9 The third volume in the series was recently made possible via a crowd-funding campaign. Will it be published soon or is it still being finished? The third volume in the series will be launched, if I don’t die first, at the 2013 Amadora BD. The crowd-funding has been a great help and allowed us to launch the book this year. Have you never been tempted to continue it as an ongoing series, like many American comic-book heroes? No. I’ve always thought of it as a trilogy and that’s what it will be.
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David Soares
The act of writing is an act of authorship By Pedro Moura For years in the field of art in question, the idea that such a thing as a “comic writer” was possible was beyond even readers and fans of comics themselves. Whether the history of this art form is analysed from a more conventional or nuanced perspective, it will always be interlaced by the confused and mythographical idea of the “sole author”, a person who perfectly combines a comic’s perceived twin functions: image and text, story and drawings. It is as if these skills existed in a vacuum and therefore could be analysed separately, equi-distant from one another, above all where collaboration exists – which, seen from this notion, this myth, of the “sole author”, is regarded as inferior. This myth obviously did not arise when comics originally emerged from their broad sphere of popular culture associated with the various domains of the 19th-century press (with which they established the most fluid and “natural” of collaborations and associations), but rather from the child/youth subculture which gradually formed in the first decades of the following century and which, perhaps in Hergé, found its tutelary, sacrosanct and untouchable figure who remains forever (and even retrospectively) frozen in time. Yet the creation of what became a firmly entrenched canon – with Hergé at its tentative centre, at least from the European perspective – also represented elevating the authors considered and condemning their collaborators to a certain invisibility. Many examples abound, and undoubtedly many exceptions, but if we recall that the name Van Melkebe is practically unknown, despite his contribution to constructing the Tintin myth, as are the vast number of comic strip writers all over the world who never signed their names beside those of the artists, we start to get an idea of this imbalance. However, if up to a certain point one can talk of a canon, this notion has fortunately been transformed and diversified over the last 30 years. One of the turning points was the emergence of the major comic “scriptwriters” or “writers”. While one can think of several very diverse names which have always caught the eye, from John Stanley to Héctor G. Osterheld, Denis O’Neil, JeanMichel Charlier, Harvey Pekar, Pierre Christin and Jodorowsky, it was necessary to wait until the 1980s and 90s, above all in the United States (with the “Brit Wave” of writers from the United Kingdom), to find authors achieving an impressive level of stardom merely (I use
it ironically) as writers and breathing new life into the function to make it more central. The most obvious names here would be Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis and Jamie Delano, but broadening the net would also include J. M. Straczynski, Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker, Marguerite Abouet, Ariel Schrag and Benoît Peeters… A certain deficit of attention has also been given to comic writers in Portugal, both in terms of emphasis (general exhibitions rarely celebrate the act of writing, focusing instead on the image) and in terms of memory, even of the immediate past. Names such as João Paulo Cotrim, Nuno Artur Silva, Rui Zink, Marcos Farrajota/Marte and Nuno Duarte, and also Pedro Brito and Miguel Rocha, in their capacities as writers, form a significant constellation that is deserving of recognition. And within this constellation stands the “black star” of David Soares.
Under the sign of Pluto Whether drawing irregularly, little or not at all, these names gained recognition above all by creating a body of comic work which deserved critical, varied and focused attention for their construction of fictional worlds (or other configurations relative to the empirical world) rather than their artwork. In fact, many of these authors were, if not mediocre, then passable artists. David Soares is in a relatively similar position, having also been a “sole author” during an initial phase in his career and, after a series of brilliant experiences in the (exclusively) literary field, returning to this area as a writer. But immediately we come up against a language problem. The use of the terms “sole author”, “writer”, “scriptwriter”, etc. suggests a whole series of specific types of comic production and, above all, a certain value attributed to that work and responsibility. David Soares is an “author”. Those who have followed his work since his fanzines (Alimentando-se com os Fracos, Pessoas Comuns, Horror Fiction) and then the books released by his own publishing company Círculo de Abuso (Cidade-Túmulo, Mr. Burroughs, Sammahel and A Última Grande Sala de Cinema), almost all drawn by himself, will know that the balance between attracting a niche readership and a more mainstream audience is something that he is not unused to (Mr. Burroughs, which was drawn by Pedro Nora and expertly published by the former Amok, won awards for Best Script and Best Drawing in a Portuguese Album at the 2001 FIBDA) and, as we can see, a talent he hasn’t lost. And this has been achieved thanks to his ability to give the worlds he creates solid roots. It is he who moulds them. While we can fit his work into certain territories and genres – fantasy, horror, black comedy, the absurd – this should in no way limit the influence and resourcefulness of his transmorphic control of these territories. Therefore, if in chromatic terms there is a greater similarity to the blackness of cold and distant Pluto, it shouldn’t be forgotten that it is also here that we find the shadow of transformation, the wisdom of the dead, the fertility of the soil. In etymological terms, Plouton means “riches” and is probably associated with the Indo-European verb “to flow” and thus “to overflow”. The riches are spiritual and can only be attained via an initiation ritual, a cruel and bloody ablution, and igneous filter. Do not abandon hope