Smoke and Love developed from the project of a greeting card. I had created many such cards in the early 1990s. In one of them there was a match declaring its love to a cigarette that rejected it showing a “No Smoking” sign. Emanuela really liked that and for a long time she had been going on telling me that those characters were really beautiful and deserved to be used again. So INK was the right opportunity to get them out of limbo and to create a comic. I had recently read a story by Bruce Timm in the Batman issue Black & White. The use of fixed frames and standard black and white gave me the idea to increase humour adding some elements of “noir” fiction, like a change of setting from a piano bar to a night club.