I could tell you a lot about Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá: the fact that after all this time, I still can’t tell them apart over the phone; the fact that they are very, very proud of this; that they spent a good chunk of our working relationship imagining I looked like an Asian version of fellow Vertigo editor Will Dennis (who’s Irish, which makes the visual even better); or that I think I owe them a copy of Asterios Polyp (Dammit, now I went and reminded them…), but nothing sums them up better than the cover to DAYTRIPPER # 1 and what they went through to get it. See, before those beautiful covers end up on shielding 22 pages of equally stunning art, rough sketches get shot our way, and when the time came, the boys didn't send me a sketch, they sent me a dozen. Some of the highlights: cover-concept-july-01-a cover-studies3-a cover-sketch-feb06-pb cover-concept-july-04a cover-concept-july-05a cover-studies-20-jan They were graphic, beautiful and full of possibilities, and yet – Bá, Fábio and I all agreed that none of them were quite right. None of them by themselves hinted enough about what the book was about. First issue covers are tough like that. You can get away with just being beautiful or mysterious for later issues, but when you’re launching an entire new series, it’s nice to gives readers an idea of what they’re going to be in for with your new #1. And for DAYTRIPPER, that’s tough to wrap up in a sentence. After all, taking place in the boys’ native Brazil, it’s a book about life, as vague as that description is – about the most important moments of your life – or of Brás de Oliva Domingos, the main character of the book, as he wrestles with his existence as an obituary writer who lives in the shadow of his famous father. It’s about life and love and family and is literary, lyrical and beautiful beautiful beautiful. But how do you encapsulate that in a single image? picture-11 daytripper-cover01-test-01 cover-concept-new-1 Closer… and yet, Fábio and Bá wanted some kind of recurring visual theme to all the covers, and if they went with the first sketch, the design conceit might have gotten old by the last one. And the boys felt that the Brás in their book wasn’t as intimidating as the guy on the other two options. No, Brás was friendly and inviting with a life that’s as open to possibility and it is mysterious… cor-study-details Cool, right? Really, really cool, right? I mentioned how my eye was really captivated to those little images montaged in the blue, to which they responded… daytripper-cover-concept-3 And then… We were happy. dayt-cv1 DAYTRIPPER # 1 hits stores today, and every page of it is done with as much, love, energy and imagination as that cover. I think My Chemical Romance frontman and Ba’s co-conspirator on The Umbrella Academy, Gerard Way sums it up best: "From being two kids flying their portfolios halfway across the world to comic conventions, Gabriel Bá and and Fábio Moon are finally realizing their life's work frighteningly young. Beautifully written and utterly gorgeous, DAYTRIPPER completely blew me away. Even more startling is the fact that for them this is truly just the beginning." They’re also frightfully nice guys who’ll make fun of me for all the parts of this that I remembered wrong.