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Immaterial levels
Hello! I hope you are doing very good. This edition of the newsletter brings some bits on the new comic I’m working on, the release of the Lydia Ray digital comic book, and a revised story from the Secret Knots archives.
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Comic: in progress
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After some hesitation, I went back for another round of tuning the style and colors for this one. The script got some revision too. Sometimes the starting line is the hardest part. I made a bit of a style reset, since I realized how important was the environment for this particular story. In the lookout for specific backgrounds for the sequence (that happens in some kind of VR memorial space) I decided to give it a more dedicated look, and resorted to some modernist building complexes that still exist in my city, as reference. I had friends who lived in these blocks, and, as kids, we made use of all the weird features of the constructions, the connecting walkways and passages, the concrete boxes for huge gas cylinders, and the dense patches of vegetation growing between the geometric shapes. It was the terrain of the games we came up with, and the things we imagined.
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The space in the comic is not as lively as my memories, (also, because as it will be revealed later in the text, it’s a hacked and decaying digital environment) but I wanted it to suggest some of the feeling of these weird blocks. This is what I take from that classic advice “write what you know”. Not necessarily telling stories about fields in one’s own experience, but trying to bring some air, or headspace that belongs to personal memories, even, as in this case, for some passing details in the establishing shots of a short story.
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Lydia Ray magazine: is out now!
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And it’s been doing good in the Drivethru market. As I’m writing this, it’s one of the top seller comics. This is a digital publication that includes the stories previously posted to my website or shared on Tumblr, collected in a reformatted comic book version, plus notes and sketches.
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Archive comics.
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This comic was one of the first I did when I switched back to analogue drawing and inking for a while. I think that's why I wasn't entirely happy with the art: some of the drawings are kind of crude, and the splashy coloring, I think it works well on some panels, and not so much in others.
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But I like the story, now that I could read it with enough distance. And I kind of miss making stories so short! 12 panels, and done. All the rest is left to the unwritten space, like the immaterial higher levels of the tower.
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In the rest of my time, besides work, I’ve begun to run a game of Wraith the Oblivion, a moody rpg where the characters are newly dead, in a crepuscular land that barely touches our own, living world. It can go in many different directions, thematically, just as in the very game’s geography, so I’m interested in seeing where the players take the adventure to.
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I’ve also been watching the new season of Babylon Berlin, which looks as great and lush as usual. It’s fascinating to watch how the story manages to move forward cleanly among a panoply of themes each season, that include this time: underground boxing, the underworld of street urchins, criminal gangs, Bolsheviks, Nazis, and a lost diamond. The music keeps being perfect and relevant. I love when a show proposes and defines its own world, and I think in this case the knot is tied with the music. Very immersive.
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Thanks a lot for reading this edition of the newsletter. I’ll see you soon with new stories and art.
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