On Writing a Comic Book Script and Rediscovering Purpose
And on what it means to connect through art and stories
You are reading Claudia’s monthly newsletter, where she ventures into her journey as an author and artist of comic books and stories.
Hi there! Welcome to my monthly dose of blabber and babble.
As usual, I left more than a month in between newsletters, and there’s a lot to say! In this issue, I talk about writing scripts, rekindling purpose, and a couple of small projects I worked on.
As usual, the newsletter ends with a film recommendation that I hope you’ll like.
The Last Day of Rain: How It’s Going
In the middle of searching for, adapting to a new full-time job and preparing for a newborn (surprise!), I didn’t have a lot of time left to draw in the last few months. However, now that things have calmed down, I finally managed to pick up the script for the final volume of The Last Day of Rain!
I already had a first draft, so I began with that. I made a few more changes to the ending parts after reading Manga in Theory and Practice, by Hirohiko Araki, and I feel I’m approaching something that I’m fairly happy with. Never fully happy, of course, because that doesn’t happen with me or anyone I know.
The initial version made Carol more of an observer who saw events unfold. After the changes, she feels more in control of what happens. Which is how it should be: she’s the protagonist, after all!
Due to parts of the story having to be explained via dialogue, one or another passage might sound a bit like a soap opera, I think, but I hope it will be a fun soap opera.
ALERT: Scroll past the image below to avoid spoilers. 🙃 And if you do read this and don’t know anything about the story, it’s not always this soapy! It is, however, a sci-fi mystery with a love story at its core, so it will have its moments.
Needless to say, pages thirty-eight and nine are probably halfway through the book, so this final chapter is shaping up to have around eighty pages. I refuse to split it, though! I’d rather spend more time on it than having to go through releasing two more chapters. Believe it or not, marketing comics is harder work than making them!
Once this is done and dusted, I’m planning to clean up and re-letter the whole thing and publish it in the form of a single graphic novel. That will take a while, but I think it will be worth it!
The work on this story will be the focus of the newsletter until the end of the year, from script to concept art and to finally developing the book itself, and I’m hoping to share a lot of behind-the-scenes content. So if you’re interested in seeing it evolve, you are very much welcome to press the subscribe button below:
Rediscovering the Purpose of my Art
I haven’t been drawing a lot lately, but not only due to life changes. The biggest reason is, probably, that trying so hard to get my art and comic books noticed has taken a bit of my passion away. It made me forget why I do it in the first place. So I needed to stop. To get a normal job that pays the bills and makes me feel safe, instead of chasing freelancing in a world increasingly populated by AI, where hard work appears to have no value anymore and everybody thinks that prompting will save their lives (it won’t).
And so I had time to breathe. And to remember why I started doing it, whether I want to continue and what motivates me to do so.
I want to create beauty. And connection. Stories, whether in text or image, have helped me cope with many pivotal moments in life. And that’s what I want to do. To create images and stories that give others comfort or catharsis. That helps them deal with emotions, even if they don’t know that it’s what’s happening.
Each artist is different, and many create only for themselves. But for me, it is not an individual activity. I do it for connection, not for reclusion. I don’t do it to relax at the end of a busy day, either. I do it for mental stimulation and because I love to learn, and I love feeling the engines of my foggy brain moving when mixing fresh new knowledge with creativity.
That’s why I want to keep learning, and getting better, and creating more. So that I can become good enough to be able to make others feel.
We have recently redone our office space here at home to create room for the new arrival, and I used the opportunity to install a few cork boards in front of my desk. A big chunk of them is now full of images that I love and want to use as inspiration in the months that are coming. I hope that, instead of a digital board, having these tangible bits of paper that I look at every day will help me stay true to the emotional type of art that I’m looking to achieve.
There’s a mix of artists who favour soft edges and light colours and those who go for moody palettes and sharp corners, and perhaps I’ll need to choose, or maybe I’ll be able to come up with something that sits comfortably in between.
All these people are extremely hard-working with a perfect grasp of fundamentals, and I won’t ever be as good as them, but it’s important to have something to look up to. 🤓
Over the next few months, I am planning to share some quick sketching sessions based on these on my Instagram page, should you be interested:
Comics Disability Project - Cats And Dogs
This month, I had the chance to collaborate with Jess Hannar on a project that sheds light on the struggles of people with disabilities who will lose their benefits due to a recent UK government policy. Unfortunately, has already been approved in Parliament.
She’s working with a few artists by giving us scripts to illustrate, which are then posted on Instagram.
Here’s the result of my one:
This was so engaging to work on, and I’m happy to have contributed, at least a tiny bit, to an important cause. I hope people will continue talking about this, so that at least parts of the policy can be reworked, if not all.
I’m also looking forward to collaborating with Jess again in the future. She’s a truly lovely person and her ideas deserve to be seen.
A Navy Bird
Last year, we heartbreakingly and suddenly lost a beloved member of the WIP Comics community. Navy was a cartoonist and tutor, besides being an excellent human being with multitudes of worlds and stories contained in her mind, waiting for the right moment to come to life. She’s dearly missed by all of us.
So in our yearly anthology, we are paying her tribute by drawing little navy birds, her online nickname, which will populate a section of the book. I tried to capture the essence of her work and personality in mine, if such a thing is even possible:
In case you’re interested in having a look at the anthology itself and getting your hands on the work of over sixty emerging artists, you can find it on Kickstarter until the end of the month.
Film recommendation: She Taught Love
I loved this film. It starts as a seemingly normal, perhaps dull, romance, but you soon realise that one of the main characters is a covert comic book nerd who created a whole fantasy series together with her dad.
The way the film reveals layers about the characters, starting with a sophisticated world and ending with a nerdy, who-cares vibe. How the relationship between the protagonists isn’t shallow, and feels like actual love and trust.
It’s another one with not-so-good reviews on IMDB, but once you look under the surface, they are mostly excellent. However, the few people who didn’t connect to the film really didn’t connect to it and brought the rating down. These days, it feels like people are so numbed by endless streams of entertainment that they expect every single thing they watch to make them jump out of their seats.
Either way, it was an entertaining watch! You can find it on Disney Plus, Hulu and possibly other streaming services.
Next Markets and Conventions
Here’s where you can find me until the end of the year:
30 of August - Urban Makers (Old Spitalfields Market, London)
27th-28th of September 2025 - The Lakes International Comic Art Festival (Bowness-on-Windermere)
15th-16th November 2025 - Thought Bubble Comic Convention (Harrogate)
And in case you can’t make it to any of those, my online shop is always open (it warms my heart whenever someone picks up something from there, especially because it’s rare):
And that’s all for today, folks!
Hope to see you soon!
- Claudia
Thank you for reading, and for your continued support! The four chapters of The Last Day of Rain are available in my online store at shop.claudiamatosa.com, as well as a few other books and art prints.
You’re also very welcome to subscribe to this blog if you like reading my ramblings (for some reason)! I don’t e-mail every post, but once in a while I send a summary of what I’ve been up to, so you can catch up:
For bits and pieces, you can also find me on the following socials: