1. What initially drew you to comics?
I was not very social when I was a kid, so I used to draw a lot from tv shows and the very scarce southamerican translated comics from DC and some European comics like TinTin And Valerian that we got when I was a kid. It was for me at my young age a way to make those animations I enjoyed more accessible to draw and to tell stories of my own. The European comics, although some for more artistically mature audiences, were epic and very eye-catching and pushed me to observe better. It wasn't until later in my teen years when I started collecting as Manga started entering my country Colombia, and more comics from The US started arriving as well. Having new stories and characters to read was very exciting for a young fan of action stories. There was also a boom of adventure and sci-fi movies in the eighties, both from the US and Japan, that arrived in Colombia and I was drawn to all of that. I was watching beta and VHS tapes, and drawing in my free time with my brother.
The dynamism of the art is basically what made me want to practice more my drawing skills, first with just figures and then moving to paneling pages for short stories. Wanting to get my head into another adventure was a magnet for comics.
2. What do comics allow you to do as a creator?
Comics are a funny thing, just like matter, they have many states. Fluid in one moment, solid in another, and you can use that to tell a story is what I have learned. You can tell the same story in a lot of panels, or just a few, if you choose your shots correctly. They make you play with the setting to show a feeling or a sensation depending on what you show in the moment. They allow for understanding of a moment, to me.
Not only do they help me pace a story, they permit me to be more artistically expressive with a restricted budget of time and resources. You can create anything you can draw in a panel, any creature or location, all it asks is that it helps tell the story well.
They require time to grow, as every craft does, but once you get it going, and you know how to be more efficient at doing it, they will give more space for experiment, take on larger projects and create larger worlds.
3. Please tell us about your wide range of books on comics creation (as well as any other projects you'd like to share about). I started my career in comics on locally distributed publications from Small imprints here in Bogota, Colombia, back when there was no internet, and most of the distribution was during large book fairs where people would get their local comics. Things started to enter the more business side when I started doing short comics for advertisement agencies, and even some for governmental agencies, pretty straightforward things, like formatted storyboarding (which is another skill you get while learning how to make comics).
While working on those, I started making short stories so one day they could be collected into an anthology, like a sampler of potential larger projects. One of those, "Orcland", a short fantasy story, was published in Heavy Metal Magazine, thanks to Kevin Eastman, the editor at the time. That would be my first US-published work, back in 2013.
Although our studio is mainly focused on illustration for videogames and books, and our history with book production has been closer to children's books in the last 10 years, we have been able to produce complete books for other publishers, more recently Capstone publishing, with their horror books for young readers under the "Scary Graphics" and "Library of Doom", with seven stories of my favorite genre in comics nowadays.
We have also been collaborating with indie comic creators, like the folks at Source Point press and their project "Jasper's Starlight Tavern", recently published through crowdfunding.
4. Where can we find more information about your work?
You check our studio's work, with a couple of short comics to read online included, here https://www.behance.net/LiberumDonum
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