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Some of the comic strips I drew and painted were done in partnership with my brilliant and dearly missed friend Kastello. A brilliant screenwriter, he created stories that I'm still proud to have illustrated. We met in the 80s, we were 15 years old and taking a course together. There's no such thing as coincidence, and I always think that people are where they're meant to be, and that's how we became close, sharing the same passion for art and comics. We liked the same authors and illustrators like Frank Frazetta, Simon Bisley (he was the one who first introduced me to Bisley's art), Moebius, Jack Kirby, and so many other incredible artists. It was also Kastello who introduced me to the films of Woody Allen, Federico Fellini, and Alfred Hitchcock. I knew nothing about them. Soon our friendship blossomed, and at least once a month we met to exchange ideas and talk about the world of comics. Those conversations were very inspiring for me. His father had been a great illustrator, and one day he gave me the honor of seeing the originals up close, all very well preserved in plastic envelopes at his mother's house, Dona Leda. I started insisting that he hang them on the walls, but then I understood that it brought back a great longing for his father.
Kastello was the most creative guy I've ever met. Besides writing very well and having great ideas, he was an excellent non-practicing illustrator; he worked at Rede Globo creating promos for soap operas and so many other brilliant things. He also created plays, and we had a dream of publishing our stories as comics. Then he started developing incredible scripts for some stories, and we began to nurture that dream.

It was a challenge for me to illustrate those wonderful ideas and get my art to reach the level of his scripts. But he always enjoyed my drawings and paintings, and that gave me the confidence to keep making more and more comics. There's one in particular that I still stop and think about how he could have such a modern and brilliant idea; it's the comic "Babies." To this day, I'm fascinated reading those three pages. We also made the comic "Under My Skin" for the US; we were very excited, but being inexperienced, we were ripped off by the publishers. However, we managed to receive the printed magazine, and to our surprise, it had the wrong title and only my name as credit, which left me deeply upset.

We created several comic strips, some of which were posted here. Unfortunately, life separated us. That's just how friendships are. After 25 years of friendship, we drifted apart for a while, and one day I tried to rekindle that friendship. To my dismay, I discovered that Kastello had passed away two months prior. That devastated me emotionally. I was truly heartbroken. I would no longer have my friend and partner in so many ideas and artistic endeavors to talk to... I would no longer have by my side that friend with whom I had so many good conversations about life and the world... To this day, I miss that friendship terribly. I've never again found a friend with that level of creativity and camaraderie.

What remains are the comics we created together. One day I know we'll surely be talking again in some place in the universe, maybe alongside Frazetta, Moebius, Jack Kirby, and so many other idols of both of us.

Eternal memories of my friend Kastello.