying tones on this batch of Phenomena pages until the end of the year. It will be a hard to wrap it before then, but that is the goal. So you can expect sneak peeks and exclusive previews.

The same is true for the other stuff I’m working on, as long as I can show it to you.

I’ve also been on talks about what I’ll do after Phenomena is wrapped up. It’s still far away, but some interesting things are lining up and you’ll be on the front line to know when the time comes.

I’ll also show you many galleries, step-by-steps and overviews from my past works, including Righteous Thirst, which had a very interesting process.

As always, feel free to suggest things and send any questions you might have. Thank you all for reading and subscribing, I’ll see you next week.

André