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Kermia, the Ceramic Forest Codex R by Roque Romeroweb / tumblr / flickr / behance

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An old animated self portrait (animatic and finished version) by Roque Romero

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An external phone call arrives at Emma’s château from an obscure Galician asylum known as Chez Meros. The living device is a little tired but, after sipping some water, delivers its message.

Emma- Yup?

Patient R.- Hi! Emma, it’s Roque. Do you remember that time I destroyed Ares City, from your comic APB, using a mutated version of your characters infected with martian spider DNA?

Emma- I do. Those mutants built a beautiful love story from there…

Patient R.- Well, sorry… I decided - ten years later - that I owe you one, and also wanted to make a new architectural effort after destroying thousands of cities in almost every comic I made until now…

Emma- That’s so sweet! Aw…

Patient R.- I couldn’t give you back that totalitarian-Mars-colony-thing so this new one is more like an amusement park with giant robots, deadly traps and people adrift everywhere.

Emma- Well, that definitely sounds better than that horrible corporate shit I was creating back then.

Patient R.- Don’t know… I’ve been looking those old and worn copies of Miller and Darrow’s HARD BOILED…

Emma- Were you doing all that while visiting your parent’s house in the mountains last week? I see… Does that ostrich farm near by still exists?

Patient R.- No, no more ostrich courtship neck dance, but they had some new goats, a horse, two ponies and some sheep. The other neighbor was slaughtering a pig last Saturday… That’s very nasty…

Emma- We have to plan something to free them all.

Patient R.- Yeah, Mirror rebellion will start on a small Galician town…

Emma- So, about that giant robot city with traps…

Patient R- It’s in line with some recent work I did, the WEIRD CITY CODA experiment - in which I did a fraction of a city each day without a previous idea for a couple or weeks - and that t-shirt design, THE TERROR, that went nowhere… But now I have a lot of lego-like pieces for constructing anything…

Emma- DUDE! I love that stuff more than I can say!! I lived there for quite a while, having it as my wallpaper, wandering like a stray dog for months to discover every corner.

For a moment I thought you definitely lost your mind after doing that one, but it was only natural. You’ve  been always obsessed with manga depicting demolitions and industrial music… It was predictable…

Patient R.- Yeah, but it wasn’t that good to build from, too much ruins and destruction and nothing really constructive… Do you remember when I had that project called STRATEGIES AGAINST ARCHITECTURE (named after Einsturzende Neubauten’s collected works)? It was about cities and buildings turning self aware and trying to kill all lifeforms they contained, with people trying to survive in a breathing and ever-changing concrete and steel labyrinth.

Emma- Jeez, that Neubauten collection drove us all crazy. I remember bringing it for an exercise during college, while studying architecture, but well, they always preferred building things to destroying others there…

But yeah, I really like that project you did back then. Somehow, it had a lot to do with LS, the last story you’ve been preparing, but changing architecture for crazy plants in space. Have you ever thought about it?

Patient R.- Well, Strategies was more like a punk approach to Schuiten & Peeters’ THE OBSCURE CITIES and LS is more like Douglas Trumbull’s SILENT RUNNING…

Emma- So, you changed sick architecture for sick nature, to be back to architecture again… I remember reading an interview between Koji Morimoto and Katsuhiro Otomo once, in which Morimoto, depicting himself as an obsessive urbanite, said something like he couldn’t even draw a tree..

Patient R.- Trees are really difficult. I really tried to go outside, to the forest, and draw branches and stuff but I always end up going for the Garden of Earthly Delights thing. I love alien like botany explanations, imaginary environments with its impossible lifeforms and made up languages, or even images of real plants and animals in strange representations like Ernst Haeckel works.

But yes, I think I am an urbanite, but for small cities. Big cities are kind of nightmarish to me… And yes, when I try to imagine my city images in motion I suspect  that they move and live more like plants, fungi and living things: buildings in bloom and backstreets slowly rotting, making room for new structures. There are ‘building-people’ too, and traffic is like a blood transfusion…

Emma- Sounds pretty J. G. Ballard…

Patient R.- Yeah, I discovered him in my teens reading those books about residents of futuristic buildings going bananas, turning their flats into caves, stories about  homes getting smaller everyday without any logic explanation, senior citizens shut in concentration camps disguised as coastal developments, or even families communicating only via closed circuit equipment…

Emma- I always liked his ideas but could never dig his writing that much. I adore what he did to your brain, though…

Patient R.- I’m always toying with ideas like those but got a little tired. Right now I prefer creating new lifeforms and giving them specially adapted worlds.

Emma- You’re frightening me…

Patient R.- I thought about creating a city for Island readers, it is alive and needs some kind of rest, so the eyes and minds of the readers are its favorite holiday destinations.

I would love to do something à la Yuichi Yokoyama: creating an environment - or a completely new world - and guiding the reader through it. Traveling guides to places never seen before in the shape of comic books. Brandon Graham’s work was such a discovery too, specially the new MULTIPLE WARHEADS story arc.

(Emma holds Roque’s hands with sparkling-shojo eyes.)

Emma- Those ideas are so touching! Thank you!!!

(Somewhere, not so far away, a loud sound occurs while the skyline of Coruña starts to move, opening sails to each one of Island’s readers. Emma sits on the floor, drawing and writing for a future project. Meanwhile, Patient R. looks at the city window by window, trying to mentally suit each flat to new homecoming creatures…) —— + Emma Ríos is co-editing Island, drawing Pretty Deadly and writing Mirror. All courtesy of Image Comics. ( facebook : twiiter ) + Roque is the author of  ‘Polaqia’s Sketchbook #2’ ( Polaqia Ed.) and lots of xeroxed self published stuff. He tries to live drawing. (web : tumblr : instragram)

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Experiment in Terror 006 (or 005 bis) by Roque Romeroweb / tumblr / flickr / behance

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For your consideration https://www.threadless.com/designs/monster-is-people?c=4082002

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INKTOBER 2015 (1/3) by Roque Romeroweb / tumblr / flickr / behance

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Monster is People on Threadless If you like it, vote for it or pre-order... <3 Thanks! by Roque Romeroweb / tumblr / flickr / behance

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A direct message from a Galician asylum: I found an Island recently, in a dream, a daydreaming, or belonging to YOUR own world, but it promised me a lot of things and I’m starting to draw in its direction. I know I’ll have to go through that nightmarish city, but sometimes we have to face our fears… Will you come with me? Patient R.

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TumblrSpots (animated version) by Roque Romeroweb / tumblr / flickr / behance

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A comic from our latest fanzine, AND STUFF #2. It was originally serialized (as part of AND STUFF:SEASON 1) in my Instagram: https://instagram.com/explore/tags/andstuffs01/ Texts by MJ Images by Roque Romeroweb / tumblr / flickr / behance

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Some samples from a monstrous sketchbook by Roque Romeroweb / tumblr / flickr / behance

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TumblrSpots (animated version) by Roque Romeroweb / tumblr / flickr / behance

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METAMONSTER from my character sketchbook Stabilos and Pentel by Roque Romeroweb / tumblr / flickr / behance

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Experiment in Terror 002 color test 

by Roque Romero

web / tumblr / flickr / behance

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Kaeghoro working on our pieces together EXCELSUS!!! kaeghoro:

/ kaeghoro & roque / collab work no. 05/06. my 2nd finished artwork from my drawing-collab-experiment series with roque romero Roque’s pieces with my input are amazing — check it out work in progress on instagram – roque | kaeghoro

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032: Roque Romero

also here and here