iFanboy Upstarts: Pietro Antognioni

Brazil is a hotbed of comics energy, going back from early 19th century caricatures and cartoons in newspapers all the way to numerous comic anthology magazines thriving in the South American country. Many of today’s top comic artists in American comics hail from Brazil, such Mike Deodato Jr., Rafael Albuquerque, Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba. And now, one more is looking to join their ranks.

Sao Paulo’s Pietro Antognioni makes a living for himself as an illustrator for the Brazilian advertising agency DM9, doing everything from textbooks and magazine illustrations all the way to doing storyboards for various commercials and video work. The artist is also an ordained minister who takes up the cloth from time to time, as well as teaching courses in drawing and painting at the Academy of Arts Quanta. Between all that, Antognioni wants to be a comic book artist.

Antognioni has done work for several Brazilian comic magazines such as Brutal and has been working on his own graphic novel in his spare time, but he’s completely unknown outside his own country; the closest thing being some sample pages he did for Marvel that failed to get any traction in New York. Despite all that, he has a prodigious output of artwork online, split between his DeviantArt page, an art blog devoted to dinosaur drawings, and a sketch blog. His artwork is thrilling in that it has a stylistic panache but also based on strong fundamentals of anatomy and storytelling. If he’s serious about comics, I could easily see him breaking in through a creator-owned series at Image partnered with a name American writer or getting a shot on the right Marvel or DC book easily. In many ways he reminds me of a young Nate Bellegarde who posted his work online alot before becoming popular with Brit and Nowhere Men; full of talent and frothing at the proverbial mouth to get it out.

Look at samples of his work below, and let me know where you think he should ply his trade.