Yes, I have an "assassins sketchbook"
An edition about dreamy projects, hitmen, Toriyama and night vigilantes
HELLO AND WELCOME TO A NEW EDITION OF MY NEWSLETTER!
Here I am, back from holidays, 100% committed to creation! Damn, that sounded awful…
Better if I begin with the spam as soon as possible.
KID MAROON PRE-ORDERS
Now we are during this tricky time when we have to promote our issue 1 solicitations. I think I don't need to remind you how important your help is, sharing and talking about this little project. In this age of giant franchises directed by committees of suits (coming soon replaced by AI bots), creator-owned stories are more necessary than ever.
For me, Kid Maroon is the project I have been waiting for since I began to work for the American market. If Polar was the consequence of all the things I had learnt doing crime books, Kid Maroon is the response to all these hours reading and studying masters like Will Eisner, Johnny Craig, Wally Wood or Harvey Kurtzman.
Chris and I have tried to make a “more comic than ever” comic, with all the virtues and resources this medium has. A nod to the old times but with the hope to continue beyond this first double-size 4-issue collection and create a modern series.
So any help is welcome, you can pre-order it to your favorite store (Diamond code SEP242110) or simply spread the word. Thanks in advance!
(not exactly INK)TOBER 2024
Again, Inktober (or what I used to call Inktober) is coming! Last year I made an ego trip with my Victober, revising some of the characters I had created or co-created during my career. I must confess I was a little tired about this challenge, and thought that a personal celebration of my career could be a good finishing touch.
But October is near, and thinking about how sad the passing of Akira Toriyama was, I suddenly felt like drawing some of his characters, especially from Dragon Ball. So I have decided to do the challenge once again with a tribute to the sensei. And I really want to have fun with it and recover the simplicity of the first editions, without pressure about the characters I will draw. It's not going to be a ranking of popularity or I will make a previous list, I will simply draw the character(s) I want every day and I will not think about it until I grab the pen. Who knows? Maybe Goku will not even appear.
#Toritober is here!
Same rules: One (traditionally) inked drawing every day until the end of the month, not spending more than 30 minutes in a drawing on a 21x29,7 cm (8,3x11,7 inches) Bristol sheet. I will be uploading them in my Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky and Instagram accounts (links at the bottom) and selling them in my big cartel store.
And if you want to see all my scanned drawings of this edition and the editions of previous years you can find them in my blog/site:
https://victorsantoscomics.blogspot.com/search/label/inktober
THINGS I'VE SEEN/WATCHED/READ
I really enjoyed the Batman: Caped crusader TV show. It was easy to predict, you surely know my devotion to Bruce Timm’s 90s Batman TAS and derivations like Batman Beyond or titles like Superman or Justice League. I hear and read some criticism about the animation and the changes but I must say that the animation of these TV shows always had tight budgets. I found the animation impeccable but the strong point of this show (and the 90s shows) were other values: the stories, the voice, the atmosphere, the framing, the voices!
About the changes, I really appreciate this is not a prequel of previous shows. It's a reformulation of the myth of Batman. One of the pleasures of every chapter was precisely being surprised by new approaches or variations of stories and characters I have visited multiple times in multiple incarnations.
One example about how brilliant this show is. In the first episode you see what the Penguin does with traitors: Lock them in a wooden box and throw them into the cold waters of Gotham's coast. When Batman drives his Batsub through those waters we can see the seabed full of dozens of these boxes, like an underwater graveyard. There is a better way to describe Gotham's corruption? What a perfect example of the old fiction rule “Don't tell. Show”.
Lately I have been very into comedy-action manga series. I told you in a previous newsletter I love hitmen stories, and loved the Sakamoto Days manga. I recently added Kill Blue and Kindergarten Wars to my “hitmen readings”. Kill Blue is about a middle-age legendary hitman who is transformed into a 12-year-old boy after being stung by a mysterious wasp, and Kindergarten Wars is about a school for the children of the wealthiest protected by an elite of convicted assassins. In both books violence and action weave romance and comedy together, and I admire how well balanced every factor is.
My action stories have always been pretty serious, and feel like doing something lighter and funny. For years, I have had my own project mixing comedy and hitmen. Basically I filled a sketchbook with every crazy idea about assassins I had and later tried to make it make sense.Let’s see what happens with it. Meanwhile, I continue enjoying these stories as a reader or viewer.
And that’s all! In the next newsletter I will tell you more things about the process of Kid Maroon and some interesting (and crazy) projects I was involved in some time ago.
See you soon!
Victor
Copyright © 2024 Victor Santos. All rights reserved.
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