13 not to invest in Portuguese comics after 1993, however, put a stop to all national comic projects, including those by Relvas. The two projects that Asa abandoned were these: Goa, the second volume in the Vaz Taborda adventures, and O Nosso Primo em Bruxelas, the first volume in the Piri Lau series, which are featured in the third and final section of the exhibition. Contradicting the idea that Relvas worked by improvising, something which the preparatory studies for the different projects help to deny, these works reveal how thorough the author was in his research for his books, undertaking extensive planning and, in the case of Goa, historical and documental research, which at a time when the Internet did not yet exist implied days on end spent in libraries and lots of money spent on specialised books and magazines. While Goa remained unpublished and unfinished, Livros Horizonte reprieved O Nosso Primo em Bruxelas in 1995, but in a
filling all the daily duties the church demanded, within rigid moral guidelines. Passionate about comic stories (carefully selected by his parents who allowed him to read a single children’s magazine) and especially by the Ninja Turtle series, Thompson developed his artistic abilities within the limits imposed by his family, spending hours drawing and creating comics with his brother. His expectations for the future, however, were to become a local artist (not necessarily a comic author). His studies at the University of Wisconsin and later Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design shook up this idea profoundly, cementing the relationship with comics and making it a visceral bond. Comics became the medium through which Thompson expressed a deep inner struggle between what was expected of him and who he truly was inside, helping to reveal himself as a complete person by putting his
modest form and without the framing Relvas had intended. An urban adventure, with no lack of sex and violence, the album narrates the travails of two musician friends, Lau and Zé Peixoto, alias “PiriPiri”, who play in Lisbon’s bars. The action is set between Lisbon and Sintra, in an environment which the author, who at the time was living in Almoçageme, was very familar with, but it branches out to places ranging from Angola to Brussels, where the cousin of Zé “Piri-Piri” Peixoto, who gives the album its name but never actually appears, lives... Despite the somewhat confusing storyline, the plot is well thought through with dynamic narration, to which the irregular panel layout contributes greatly, and an edgy and personal, though at times overly synthetic, style. This is well complemented by a colour scheme which the printing by Livros Horizonte fails to do justice to. Once again, the characters are framed in real and clearly recognisable scenarios, in particular Bairro Alto. The vast amount of preparatory work for these albums, from postits with character studies and plans for the narrative structure to the first black and white versions of the pages, allow the different stages in the author’s creative process and the way the story evolved from the initial sketches to the finished book, which readers could find in bookshops in 1995, to be seen for the first time in an exhibition.
anxieties, fears and doubts onto paper. In 1997, he left for Portland, Oregon, and worked hard to add consistency to his drawing and the narrative itself, drawing freely on the inspiration of the work of Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Joe Sacco and Taro Yashima (while maintaining a very distinct voice of his own). This effort would bear fruit two years later with the publication of Good-bye, Chunky Rice. Chunky Rice is a turtle who leaves his family home and his best friend (a small mouse) to move on with his life. It is a kind of journey of initiation which confronts us with the pain of separation and the value of eternal friendship (“There is no goodbye, Chunky Rice,” says the mouse at the end of the book.) In this, Craig Thompson introduced the basis of what would be his later work: a deep reflection on love (fraternal and marital) and how we relate to others. He revisits the theme of love (in its broadest sense) in Blankets, a graphic novel begun in 1999 and published in 2003. In this huge autobiographical work, extending over more than 582 pages, he exposes much of his childhood and adolescence, and a lot of his life as a young adult: his inner struggle with faith and the church (and its respective dogmas), the (inner) struggle with his parents (and the morality they represent), his relationship with his younger brother, the abuse he suffered as a child (recounted with great restraint and decency), his first love… Thompson exorcises the frustration caused by the gap between who he really “was” and who he “should be” in the eyes of others: the guilt at violating the moral conscience instilled in him during his upbringing; the difficulty with adopting personal behaviour and expectations (and not those of others); and, more importantly, in recognising the body and sexuality… He throws off his ghouls and, to a certain extent, an ethical conduct imposed upon him (by his family, by religion), to create his own person, accepting sexual desire (and its naturalness) in confrontation with his own upbringing. But not without a strong sense of guilt, a struggle he resolves by accepting sex as an integral part of love (and seeing love as an element which motivates physical desire.) In 2004, he began working on Habibi, a 671-page graphic novel published in 2011 (he still had time to make a foray into “travel books” with Carnet de Voyage in 2004, a book completed while on a promotional tour for Blankets). Habibi is the story of Dodola, a
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From Traverse City to the World “How satisfying it is to leave a mark on a blank surface. To make a map of my movement …” Craig Thompson in Blankets By Paulo Monteiro Craig Thompson was born in 1975 in Traverse City, Michigan, and grew up in Marathon, a rural city in Wisconsin. Closely supervised by his conservative Protestant parents, he had a strict upbringing in which he could only watch certain films, read certain books and listen to Christian music. Everything in his life pointed towards him becoming one more member of the local religious community, ful-