A couple of years ago, I got an email from Marcio Takara – the regular series artist on Poison Ivy – that was not about work. In the kind of poetic accident that makes life feel scripted, it turned out he was a lifelong Botafogo fan, and had watched both Nico Lodeiro and João Paulo play for his club over the years. It seemed apt, as we were working on a series set partially in Seattle, that I was now the one showing up at the stadium to watch Nico and JP, like the passing of some symbolic baton.
So when the Sounders and Botafogo were drawn in the same group for the Club World Cup, it felt like the continuation of a subplot in a novel — what were the odds that these two clubs, both beloved in their own regions but hardly household names internationally, would end up facing off against each other in a high-stakes tournament? It was almost too wild to be a coincidence. So it seemed like a good time to trade shirts.
The comic book industry is a moveable feast, traveling from convention to convention over the course of the year to sign books and tease your colleagues on panels about superhero trivia. You tend to see the same faces over and over, flourishing in good years, haggard in years when the industry takes a hit, reliving the same drama of boom and bust that working artists have struggled through since at least the Renaissance. Many of the most well-known and well-attended conventions are held in the United States. In ordinary times, Marcio and I would have held on to the shirts and exchanged them at Emerald City Comic Con, held here in Seattle every spring, or at San Diego in the summer, or New York in the fall.
