sorry folks: u forgot tha say 'please'
voltaremos quando vos for mais inconveniente

há aqui uma moral

Seguimos de arte e $$$, tech e desconstrução da BD: enter digital.

Case study: Uno Moralez. Saímos desta leitura com um renovado sentido de entusiasmo pelos comics online: não o considerem o supra-sumo de um novo formato mas uma sugestão de possibilidades por vir: o início de qualquer coisa nova que por várias vezes rondou a noite mas nunca lhe apanhamos mais do que vislumbre. Moralez dá-nos uma boa pista para seguir.

Porque funciona: abraça o(s) meio(s), bd e web combinadas de forma natural como um novo estágio evolutivo, não um gimmick gratuito. A bd não é assaltada com artifícios que lhe são estranhos nem beneficiada por eles, simplesmente combinam-se e fazem parte um do outro, indistintos - falamos de formatos, funcionalidades, acessibilidade, $$$.

E sobretudo, sempre, autenticidade:

Whether we're talking about his standalone images, his animated gifs, or his keyframe-style comics, they give off the sense that what's happening makes sense to the individuals involved, which is the most fascinating and harrowing thing about Moralez's work. The distance from here to there seems insurmountable, but he bridges it time and time again, in a lo-fi digital style that makes it seem like these images are woven from the fabric of the Internet itself.
in "Uno Moralez!" 16 ago 2012

Aquelas intenções insondáveis por detrás :)

If you’ve been looking for the first significant comics release of 2018, it’s here - and you can read it for free right now on whatever you’re reading this article on. It’s tough to figure out what’s driving Moralez from a career perspective; there’s very obviously a ton of work in this comic, and he dumped it online for free in the middle of winter.
in "Blue Teeth" 14 fev 2018

Online, grátis, e genial -quem o diz são senhores muito mais dados a essas adjectivações do que nós- e com um toque de... evil?

This is ambitious and hugely original work by a major talent who seems perfectly content to be to the comics world like something in one of his gifs - a malevolent, twinkling light very far away in a black and unknowable sky, approaching.
in "Blue Teeth" 14 fev 2018

Conseguimos imaginar. Outros tiveram que ser convencidos.

I still have a hard time believing it actually exists

Moralez is a Russian enigma whose LiveJournal is written in Cyrllic, whose work is both drawn and published in digital pixels, whose output comes in the form of bizarre and ferociously NSFW image/gif galleries as often as comics or illustrations. You could easily have convinced me he was an elaborate hoax.
in "Uno Moralez!" 16 ago 2012


I

Internet

Artistically, Uno Moralez is a citizen of the internet.

Moralez's most popular single images and gifs would obviously be impossible without the internet, and yet feel like they exist in a space that's deeper than a url. Like they were immaculately generated by internet culture itself, rather than the hand and mind of one singular and determined artist.
in "Blue Teeth" 14 fev 2018

That really good tumblr page - that's where Moralez really earned his stripes. Even on a platform that nobody uses anymore. That "internet-ness" of Moralez's work, its immediacy and rebloggability, is what's most readily noticeable about it.
in "Blue Teeth" 14 fev 2018


II

Comics

It's in his comics work, his strings of silent, sequenced imagery, that the true depth of his talent comes into sharper focus. It's here, and really only here, that his full prowess as an artist can be seen. Blue Teeth is a horror story, but it's also a period piece, and a fable, and a wordless formal exercise, and a very much digital-only webcomic.
in "Blue Teeth" 14 fev 2018

It blends imagery from different cultures into something new.
in "Uno Moralez!" 16 ago 2012

It seems pulled directly from a definite historical moment - some time in some country's pop culture.
in "Blue Teeth" 14 fev 2018


III

Pixel-comics

[TCJ] Why do you include animated gifs in your comics?
[UM] Gif animation is fun, it is concise and expressive. How can it be ignored?
in "Uno Moralez!" 16 ago 2012

The pixel art packaging is the first thing anyone will notice about Moralez’s imagery, but his chops are absolutely hellacious. Complex but readable compositions with perfect balances of black, white, and gray space. What Blue Teeth attests to even more than Moralez’s image making expertise is his power as a comics maker. In a way, this is work as formally simple as it gets: a screen that shows one single image at a time, each isolated and complete in itself, yet linked by subject to the others. What’s so impressive is how immersive Moralez makes his work without any page-layout tricks or advanced sequencing or even words, for crying out loud! He gives his trust to the effectiveness of comics at its most basic level, comics as a simple accretion of image after image. Anybody can format a comic the way Moralez does here; that’s not the point. It takes someone who really understands the form, who gets that it’s about the thoughts that flicker in the reader’s head between the images as much what’s as inside of them, to make it work this well.
in "Blue Teeth" 14 fev 2018

Of course, he’s also ladling on a ton of secret sauce. This is an internet comic, not a printed volume, after all, and if he can make the pictures move, why in the world wouldn’t he? Each gif in Blue Teeth, from the full on multi-shot animated sequence that opens the book to the barrage of twinkling demonic icons that closes it, is calibrated for maximum impact. There’s no awkward figure animation here, no jerky lo-fi stop-motion, just an expert eye selecting exactly which aspects of a picture would work better if they had a little more life to them. As much control is put into these gifs’ placement as their creation; the vast majority of the pictures here work great as still single images. It’s only the big moments, the utterly bugged out ones, that get to reach out of the screen and grab you. This, perhaps, is the internet equivalent of proper splash page selection, and it really puts this book over the top.
in "Blue Teeth" 14 fev 2018


IV

Papel/ Digital

[TCJ] Since you're drawing digitally and publishing primarily through the digital medium of the web, I find your work more frightening than I would if it were in print. It feels like the horrors you depict in your illustrations and comics are a part of the web itself - like they've infected the page on which they are hosted. Do you feel publishing on the web gives your work any advantages it would not have in print?
[UM] I publish my work on the web because it looks like it was planned and created there - in its original form, in other words. Furthermore, it's available for maximum number of people. I'd chosen pixel art almost immediately, probably because I consider it as the most suitable technique for my stories.
in "Uno Moralez!" 16 ago 2012


Repetimos: um renovado sentido de entusiasmo pelos comics online. E não somos os únicos. Porque é mais do que apenas BD.

At this point the chestnut that the internet would do away with the media-gatekeeper system of the 20th century and replace it with something more democratic seems as baldfaced a lie as anything else about "democracy" that gets repeated ad nauseam, but you know what? Comics, anyway, has been an outlier from Culture for its whole existence, so it makes sense that it would find its opportunities to extract the mote of truth from even that harmful cliche.
in "Blue Teeth" 14 fev 2018

Mesmo se por vezes seja necessário vê-lo com outros olhos para o descobrir.


Uno Moralez, 2014: voltaremos a este ano.

I see the Web as an electronic prosthesis which replaces the mental link between people on the planet. But the thought of the Internet having an autonomous mind warms my imagination.
in "Uno Moralez!" 16 ago 2012

mais moral