I’ve been working on this story in different ways since 2017, writing and drawing parts of it and occasionally publishing them before realizing that the story is deeper and larger and more challenging than it originally seemed. Here is a brief chronology to set the record straight.

2017: A first attempt

This was my initial stab at this story, written and drawn in the CCS Graphic Memoir workshop with Melanie Gillman in the summer of 2017. I only had a week to script, draw, and polish, and 5 pages was the longest comic I had ever done at that time. This was published in my very first minicomic, Pine Pitch Perfume.

2019: Just Start With The Exciting Part

In another CCS Summer Workshop (Graphic Novel Workshop with Paul Karasik), I dove in to a longer story segment that took place after the 5-pager above. With a few longer comics under my belt at this point, I scripted and drew 28 pages (completed AFTER the workshop, of course) in pencil on bristol board. I self-published this section under the title Grandes Expectativas: Shifting Sands in October 2019.

2020: MORE COMPLEX THAN ANTICIPATED

Amid the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, I signed up for the 6 month Graphic Novel Intensive run online by the Sequential Artists Workshop, and got to work on what was becoming a much larger and more involved project than I had originally planned for. In this class I created an 8 page summary comic of the whole story that I still use as a kind of road map to the project. This was my first comic created digitally on the iPad in Procreate—very helpful for the complex travel and limited workspace I faced during the beginning of the pandemic!

2021: In Search of Brazil

In the next cohort of the SAW Graphic Novel Intensive, I drew another story section, this one taking place earlier on in the chronology. After adding color and tinkering with the lettering and drawing style, I self-published this section in 2023 under the title How Brazil Can Be.

2022: BACK TO THE BEGINNING

I used an online comics challenge as motivation to draw the first 30 pages of this story. Finally I had something that started at the beginning!

2023: FILLING IN THE BLANKS

I’ve been working on brainstorming and scripting different story sections, with the aim of creating a pitch packet for agents. If you want to read more about my process on this project, join me on Patreon where I write detailed posts and share all my pages in progress, like these: