EPIC-SCALE STORYTELLING

Matías was named Artist of the Year in 2019 by Entertainment Weekly for his work on Coda. He walks us through a particularly special page

I like this particular splash page – the final page of issue 2 of Coda – because it’s a good synthesis of what made my style really work in this story: epic scale, craziness, imagination and a bit of silliness. This whole thing – a mutant giant pulling an entire town rolling on colossal and countless wheels, with airships and tanks all around and numerous other machineries – I got to illustrate by using the same method I did in all of Coda: just making it up directly on the page as I went. 90 per cent of what you see on the book wasn’t predesigned somewhere else and most of that was just improvised during inking. This process was a bit worrying for my team at first, they had to trust me. Luckily everything went great.

IMPROVISED INKING Matías loves this page from Coda issue 2, because most of it was improvised and drawn directly onto the page.