7 with time, everything has come full cycle and returned to the beginning but this has not, for example, prevented the issue in which he dies selling some 3 million copies and appearing on the cover of all the world’s newspapers. But it is a matter of celebration that during this period Superman had some of the most successful stories in his entire history, such as Superman for All Seasons (1998), by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, All Star Superman (2006), by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, Superman: Red Son (2003), by Mark Millar, Dave Johnson and Kilian Plunkett, and even Peace on Earth (1999), in which Alex Ross questions why the hero, despite all his powers, cannot solve world hunger. Meanwhile, his success on the big and small screen remains far greater than expected (even the initially unpromising Smallville, about the hero’s early years, ran for 10 seasons), but the increasing difficulty of attracting new readers inspired DC Comics to yet again wipe the slate clean for all of its titles in 2011 and start over. It is still too early to say what the outcome of this will be, besides a new armoured costume without pants on the outside, though the talent of the writer Grant Morrison is starting to bear interesting fruit. Whatever the case, in Superman’s 75th-anniversary year, a new blockbuster was released which brought his adventures back to the big screen and he continues to be the yardstick by which all other superheroes are measured. And he has an impressive capacity for renewal, in which everything changes while everything stays the same.
And in Portugal…? As in most cases involving American comic-book superheroes, the Superman stories were published in fits and starts in Portugal, though the local market was almost always well supplied in quantity and distribution via publications from Brazil. There, the hero began being published as early as December 1938, just a few months after he first appeared in the USA, and after 1947 was extensively published by Ebal, Abril and Panini. The first Portuguese Superman adventure only appeared on 3 January 1952, in issue 125 of Mundo de Aventuras, followed by his inclusion in other publications by the Agência Portuguesa de Revistas, such as Colecção Condor, Condor Popular and Ciclone. During this period, and just as occurred later in the newspaper A Capital and in a Batman story in Jornal do Cuto, they appeared in the form of daily newspaper comic strips. The first comic book, Revista dos Super-Heróis, only appeared here later, in December 1982, and in it the Man of Steel and Batman featured in alternating issues. In 1995, Abril Morumbi published A Morte do SuperHomem and its spin-offs in digest size, followed by 22 issues of a magazine and 4 of another. Devir then tried its luck, but it had more success with individual Superman issues published in the larger collections sold with the newspaper Público in 2003, 2005 and 2013.
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Dog Mendonça and Pizza Boy Heroes of the Underworld By Sara Figueiredo Costa In 2010, a mainstream publisher with only one comic book in its portfolio launched the first volume of a series which it was difficult to imagine succeeding in the Portuguese market. The publisher was Tinta da China, the series was called The Incredible Adventures of Dog Mendonça and Pizza Boy and the difficulty with imagining its success stemmed as much from its editorial style and line as the fact it was co-produced by a Portuguese writer. Nowhere does it say that an American-style comic written by a Portuguese author is doomed to failure, but the fact is that the national market is not usually the most fertile territory for such bold initiatives. So this is the first point worth mentioning, followed by the fact that the first volume in the series was published in three editions. The Incredible Adventures of Dog Mendonça and Pizza Boy is the product of a partnership between Filipe Melo, a man of many talents, including film (he was responsible for the first zombie film made in Portugal, I’ll See You in My Dreams) and jazz, and Juan Cavia, an Argentine artist with close links to the worlds of design and cinema. To these two must be added Santiago Villa, a colourist, and Martin Tejada, who played an important role in adapting the script. The process of producing the first volume took 5 years and was achieved via the use of the internet and long-distance communication tools like Skype. Melo and Cavia only actually met for the first time after the first volume was ready; until then, they had worked separately in Portugal and Argentina and communicated via Wi-Fi and many km of fibre optics. While the original idea had been to produce a film, once the initial script (which formed the basis of the first book) was produced, the result was a series of comics which besides being published in Portugal was also released in a North American edition by Dark Horse. The plot of both volumes of The Incredible Adventures of Dog Mendonça and Pizza Boy begins in the style of a children’s adventure book, firmly balancing between a detective story and a fantasy later to reveal itself as an effective and stunning pastiche of references which include sleazy pulp fiction, computer games that filled the dreams of many adolescents in the 1980s and a handful of Hollywood blockbusters beginning with The Goonies, ending with The Gremlins and taking in the kitsch epic Big Trouble in Little China (and what today would be seen as laughable special effects) or Nightmare on Elm Street. The alliance between a private eye of dubious character, a pizza delivery boy, a demon cast out of hell and imprisoned in the body of a little girl, and the head of a gargoyle is, in itself, a multiple tribute to many of these references, but Melo and Cavia guarantee that the children’s adventure book style is not reduced to the contours of a plot which could compete with one of the films that marked their adolescence. With the shadow of Hellboy and Hellblazer hanging over the characters and the obvious, yet never strident, parodying of the many conspiracy theories so beloved of Hollywood producers, bestseller writers and bus con-