those who enter his books, for you shall be enlightened. By a black, Baudelairean, Lautréamontian sun, but enlightened nonetheless. In 2002, we wrote (in issue 26 of flirt) that Soares’s work had attained a state “where the narrative could be thought of as a whole, with a steady rhythm, perfectly plausible diegetic worlds and a writing that is cohesive, dense and clear”. In the years that have followed, and which could be regarded as divided between his incursion into the world of literature (although he wrote stories, the series of novels for the publisher Saída de Emergência consolidated his place among a particular circle of readers) and a return to comics (via a challenge from Mário Freitas, of Kingpin Comics, for a number of collaborative projects), this general idea would be proved right, although with minor specific variations with each title. Soares’s writing does not rejoice in an obscene immersion in the orgiastic and uncontrolled violence of post-gothic gore (a style co-
of drawing groups him together with authors like Bill Sienkiewicz and Ted McKeever. Pedro Nora was also part of this broad family of noisy, textured, “dirty”, authors who to a certain extent signed up more quickly to this type of thematic approach. Without forgetting Osvaldo Medina, who drew Mucha, with its vast spectrum of styles, but who in this project limited himself to an almost plain and direct style, Serpa introduces something entirely different. Crystal clear in figurative terms, radiant in chromatic terms, with a somewhat naive approach to the graphic style, it is like a crystalline recipient into which Soares’s terrible incandescent liquid drains. If the composition of the pages is always important, where the balance between those broken up by “rhetorical” vignettes” and those which take in the whole landscape, where certain sequences are concentrated on a small yet decisive action and others extend in long controlled moments (the monologue of the Dragon Castrator), and with no det-
opted by capitalist culture), the pornography of macabre literature, or the orthodoxies of horror. Like the Marquis of Sade, his projects are transgressive, not because they contain violent acts, morally corrupt characters, or creatures or realms of an unspeakable fantasy, but rather because they open the way to understanding and exploring the human psyche, above all the most recondite and hidden secrets and whimsies that would never be confessed in daylight. In contrast to the high and noble intentions of the heroes, total fantasies blind to the reality of human life – “if that had been me, I’d have saved the people”, “I wouldn’t have collaborated with the henchmen”, “I would have fought for human rights” - Soares paints a truer picture in which, given certain circumstances, we would be the henchmen and it would be us plunging the knife in deeper.
riment to the artist, it is because of Soares’s careful and detailed plans. An exponent, as we know, of the ‘full script’, i.e. a script in which the details of the gestures and fácies of the characters and not just the idea of the diegesis is presented, in which each typical comics structure, above all the composition, is merely another writing tool, Soares, in a manner of speaking, supplies artists with whom he works with a fully created world, a ready-formed idea, which just needs a body, form and matter. Which in no way undermines the role of the artist, or the limits within which he is free to express his own creativity. In line with a recurring Soares theme, totemic animals and psychopomps play a preponderant role – in this case a panda and chthonic dragon – as touchstones for the transformation which takes centre stage in the narratives. Through dialogue lessons, or magical actions, they open the way to a higher sense of justice, higher even than the justice of men, who suffer so often from the hubris of believing themselves the paradigm of all things. Soares, however, contributes in a very particular way to the political subjectification of his protagonists. As we have already noted, these animals arise like a dark reflection: “It is as if the face of the human characters were a counterpoint to these creatures, even if theirs is far larger, not just in scale but in its very nature, as if they were merely the visible, sensory and perceptible part of something far beyond.” And if the creatures represent the katabasis, the ritual of confrontation, the shadow of blood, it could lead many to the death of the characters. But above all, as an act of writing and creational magic, it leads to a new awareness, very often that of the reader himself.
The book Like Soares’s latest project with Pedro Serpa (Palmas para o esquilo), this narrative is broken up by the voice of an outside narrator, as if it were a legend told by an ancient sage, pedagogic in purpose and woven in a joyful timbre. In its atmosphere of a semi-fictional China, there are other elements which could be analysed, but we shall only look at that which reveals the act of writing, the act of creating the world. At the centre of this small, quasi-oriental fable o pEQUENO dEUS cEGO is a small creature who even in his name (“Sem-Olhos”, “PapaMoscas”, “Caganita”) is broken and constantly stressing his feebleness compared to the power, even if illusory, that others like to wield over him. Before him lies the path to growth and knowledge, whose price is the greatest rebellion of all, the abdication of the conventional role of the manly hero and the spiritual acceptance of the descent to the plutonic underworld, but also the immediate realisation that the greatest reward awaits on the other side: the ineffable mastery of self. The transformation – of sex, face and old ancient – repeats itself, but the greatest change is that which takes place within Sem-Olhos’s most inner desire. Soares’s alliance with Pedro Serpa on this project, directed by the editor Mário Freitas, clearly reveals a possible form of expression and production strategy. In the former’s case, and without creating hierarchies or comparative evaluations of all the artists with whom he has worked, the truth is that Soares’s distinct style
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Relvas in Triple Time
The language of comics explained through the work of Fernando Relvas By João Miguel Lameiras Born in Lisbon in 1954, Fernando Relvas is one of the biggest names in Portuguese comics of the last forty years and one of the various authors whose life is linked to the city of Amadora, where he