Miguel Rafael
b. 1981, Lisbon. Lives and works in Barcelona.
Miguel Rafael makes art as Fantom Engine. He graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Lisbon in 2008. He then spent 18 years in the video game industry as a writer, game designer and creative lead.
Since 2019 he has signed his art as Fantom Engine, an alias that kept it apart from his games career. The name comes from the Motor Fantasma, the ghost engine: what he called the force in his chest that has pushed him to draw since he was young.
Statement
I tell one story out of order. Each piece is one scene, made for a wall instead of a book. In Discovery Complex, technological villains attack the heroines’ neighbourhood, and each attack opens an adventure left unresolved, like the first page of a classic comic. Every new drawing fills a gap, and the world of Fantom Engine gets denser.
Because nothing is published, I can draw the same moment again, the way comics redraw a key scene in flashbacks, each time with a new angle and a different emotional lens.
The work is black and white, mostly ink and graphite on paper, from 21 x 30 cm to 84 x 119 cm (8 x 12 in to 33 x 47 in). The pieces look like original art boards before clean-up for print. I come from black-and-white comics and manga: Mike McMahon, Carlos Ezquerra and Brian Bolland, the early Judge Dredd artists, and mangaka like Naoko Takeuchi and Masamune Shirow.
My main characters are all women who meet strange forces by chance and welcome them with curiosity and courage.