Me, a comic character
Tomorrow, I will officially launch this website. I spent months working on it together with the programmer, then weeks organizing the sections and uploading the publications… So much work!
The best would be to start this post promoting the website in a more altruistic way, but I think that after so much effort I deserve a slight ego trip.
Specially because what I bring today is a theme that stitches together several works posted here: I want to talk about the times I became a comic character.
The images above are, if I remember correctly, the first time this happened. The year was 2010. The artist Ana Luiza Koehler and I were developing the comics reportage “Juventude: em tempo de crescer”, and we decided to draw me as a character in the comic. The decision had a reason: the piece was published in the Itaú Cultural’s magazine Continuum among several other contents, and not all of these contents were journalistic. By showing the presence of a journalist doing interviews we wanted to make clear, already in the first pages, that this was a journalistic comic.
(You can read this story in Portuguese by poking here.)
Nine years later, Italian artist Beatrice Davies and I decided to go the same way when we did the comics reportage “Vor Gittern”. There, we both appear doing the journalistic research. The nice thing about this work is that I was drawn in different colors.
(By the way: I don’t believe that every comics reportage must show a reporter doing an interview, but this is a great tool to add credibility to the work. Otherwise, I’ve experimented with comics reportages in which the interviewees talk to the ‘camera,’ as in “Der freie Platz,” or in which only the interviewee appears, as in “So Close, Faraway!”.)
On these two occasions I appeared as a reporter, so that I became a comic character with a certain dignity. Unlike the next three cases that I will bring now.
During the 24-hour comics of Wannsee in Berlin, I use a gong. Yes, a gong. The idea was not exactly mine, but I put it into practice: the aim is to remind people every hour that time is passing. This situation seems to have stimulated the creativity of some participants, or may even have terrified them, because I have appeared in some of the comics created at this event. These pages above, for example, are from the comic by Maki Shimizu, a Japanese comics artist based in Berlin. She did this in the 2019 edition. The full story is available here (in German).
The 2022 edition took place in early October. When I was uploading the comics to the SKIZZENBLOG website (where you can find all the comics done so far), I came across this picture here:
Again, the gong. In this story, I’m really a bad guy, I don’t let anyone sleep. Here four more pages to give you an idea of it:
The complete story can be read here (in German).
Finally, here comes perhaps the most degrading situation: Why do some people think I look like this little person here?
When German artist Mawil was in Porto Alegre to participate in the Osmose project, he created a fictional comic in which some of the people he met became characters. Me, for example.
The most curious thing about this case is that several friends of mine told me that they were flipping through the book and, out of the blue, they found me drawn this way and started to laugh loud.
I don’t understand what is so funny, I must admit. Well, look at my picture on the homepage of this website. Don’t you think I’m much cuter?
(Don’t answer.)