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I used to be a prolific artist. I’d spent nights and nights happily pencilling and inking my ad-hoc comic book sci-fi super-hero stories. Unfortunately, my life took me down a path that has kicked my love for drawing into the background. Not that I should complain at all, since I’ve very luckily found work in this field (for which I’m ever grateful for my friend Henrique having recommended me and Paula for giving me a chance). 
But I admit that my dream was to one day work for Marvel drawing super-hero comics. Back in the early 90′s, the only Marvel comics I had access to were Brazilian translations that published the stories five years after they had been originally released in America. Gradually I became ever more disenchanted with American super-hero comics, with their endless character resurrections, crossovers that made you buy all the comics in the crossover or not buy them and then not get the story, the stupidly-clad main-characters, and just the whole concept. In the Marvel Universe, every super-hero group has a science-fiction means of transport, doesn’t have to work for a living, and is morally incorruptible. The blokes all have Schwarzenegger muscles and the women all have big tits and randomly strike Playboy poses. After coming to my senses, I began to get interested in European publications, especially French ones. My favourite is, without shadow of a doubt, Moebius, who’s been my main influence since my mid-teens.
His Garage Hermetique (or Airtight Garage, as it was translated), an insane, beautifully-drawn, unfathomable, non sequitur masterpiece inspired me to do something along the same lines. In 1997, during my first year at university, I rapidly drew a 32-page story in biro, The DSV Machine. Just as Moebius did with The Airtight Garage, I simply drwe whatever I felt like drawing, and just made it up as I went along, and though the drawings were crap, I liked the end result enough to sit down and redo the whole thing with more careful drawings, while expanding it. The premise is similar, with my imagining set-pieces (a particular thing I feel like drawing), and then bunging it into the story.
My biggest enemy is my obsession with quantity. I’ve never finished a long comic in my life, because I strive to make it too long, then the will to continue wanes as I find the holes in the plot and the how bad the dialogue is. My record is just over 150 pages, without an ending in sight, though most of my tries went to around 20 pages before petering out. The DSV Machine is now onto its 46th inked sheet, though if I know myself well enough, I should think about drawing the ending before I lose interest.
The story is insane and incomprehensible, while the dialogue is written to look like gobbledegook. I would very much like to colour and publish it, though honestly and seriously I doubt anyone would want to read it, apart from my secondary school friends whose likeness I used for the main characters. I’ve already published tidbits of it on my old defunct blog, and I may do the same here. Who knows? I don’t care as long as I can finish the thing.
