JOEL DOS REIS VIEGAS Guides us through the City Sensations of URBANCE

Joël Dos Reis Viegas steps into the Yeti Cave to chat with Interviews Editor, Andrew Irvin, over the graphic novel of Urbance, launched through Kickstarter from Oni & Magnetic Press.

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COMIC BOOK YETI: So congratulations are in order, Joël, as nearly 400 backers put over $40k into the Kickstarter campaign for Urbance, blowing out your goal more than five-fold. What’s your outlook now in the wake of such a well-received campaign, and what is your next step?

JOEL DOS REIS VIEGAS: Thank you Andrew! We’re thrilled with the response the Kickstarter campaign has received, and Magnetic Press, Oni Press, and I can’t wait for readers to discover the graphic novel. I’m excited to see what the public thinks of Neopolis, the universe I’ve created, and whether they’ll get on board with the style and fast-paced rhythm I wanted to bring. The next step will be producing the copies promised to readers and those intended for retailers.

CBY: I saw a pre-order store is being set up to support getting copies to those who didn't catch the campaign. So it’s my understanding you’re from Montreal, Quebec - it’s a very cool city with a phenomenal night life and art scene, which I was grateful to experience a small glimpse of during a visit in 2024. Urbance takes place in the island city of Neopolis – a deeply fictionalized city – but what elements of Montreal have bled into the cityscape and tone of this world, and what have you drawn upon from elsewhere to create an urban aesthetic all its own? 

JDRV: Yes, it's true, Montreal inspired Neopolis on several levels; the idea of splitting Neopolis in two with a wall came to me, among other things, from the invisible divide between East and West Montreal, where French and English sometimes clash. The architecture too, which can be recognized at the beginning of volume one when Lesya discovers Tech City, with its typical spiral staircases, red bricks, and typical North American alleyways. Neopolis is a mix of what surrounds me in everyday life.

CBY: Oh, having that linguistic or cultural divide operating as a basis for the partitioning of Urbance makes even more sense now. It’s also my understanding you’ve been building the world of Urbance for over a decade, funding and producing an animated pilot episode with Tokyo-based Yapiko Animation. It’s my understanding it caught a wide array of attention upon release, so I’m curious; how did this story originate, what influences fed into its creation, and how has it evolved over the development process you’ve carried out over the years? What has the maturation period over the past decade given you in experience and material for future expansion of the Urbance world?

JDRV: The idea for Urbance came to me out of the blue, one day while I was watching a documentary about female street gangs. I imagined a lost world where women would dominate men and where rivalry would be constant. Being a big fan of SF literature, Orwell's 1984 and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 definitely influenced me. Gradually, as I developed my characters, I realized that I was addressing the theme of rivalry and difference. I wanted Lesya and Kenzell to build strong bonds in an anxious environment, where love could barely survive. The comparison to Romeo and Juliet seemed obvious to me. Even though the original idea, theme, and characters already existed in the animated pilot, the graphic novel goes much deeper. I took the time to rewrite everything, to strengthen my characters' motivations, and, yeah, the story has matured a lot.

CBY: With such a well-centered cyberpunk aesthetic, 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 are both clear precursors in present urban dystopias under techno-authoritarian control, and you've built on those foundations in a distinct direction. The urban nature of the story takes on an enormous character of its own. You utilize the city as both a source of oppression, with the structural boundaries creating constraints and guiding the plot, and the crowds of bystanders chiming in as the Greek chorus, providing the main source of expository dialogue. You’ve gone as far as mapping out the neighborhoods and factions that inhabit Neopolis; can you dig into your worldbuilding process; how many people live in this post-pandemic city, what’s the demographic composition, what is the governance structure, and in what critical ways does it depart from the world your audience is familiar with?

JDRV: Neopolis has always been conceived as a character in its own right. I didn’t want just a futuristic backdrop, but a city that constantly influences the choices and fate of the characters, depending on which side of the wall they’re on. My creative process started with the structure of the city: its neighborhoods, centers of power, inequalities, and the interactions between different factions. More than the exact number of inhabitants or precise demographics, I wanted to convey the feeling of a huge metropolis, marked by a pandemic that has profoundly changed society. For context, the registration number attached to every resident’s name indicates the scale of in-vitro births. For example, Kenzell M2379 shows that he is the 2,379th male born in Neopolis, which gives an idea of the population density.

What really sets Neopolis apart from our world isn't just its technology, but the way the crisis has redefined human relationships. People live closer than ever, yet are more isolated, and this tension reinforces Urbance's main theme, rivalry.

CBY: So as a founder of the Montreal-based creative agency, Steambot, and as Art Director of Yellow Brick Games, you are creatively engaged in various other projects that exist beyond your own intellectual property. You mentioned in your recent interview with Anthony over at Soda and Telepaths that you don’t view Urbance as a job, and you talked about the logistics of being able to work on your own IP while paying the bills with others’, but how do you approach your creative process differently depending on your role in executive decision-making around the direction of a story, and what balance do you find works best in apportioning your creative focus and energy (especially when it comes to knowing where an idea will best fit into a broader narrative landscape)? 

JDRV: Well, my full-time job as an art director is very different from being a comic book writer, which is actually a good thing because it lets me keep my creative energy for my story and my desire to draw. I spend a large part of my time writing before starting the storyboard for a new volume, I re-read the previous chapters, and I often refer to my creative bible. I created this bible when I made the animated pilot and it contains the main outlines of my story, the stakes, the motivations of each of my heroes, the connections between the clans, as well as the rules that govern Neopolis. This allows me to keep the story consistent and ensures that my characters say and do things that are credible and logical according to their personalities. When I write, I already know where I'm going, I already have the end of the story, but I don't yet have the paths. I create them as I go.

In general, I have three points of view in my story: the girls' neighborhood, the boys' neighborhood, and Coevo's. My narration often shifts from one to the other, making the story dynamic. If an idea comes to me, it absolutely has to enrich one of these points of view and feed the main theme of my story, either helping to create more division and rivalry (my theme) or to unify (my message). Because after all, the message of Urbance is that there's strength in unity.

CBY: Leaving the means to a definitive end up in the air can certainly make drafting a more adventuresome ride for the writer, being in the driver's seat and letting go of the wheel to see which way things start to drift. Can you also speak a bit about your artistic process, regarding how you’ve presented Urbance in multiple formats? The animated pilot is a neon-soaked sensory overload, and the fashion-forward aesthetic of the characters lends itself toward a full-color presentation. What led to your decision to present the full volumes in black & white? Can you walk us through your illustration process and decision making around the print title?

JDRV: Urbance first came to life in animation through the trailer and the pilot before becoming a comic. When the chance came to make the comic, choosing the manga format seemed obvious to me. On one hand because my hybrid drawing style suited it well, and on the other hand because I find the size ideal for reading anywhere. There's also something addictive about collecting manga series, being a big reader myself. When I rewrote the story, it became darker, more serious than in the pilot episode. When I rewrote the story, it became darker, more serious than in the pilot episode. So I thought, hey, why not do it in black and white, in the pure tradition of manga? Of course, it was a heartbreaking choice since the audience loved the colors from the pilot. Still, I treated myself with the first 16 color pages of each volume! In the end, I think black and white fits perfectly with the tone of my story. Even the more energetic drawing style, I think I managed to create a paper version of what the animation could have been.

CBY: The manga influence aside, the black & white presentation definitely helps connect the story back from its cyberpunk milieu to its noir roots. You referred to Urbance as, at core, a manhunt. It is a noir tale presented in a quintessentially cyberpunk world; techno-corporate totality exerting dominion over an urbanized jurisdiction in a near future with anti-hero characters rebelling against increasingly thin futures under the established dystopian paradigm. What other cyberpunk iterations do you look to for both inspiration and differentiation of the Urbance world, and what other stories would you say provide a narrative counterpoint to cyberpunk - are you keeping an eye on solarpunk titles? Now that you’ve released this epic cyberpunk title, if you were to start fresh, depicting a world where things took a turn for the brighter, where would you start?  

JDRV: With Urbance, I wanted to bring cyberpunk back down to street level. In Blade Runner, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, 1984, and even Black Mirror, technology is important, but it isn't the protagonist—people are. I'm fascinated by the feeling of ordinary people trying to preserve their identity in systems that constantly reduce them to data, consumers, or stats. Of course, I like happy endings, or at least for the moral to bring some hope. I don't really know if I'd make a pure solarpunk story, as I'm more interested in the transition than the destination. But If I had to start thinking about a world looking more like an utopia than a dystopia, I would probably tell the story of a society where human relationships have become completely superficial and technology gradually dehumanizes its inhabitants. It would be a great starting point to tell a human story!

CBY: I would enjoy seeing a dissection of this very relevant trend, to which we're currently seeing a backlash in real-time as people reject the onslaught of AI products entering the market. To close, we always offer guest an opportunity to share a selection of work unrelated to their own projects that has provided inspiration. What other comics, films, music, literature, etc. have caught your attention lately?

JDRV: Well, there are so many good things out there that I prefer to share what I like these days. In terms of TV series, I’m into Pluribus, Severance, Silo, and For all Mankind. These series are really smart, and they elevate narration to another level. Book wise I'm reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, and I'm falling (again) into my Stephen King collection. Comics-wise, I’ve recently backed the Kickstarter campaign of Matteo Scalera’s Fourth Father and Jonathan Djob Nkondo’s Peaceful Remission. Both are insanely talented artists. 

CBY: Joël, it’s been a pleasure discussing Urbance and your career more broadly. If you have any portfolio, publication, or social media links you’d like to share, now is the time and this is the place!

JDRV: Oh thank you Andrew, it has been a real pleasure to share with you! Your readers can follow me via Instagram, facebook, X or any social media, simply by typing my full name or looking for @feerikart.

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