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Best Comics of 2020: An International Perspective Part 3:
Year in Review
To continue and complete our global comics survey, here is Part 3 of the Year in Review exploring the Best Comics of 2020 from an International Perspective. My thanks to all the correspondents for their selections and reviews. Look out for more of this last batch of reports to follow shortly…
You can read Part 1 here… and Part 2 here…
Brazil
Selected by Heitor Pitombo
Heitor Pitombo began his career in Brazilian comics in 1990 writing articles for the Carioca newspaper Tribuna da Imprensa. In the following year he was a member of the Rio de Janeiro International Comics Biennale’s staff, the first major Brazilian event of its kind. From 1992 on, he began a long association with the Brazilian Mad magazine as assistant editor and then a Portuguese translator, and started writing for most of the country’s specialist comics magazines. In 1998 he won the HQ Mix award for The Universe of Super Heroes, the first Brazilian CD-ROM about comics. As a translator, he wrote Portuguese versions of comics originally produced by Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, John Byrne, Garth Ennis and several others. He wrote two books about comics: 300 Mangas and Endless Beings: The Oneiric Universe of Neil Gaiman. A third book is on its way. Right now he’s a member of Mundo dos Super-Heróis’s (World of Super Heroes) staff, the most important publication about comics in the country.
Beco do Rosário (‘Rosario Alley’)
by Ana Luiza Koehler
Veneta
After a series of previews released over the last eight years, Beco do Rosário finally got a complete edition last year and the delay was worth the wait. The book’s plot goes back to the 1920s in Porto Alegre, capital of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, and tries to capture the atmosphere of the city at that time and the transformations that led to the city of today. Vitória, the main character of the story, is a black girl ahead of her time and a very talented writer who dreams of becoming a great journalist, but needs to face a very racist and venerable society marked by infamy and incoherences. The Rosario Alley that gives the book its name is about to disappear to make room for new streets and avenues in a city that wants to expand and become more and more European. Koehler’s solid research carries us back to a very peculiar Brazil and offers her readers the opportunity to understand the social processes that still affect the country nowadays. And before I forget, Ana’s artwork here is simply superb.
Jeremias: Alma (‘Jeremias: Soul’)
by Rafael Calça & Jefferson Costa
Panini
For more than half a century, Mauricio de Souza has been the most prominent Brazilian comics creator. His characters’ titles still sell hundreds of thousands of copies each month. In 2012, Mauricio’s studios launched Graphic MSP, a series of graphic novels with unique stories dedicated to a single character, conceived by artists who do not work based on the de Souza studios’ style guide. In the series’ 18th book, Jeremias: Pele (Jeremias: Skin), the studio focussed its attention on the black boy Jeremias, one of the most undervalued of Mauricio’s creations. Written by Rafael Calça and drawn by Jefferson Costa, the story expanded the character’s childish scope by showing situations where children, young people and adults suffer because of the colour of their skin. After Skin’s huge success, that included a Jabuti award, the most prestigious literature prize in Brazil, Calça and Costa did not take long to put out a sequel. Jeremias: Alma (‘Jeremias: Soul’) is the second book starring the character and the collection’s 29th release. With a touching feel, the authors investigate Jeremias family’s ancestral links and keep on exposing the toxic racism that infects our society to this day. Although Costa has a very personal art style, he uses his craft to portray not only easter eggs related to Mauricio’s universe of characters but to black culture in general. At the same time, Calça puts Jeremias in touch with his roots through his grandma, who gives him valuable lessons about survival. Sometimes Soul gets a bit pamphlet-like when it overemphasises its black pride aspects. But it’s perfectly excusable due not only to the quality of the story but to what it unleashes in each reader.
Meta: Departamento de Crimes Metalinguísticos (‘Meta: Metalinguistic Crimes Department’)
by Marcelo Saravá & André Freitas
Zarabatana
In most recent years, breaking the fourth wall has turned into a great resource for a myriad of comics artists all over the world. But it’s seldom been used to such effect and creativity as in this story written by Marcelo Saravá, drawn by André Freitas, coloured by Omar Viñole and lettered by Deyvison Manes. The plot centres around some comics artists and things start to get serious when one of them is murdered and his own characters are blamed, even though they only live on the printed pages. At this point, a unit called META, the self-explanatory Metalinguistic Crimes Department, begins an investigation near the borders between reality and imagination. Despite an apparent complexity, the plot is cleverly conceived and there’s no space left for readers to lose their grip on the narrative. Extremely captivating, the story reaches its climax in its final stage, when some of the main characters invade the pages of comics produced not only by Brazilian artists such as Laerte, Lourenço Mutarelli and Danilo Beyruth, but by international stars such as Jeff Smith, Winsor McCay, Walt Simonson and Scott McCloud among many others, giving them a different meaning.
Reanimator
by Juscelino Neco
Veneta
Juscelino Neco’s greatest virtue is not taking himself too seriously. This can be clearly identified in his previous books such as Parafusos, Zumbis e Monstros do Espaço (Screws, Zombies and Space Monsters, 2013) and Matadouro de Unicórnios (Unicorns Slaughterhouse, 2016). Once again, this aspect is apparent in the comics author’s latest work, a very loose H. P. Lovecraft’s adaptation. Most of the time, Neco rejoices in the original material and uses funny extemporary remarks to tell his story and, believe it or not, they are very useful to the plot. The distinguishing aspect here is that the author not only revisits the North American writer’s tale but also uses the 1985 Reanimator trash movie as a reference. If Lovecraft lampooned the legendary Frankenstein novel by Mary Shelley in his own time, the Brazilian artist doesn’t refrain from portraying unrestrained sex scenes in his Reanimator and adding a certain greediness to his main characters, especially since one of them is determined to explore the other one’s discovery commercially, so to speak. More than inspiring fear, Neco’s tale renders more laughs than anything else.
Italy
Selected by Matteo Stefanelli
Matteo Stefanelli is a critic and curator, working on the edge between the comics industry and media scholarship. Artistic director of Comicon Festival, Naples and founder of Fumettologica.it, he is also a lecturer on media and communication at the Catholic University in Milan and the University of Bergamo, and teaches comics history at EESI in Angoulême. He has written extensively about comics for Corriere della Sera, Repubblica, Il Post, Lo Straniero, Flash Art, Neuviéme Art and Link Idee. Among his books: Bande dessinée: une médiaculture (Armand Colin, 2012) and Fumetto! 150 anni di storie italiane (Rizzoli, 2016).
Padovaland
by Manuel Vila
Canicola Edizioni
While you can easily find Padua city (Padova) in NorthEast Italy, you’ll find the more undefined Padovaland, an imaginary land set in between the provinces of Padua, Treviso and Venice, inside Vila’s mind. Padovaland ‘may potentially evolve into an LA-style megalopolis’, and looks like a suburban paradise filled with terraced houses with large gardens, wide multi-lane roads, brightly coloured industrial and commercial districts, surrounded by greenery, illuminated by neon lights. But the reality is different: it’s more an amusement park without amusement, a big parochial ensemble. This 160-page colour graphic novel follows the unambitious lives of some young adults, stuck in the middle of a diverse … nothing. The story unfolds around parties, working, drinking, sex, Netflix, social networking, graduating at university and, mostly, tells the ups and downs of complicated relationships between people forced to live together in the same space: Padovaland. This is the real force that shapes the existential path of these young people, a place that offers no big deal, no alternatives. Miguel Vila’s first book portrays a cruel and subtly violent humanity via a sharp and scathing glance that echoes the pessimism of Tiziano Sclavi or Diane Arbus: his characters are monsters born from middle-class frustrations.
Come rubare un Magnus (‘How to Steal a Magnus’)
by Davide Toffolo
Oblomov Edizioni
After more than 10 years in the making – and many stops and starts – Davide Toffolo has published his biographical fiction about the life and works of Magnus aka Roberto Raviola, artist of many of the most iconic Italian pocket-sized comics of the Sixties (Alan Ford, Kriminal, Satanik) and creator of the influential auteur spy story Lo Sconosciuto (‘Unknown’). Magnus was the main influence on the young Toffolo, when he started a career that turned him into one of most prominent “indie” cultural figures in the late 1990s, both within the alternative rock scene (as leader of the band Tre Allegri Ragazzi Morti since 1994) and the autofiction genre in comics (such as Pasolini). This book tells the life of the great cartoonist through the works he created and the friendships he made with many protagonists of Italian comics. But the biographical dimension is just a part of a broader aim, a tool to put at its heart the creative processes of comics, and the alchemy behind its codes. As always with Toffolo, in Come rubare un Magnus words (and documents) play a great role in defining the character’s main traits. But bodies speak out loud too: the battered ones of the protagonists, the naked, erotic or humorous comics drawn by Magnus, and that of Raviola himself, portrayed in different phases of his life (as a young man, then long-haired, hippie-style, and then the almost monastic look of later years). The mood of the book is also something that resonates with the profile of Raviola that defies any label: it’s a mystery and a biography, a farcical and an intimate investigation. And one of the best love letters ever written/drawn to a maestro of Italian comics.
L’ultima goccia (‘The Last Drop’)
by Andrea De Franco
Eris Edizioni
The debut graphic novel by Andrea De Franco uses coffee as a metaphor for becoming and for everything that’s unstable. L’ultima goccia is an entertaining metaphysical game, a comic as fluid from a narrative point of view as it is destructuring from a formal one. The author focuses on coffee as a changing entity and sings a hymn to it; but, in reality, his purpose is to talk about something else, driving our attention to moods, inadequacy, insecurity and fragility. The main character of the comic is a little man with a cup-shaped head (If you think that’s close to the Cuphead videogame or Shannon Wheeler’s Too Much Coffee Man, you’ll need to add much more abstraction, like in Patrick Kyle, Anders Nilsen or Fabio Tonetto). Despite himself, he can’t manage to contain the coffee: it breaks, multiplies and separates, over and over again. He finds no peace and indulges in surreal monologues or dialogues with animated objects. Thanks to lively texts and a very thin, flickering but decisive pen stroke, De Franco puts in place a stream of consciousness both fluent and spontaneous. In the more than 250 pages of L’ultima goccia, everything changes constantly under the reader’s gaze, funny figures are crowded, kidnapped by an overwhelming vortex fuelled by improvisation. De Franco has created a vivid “jazzy” book that reverberates with expressive freedom, managing not to fall into the trap of an exercise de style as a goal. And the outcome is amusing and challenging, we suppose, both for himself and for every reader. You can sample a 20-page taster here…
Posted: June 7, 2021
