Drawing
São Paulo: The graphic fiction of Fábio Moon and Gabiel
Bá
Big
cities have a lot of layers--different
buildings, different neighborhoods, different jobs, different people.
All those
differences create multiple story possibilities, as you are constantly
in
contact with all kinds of people in all kinds of situations. You can
really
experience the complexity of human existence and see how everyone is
different.
(Fábio Moon, qtd. in Shook 44)
So called graphic fiction is intrinsically
urban in nature, both in terms of the circumstances of its production
and distribution and in its themes (see Smylie for basic information on
the development of the graphic novel). This is because the graphic
novel, like comic book art in general, relies heavily on the social and
economic conditions of the city for its origins and popularity, and the
narratives of graphic fiction exploit in particular the contradictions,
discontinuities, and daunting complexities of negotiating survival and
transcendence in the urban context. Or, to put it differently, the
latter features of the urban context find in graphic novel a
particularly fertile medium of expression and interpretation. In this
sense, graphic fiction is yet one more option for the staggering task
of the analysis through art of always unresolved and confusing--and
often barely perceived--issues of contemporary urban life.
Derived from the far older
tradition of comic book art, if there is anything particularly
distinctive
about graphic fiction as opposed to comic book art in general, it is a
fundamental self-image as regards the seriousness of its artistic
enterprise
and the complex interaction between the drawn image and the narrated
story
line. Whereas comic book art may often rely on image alone (but cannot
rely on
text alone) or be grounded in the four or five-panel strip, graphic
fiction
aims, like film, for a sustained narrative via inseparable image and
discourse, with
a complexity of image that may, in fact, be committed to capturing
subtleties
of lighting and sound, which are also characteristic of film. The
contrast is
illustrative between the relatively simple line drawings of, say, Gary
Trudeau's enormously influential subtleties of image --the main thrust
of the
strip lies in its political and ideological commitments and the
sophisticated
humor with which the latter are pursued-- and the enormously
sophisticated and
integrated deployment of image and text, narrative focus and point of
view,
ambiguity and interpretive layering found in Will Eisner's graphic
novels of
immigrant Jewish life in New York City, (1)
Robert Crumb's quirky
adventures, or Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus
(1986).(2)
The distinction between
comic book art in general and graphic fiction is tenuous at best: when
does
Trudeau's or Berkeley Breathed's isolated strips yield to a sustained
narrative, especially when the former frequently employ narrative
devices that
provide some measure of continuity from one strip to another?(3) It is
not just recurring characters, principal and supporting, but plot
lines,
motifs, and concrete signs (such as Opus's closet of repressed memories
and
traumas in Breathed's eponymous strip). To be sure, all categories of
cultural
production are to a large extent arbitrary in nature: one recalls the
comment,
in the face of negative criticism about the structural nature of his
novels, by
1990 Nobel Prize winning Spanish author Camilo José Cela, that a
"novel" is any text under whose title the author places in
parentheses the designation (novel). Indeed, although Spanish has the
phrase novela gráfica (it
remains to be seen how extensively it is actually used and recognized),
although
the term romance grafico exists in
Portuguese, and is not used with much frequency, and texts that look
like
English-language designated graphic novels are lumped in that language
under
the heading quadrinhos, which
literally means "small pictures" and refers first and foremost to the
panels of the comic strip and, by extension, to the cartoon strip
itself and
isolated or interconnected manifestations of the strip (for strip,
Portuguese
uses tira or tirinha [de
quadrinhos];
Cirne; Silva; Literatura). Cartoon
art is extensive in
Of the practitioners of this
growing field of urban art, the twin-brother team (b. 1976) of
Fábio
Moon and Gabriel Bá have emerged as among the most creative.
Their
experience is now extensive and they have achieved one of the abiding
goals of
the Latin American writer, to be published in English.(5)
De: Tales; Stories from Urban Brazil was
published by Dark Horse Books in 2006: quite a milestone for Latin
American
graphic art, since the most famous graphic artist in Spanish, Quino
(Salvador
Joaquín Lavado), creator of Mafalda
(1966-73), which has been translated into dozens of languages, has yet
to be
available in English.(6) Winners of many prizes
for their extensive
production (their web site, www2.uol.com.br/10paezinhos, lists twenty
individual works and collaborations with others and the inclusion in
nine
anthologies of graphic fiction), the brothers have worked as a single
team,
both doing both writing and illustrating, and each has worked
separately,
although, as is common with cartoon art, little of their work is
available in
formal library collections: OCLC's FirstSearch WorldCat contains only
ten
international entries for Fábio Moon and ten for Gabriel
Bá;
several of these entries represent their work together. As of this
writing,
late 2007, De:Tales has yet to be
completely cataloged by any participating library.
For purposes of this
discussion, I will be drawing the strips written originally in English
in De-tales; Stories from Urban Brazil
(2007), none of which is contained in the collections in Portuguese I
have been
able to consult.
I have consulted three of the
Moon-Bá collaborations in
Portuguese available in bookstores in São Paulo: O
girasol e a lua (2000); Meu
coração, não sei porque (2001); Mesa
para dois (2006).(7) Although there is a general urban focus to
these three
volumes, one cannot say that they are really urban in nature. O girasol e a lua deals with amorous
relationships and their sadistic undercurrent, in which for not knowing
how
properly to love, Kamarov loses the object of his affections to an
avatar of
Jack the Ripper. The story is a complex (and often confusing) one,
involving
porous spaces, the darkness of the realm of the moon (a lua),
and the assumed surname of one of the artists. Indeed, the
authors' self-presentation at the end of the volume includes an image
of Moon
with a head in the shape of the moon; Bá (perhaps his chosen
surname
refers to the Egyptian hieroglyph that represents the human soul) is
given the
image of the talisman that saves the main character from death in the
story;
the cover of the book, however, has a man with the head of a sunflower
holding
the book on whose cover appears the image of the moon: this book is
Kamarov's
own first-person account. The story is urban in the sense that it takes
place
in a large city that seems to be New York (one can make out the
silhouettes of
the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building on one panel [19;
see also
66]), although the police cars in another announce POLÍCIA (54);
yet
another panel has a hot dog vendor (48) and another police shields that
say
Police Department, while the police uniforms say Polícia (55).
This
linguistic indeterminacy would indicate that no specific urban reality
is
pertinent here, and at best there is the general implication that
sadistic
sexual desire is urban in nature, which one has no reason to assume is
necessarily the case, despite whatever urban-anchored dimension that
accompanies the Jack the Ripper figure might be.
Meu coração, não sei
porque (also transcribed on
the
first numbered page of the narrative as porquê)
is also about romantic love, but this time a love that triumphs. The
use of
children, who move in and out of adulthood, might give an initial
impression of
children's literature, but the extensive and sophisticated deployment
of the
technique of narrative reversals projects the latter as objective
correlatives
for the difficulties of love in asserting its proper force in the lives
of
individuals, all of which makes for a very adult story, even if the
postmodern
reader might wish to take exception to the notion of eternal romantic
love in
its most elementarily heterosexist configurations.
Just as the difficulty of
love is the dimension of the first two volumes, the most recent text I
have
been able to consult,
All three of these volumes
are of considerable artistic value and are indicative of the
originality of
conception, if not in narrative language, in graphic representation,
including
complex juxtapositions of circumstances and events. Of particular
interest are
lengthy dialogues broken up into chained balloons that crisscross each
other
and the illusion created of rapidly successive interchanges by
exchanging the
position of the textual balloons of two character's: A's is above B's
head, and
vice-versa, with the balloon's tail indicating which enunciation
belongs to
which character.(8)
There is, however, a
substantial increase in narrative sophistication between the foregoing
texts
contained in English translation in De-tales.
Moreover, all twelve are unquestionably urban in nature, in the sense
that the
material related has a direct and highly meaningful connection with the
lived
urban experience. I would now like to analyze in detail a selection of
the
strips from De-tales.
One's attention is
immediately drawn to the fact that, of the twelve strips in De-tales,
two are entitled
"Reflections" and are basically duplicates of each other, with the
exception that some of the graphic details are distributed differently
or focused
differently between them and the second version contains an additional
detail
in terms of the exchange between two men in the restroom of a bar.
"Reflections" is built on the procedure of doubling a character such
that we see him contemplating himself as someone else and engaging in
conversation with himself over the ambivalent situation of whether he
will
engage seriously with a woman whom he met accidentally, causing her to
spill
her drink.(9)
Self-contemplation,
including talking with oneself either silently or openly, is likely a
feature
of universal human psychology. But it was the Romantic notion of the Doppelgänger (double, in German)
that established as a literary technique, characteristically in poetry,
but
also in prose, the procedure of splitting one psychic unit--that is,
one human
subjectivity--into multiple voices, characters, and identities; this is
not
precisely the same thing as the mental illness of dual/multiple
personalities,
although a cultural text may use the latter as one way of configuring
the Doppelgänger. Needless to say, from
a typological point of view, one could construct many actual and
possible
variants. Perhaps the most famous example in Latin American literature
of such
a doubling is Jorge Luis Borges's short text "Borges y yo," which
deals with the juxtaposition between the private, interior world of the
writer
and the public persona of that writer when he has achieved fame (from El hacedor; 1960), which closes with the
observation that "No sé cuál de los dos escribe esta
página" (808).
Moon and Bá strips
are fairly consistent in the representation of the two artists as
persons,
either singly or in conjunction, in their strips. As correlated with
the back
cover of the photograph of the two brothers, the character who appears
with
short dark hair in the strips can be identified with Bá (as he
is on
page 79); the character with the longer, sometimes blond and unkempt
hair is
Bá. Not that such identification is all that important, although
it does
have to do with the way in which some of the strips juxtapose two
speaking
characters who are kept apart in terms of their represented graphic
image,
while the strip under discussion clearly splits one of them (the one I
have
identified as Bá) into two separately speaking individuals.
In this case, the character
of the strip, after bumping into the woman, enters the restroom, and we
see him
making use of the facilities. In accord with such a situation, another
man
enters and installs himself in front of a neighboring urinal. Public
urinals in
Brazil, especially in places like bars, are likely to provide virtually
no
privacy and male-male sociability may involve conversation between
patrons,
although eye contact may be scrupulously avoided as a way of signaling
that we
are all men here but not seekers of men: it is one thing to acknowledge
the
other's presence, but quite another to cruise him, and restroom
etiquette is quite
formalized in this respect.Yet the reader is able to see what one
urinating
neighbor is able to see, which is the actual act of urination, penis
size and
configuration, and the fashion in which a man undertakes the act,
including the
details of his hygiene.(10) I dwell on these
men's room details because
the strip is built on the fact that the two men actually stare at each
other
(55 and 60), whereupon the first one exclaims "You... You're me" (56). The second man goes on
to state "No, I was you, but
not anymore" (56 and 60). What emerges is that the second man is the
first
man before be bumps into the girl (this is the actual rather sexist
word used
in the text) in the bar and then apparently seeks refuge in the
bathroom in
order to avoid taking up with her in the sort of narrative
characteristic of a
chance bar encounter, where any pretext can serve to break the ice and
inaugurate the narrative scheme that will result in the participants
scoring
with each other in any of a multiple number of ways.
However, the second man goes
on to state that he was the first man until the latter forewent the
opportunity
presented by the chance encounter and that he, the second man,
represents the
depression deriving from the self-contemplation of foolishly letting a
hot
opportunity pass. He concludes by saying "... And you have already
changed. You are already other than me. Good luck" (56 and 61),
implying
that all the first man has to do is to complete his business at the
urinal, get
back out in the bar, and follow through with the girl who must be
waiting for
him to come back out. Yet the first man hangs back in the bathroom,
wondering
what has just happened and whether he has had too much to drink.
Meanwhile the
first man returns, drink in hand, clearly a bit inebriated, but perhaps
not
because of the drink but because he made progress with the hot girl.
When the
first man exclaims "You again?"
(57 and 62), the second man says that he must be mistaking him for
someone
else. This explicit disengagement between the two men, as the second
man goes
on to show in his comments, is based on the way in which the latter has
scored
with the girl and that one must take advantage of such opportunities
rather
than hanging back, a radical degree of which means retreating into the
no man's
zone of the bathroom.
First the doubling of the
two characters and then their role reversal between one who is
depressed over
his timidity and one who may follow through, on the one hand, and one
who has
scored and one who has hung back and, as a consequence of waiting too
long,
lost his potential score to another is confirmed by the way in which
the second
man states that he must get back out on the floor of the bar before the
woman
moves on to another loser (58 and 62). That the second man in their
second
exchange accuses the first man of taking too long to urinate, wasting
his time
talking to others/talking to himself in the bathroom adds another
dimension to
how ducking into the restroom may be a consequence of not really
knowing what
to do with a woman when the opportunity arises. This, in turn, is
reinforced by
the insinuation of how talking to other men in the restroom, including
watching
them urinate, signals in fact a lack of sexual initiative, a crippling
inability to even begin to follow through successively with women. This
may not
be a sign of (latent) homosexuality, but it is certainly a lapse in
competency
as regards the game of sexual encounter.(11)
Thus,
"Reflections" becomes a very eloquent meditation on the so-called bar
scene, which itself is often a metaphor for the difficulty,
tenuousness, and
potentially disastrous nature of the game of sexual encounter. The
seediness of
most bar scenes, even those that are ostentatiously upscale, a
seediness
duplicated and even augmented by the condition of the restrooms
(restrooms are
rarely cleaned better than the business they are a part of and
frequently
strikingly less so) may be read as an objective correlative of the
precarious
nature of human sexual commerce and, indeed the way chance encounters
may for
some be preferable to meaningful stable relationships. I do not think
any moral
judgment is intended here (either in the Moon/Bá strip or in my
engagement with it), but only a neutral characterization of the
realities of
one sexual scene: the bar as both an opportunity to score quickly and
the
occasion of sexual timidity to quickly affirm itself. The material
added to the
second version involves the second man lecturing the first: "Oh no. I
mean, yes I am you... / ...But I didn't freak out about the whole
me-before/me-now crap... / ...And I went back to the party and got the
girl
(62). In other words, as one says colloquially, "get on with the
program
and stop wasting time."
In this case,
self-reflection, self-examination, self-dialogue, rather than providing
the
opportunity for psychic growth--the idea that the examined life makes
us
emotionally stronger in dealing with the world--points toward a
crippling
weakness, at least as far as sexual commerce is concerned. In both
versions,
the man is alone with himself, contemplating the extent of his lost
opportunity. In the first version, he looks almost longingly toward the
exit
from the bathroom, as though unable to cross back through it; in the
second
version, his face, a mask of frozen startledness, he continues to
engage in the
act that displaces his sexual pursuit of the girl, holding (in an
onanistic
fashion) his penis and urinating. The stark lines of the drawings in
both
versions, including rapidly shifted perspectives on the iconic space
involved,
contribute to a really quite harsh assessment of sexual incompetence.
The vast majority of the
twelve narratives in De-tales deal
with the intertwined theme of spiritual alienation and tenuous and
unstable
love in the megalopolitan setting. This setting is never explicitly
identified
as
One of the longest--and most
complex--strips in the collection, "Late for Coffee," is a
particularly ingenious representation of the fragility of human
communication,
including sexual relations (presumably a zenith of such communication)
in the
large urban setting. Of immediate interest is the reference to coffee
as the
focal point for a (potentially) amorous encounter. While São
Paulo is
not as much a café society as is Buenos Aires, the Brazilian
city
nevertheless does do a certain high degree of honor to the Parisian
model,
where meeting for a coffee, accompanied perhaps by a dessert or a light
lunch,
is an integral part of the social fabric, and such a meeting between
friends,
lovers, and even business partners is acceptable and appropriate at any
time of
the day or night, where in American culture an initial meeting might
typically
be for afternoon/evening drinks in a lounge catering to those seeking
anonymity, a sexually encouraging environment, and the conjugation of
elements
propitious to such an environment (smoking, decor, lighting, music, a
compliant
barman, and other similarly disposed patrons), the Parisian-style
café
is an open and often gleaming public place, where the high prices of
the menu
allow for the sort of lingering meaningful conversation may require.
However,
one might know that in postmodern São Paulo, such cafés
are often
typically located in shopping centers, where a good number of the
customers are
taking a break from shopping or waiting for a movie program to begin
(to be
sure, there are also many traditional type cafés that pre-exist
the
shopping centers). But these clients do not interfere with those for
whom the
café is a good site for the opening moves in a tryst, even
though in
Vila Madalena a bar might be far more suggestive..
The title of this story has
also another important resonance for the
There is a certain fantasy
quality about "Too Late for Coffee" that is in delightful contrast
with the hard-edge material nature of life in the city, where the
constant
struggle for survival allows little room for flights of fancy. Yet in
this
strip the entire story is premised proleptically on a tardy scheduled
encounter
that was never programmed in the first place. The initial panels show
the
protagonist standing on the corner of Avenida Angélica and
Avenida Higienópolis,
in the upper-middle class section of Higienópolis in the larger
district
of Consolação in central
There ensues the expected
stages of negotiating a dialogue--as much physical as verbal--between
them, as
she invites him to share a taxi with her, despite his protestations
that he
does not even know her name. As the protagonist grapples with how to
make sense
of this encounter, we see the lettering on her skimpy top, Sein und
Zeit (Being
and Time), the famous Heideggerian existentialist injunction about the
necessary contextualization of being within a time frame, of existence
as a
historical proposition. This is certainly the case with regards to
"Late
for Coffee." Although time in the chronological sense is here inverted,
such that one is late even before an encounter has (could possible have
been)
programmed, it is within the time frame set up by the woman's
appearance that
the sudden being of the two individuals, as far as their existing for
each
other in a reciprocal relationship, occurs. They do not exist for each
other
outside this chance encounter and the inverted chronology the woman
sets in
motion, a fact reflected in the detail that neither knows the other
person's
name: in human societies, one's name is the fundamental anchor of
being, the
mode by which one is most named by the world.
In strips of a more romantic
persuasion, the anomalies of the encounter here would work themselves
out in
favor of a positive relationship derived from the quirkiness of what,
in
retrospect might be viewed as the woman's effective come-on toward a
highly
presentable man standing alone on an upscale street corner, checking
his watch
as though he had been stood up by someone else. In another fanciful
twist, the
taxi driver leaves them on a corner featuring both a café and a
bar, and
a conversation between them ensues as to whether it is too late in the
day for
a coffee or too early for a beer (37). Of course, in a Parisian-style
café, either is available, but the disjunction is necessary here
to
represent the continued negotiation still necessary between the two.
The
protagonist suggests compromising by going across the street to an
ice-cream
parlor, and in response to the woman's question "What flavor," answers
"ice cream comes in many
flavors... / ...just like life"(38) As they walk the neighborhood,
eating
their respective cones, the process of negotiating their relationship
moves
into high gear, revolving around what each is looking for. This
exchange, with
longer panels involving the segmented and interlocking dialogue
balloons that
is a Moon-Bá trademark also allows for a suggestion of the
panorama of
the city: it is sustained in the garden city, the appropriate context
for
what may
become a fulsome amorous idyll, rather than the hard-scrabble cacophony
that is
the São Paulo the majority of its inhabitants experience.
Being in terms of the
engagement with the other comes to a head when the woman is willing,
after all,
to confess that "I'm not myself
anymore. / Not without you" (42)
When a black cat crosses
their path, it provides the opportunity for further reflections that
end,
without an element of sappy sentimentality, on how the intertwined
roots of
trees are as though they were holding hands (45). All of this provides
the
authors with the opportunity to pursue the controlling setting of an
idyll in
the making that would appear now to be a given fact, as the lovers kiss
against
the backdrop of the neighborhood (with a majestic tree prominently
displayed).
The movement of the graphic focus from the cityscape in general (which
we
briefly see as when the two first sit side-by-side in the taxi) to
privileged
neighborhood streets, lined with lush vegetation in a way that is not
immediately typical of the most living spaces in São Paulo
(which may,
however, have the backdrop of distant green-laden hills), enhances the
fantasy
quality of the story. It is, therefore, not surprising that the idyll
cannot
last, cannot be definitively forged. The physical reality of the city
reemerges
with the street sign announcing Rua Purpurina, in the equally upscale
area to
the west of Consolação, Vila Madalena. A bird perches on
the
street sign, and the expression on the separate faces of the would-be
lovers
sees it as more of a bad omen than the black cat. The woman announces
she must
leave, that is "You're late./ You lost your chance to fall in love with
me" (51). When he asks what it is that she feels within her heart, she
says "A memory" (51) and walks on.
In the final panel of the
strip, the protagonist is seen, his back to the audience, facing the
broad
panorama of the complex built environment of the cityscape:
skyscrapers, phone
lines, light posts, intersections, the extended descending slope of the
street.
Where in the opening panel, we see him from the front in a
circumscribed
neighborhood space, he is now cast, so to speak, upon the ocean of the
city.
"Late for Coffee" is proleptic in the sense that the finale of the
story is announced from the outset, and the narrative works towards its
confirmation. In a more romantic narrative, putting the world back
together in
such a way that, whatever the initial reverses may have been (and here,
as has
been noted, there is the literal reverse of cause-and-effect
chronology), love
triumphs in the end, with the entire setting devolving into a pathetic
fallacy
that supports the amorous denouement. But there is nothing romantic
about the
way in which Moon and Bá view life in
Notes
(1). According to Smylie (505), Eisner is to be credited with inventing the term graphic novel to characterize his widely acclaimed A Contract with God (1978) (see also Eisner's various discussions of this narrative form).
(2). The Wikipedia entry for "graphic novel" is illustrated by an image from the cover of Eisner's 1978 A Contract with God, certainly a benchmark for the best of the genre.
(3). The aforementioned Wikipedia entry states:
Graphic novels are typically bound in longer and more durable formats than familiar comic magazines, using the same materials and methods as printed books, and are generally sold in bookstores and specialty comic book shops rather than at newsstands.
This statement regards the sales venue of the graphic novel that is part of what makes it particularly urban, since bookstores and specialty comic book shops are essentially found only in urban settings.
(4). Such as those pioneered by Classics Illustrated as early as the 1940s; much equivalent production is available in Spanish and Portuguese. A notable example signed by Moon and Bá is their elegant version of Machado de Assis's famous short story, O alienista (1881). The Moon-Bá version appears in a series titled Grandes Clássicos em Graphic Novel; note the use of the English term rather than the reasonable Portuguese cognate romance gráfico, although the latter term is used for an entry on the graphic novel in the (quite inferior) Wikipedia in Portuguese entry.
(5). It would appear from their interview with Shook that the text was written originally in English, rather than translated from the Portuguese (45).
(6). I note, however, that a modest about of work by
(7). Also of considerable importance in the Moon-Bá oeuvre are their illustrations for Shane L. Amaya's four volumes Roland--Days of Wrath (1999), based loosely on the French epic La Chanson de Roland (mid-twelfth century) and winner of the 1999 Xeric Foundation Grant. Moon-Bá have also collaborated with Amaya in the episodes of the anthology Gunned Down (2005), Brazilian versions of stories of the Old American West. PUB: Terra Major.
(8). My colleague Isis Costa McElroy has pointed out to me that the intersecting discourses of the characters in these strips, with the abundant use of ellipses signifying reticence in full articulation and expectation for the other to complete the though, are typical of online chat. It would be entirely reasonable for Moon-Bá to have an interest in such a typically contemporary urban phenomenon.
(9). There is a problem with the English translation here: ". . .until you bumped into that girl on your way to the bathroom... ... / ... and dropped her drink" (56 and 61) the unspaced ellipses are in the text, and the forward slash indicates the transition from one speech balloon to another. One assumes that the underlying Portuguese is equivalent either to "and made her drop her drink" or (knocked her drink out of her hand).
(10). Since, generally speaking, men in
(11). One must note at this point that the sexual politics represnted in this and other Moon-Bá strips reflects a considerable degree of sexism that one must assume characterizes the social milieu being portrayed.
(12). Although in the strip "qu'est-ce que c'est," which takes place in Paris and deals with violence on the subway, the combined narrative voice of the two protagonists states "We live in a much more violent city, in Brazil... / ...but no matter how violent it may get, it's home. It's where we belong" (74). This utterance does provide a singular, anchoring identity for the urban space of the strips: it is identity specific because it is one's own. But such a solipsistic determination does not substitute for any sort of specific characterization of a uniquely remarkable space.
(13). According to Shook's interview, Moon-Bá are now preparing a second volume of De:Tales (45).
References
Amaya, Shane L. et al. Roland:
Days of Wrath. Santa Barbara:
Terra Major, 1999.
Borges,
Jorge Luis. "Borges y yo." Obras completas. Buenos
Aires: Emecé, 1974. 808.
Cirne,
Moacy. História e crítica
dos quadrinhos brasileiros. Rio de Janeiro: FUNARTE, 1990.
Eisner,
Will. Comics and Sequential Art.
Eisner, Will. Graphic Storytelling.
Foster, David William. From Mafalda to Los
supermachos: Latin
American Graphic Humor. Boulder:
Lynne Rienner, 1989.
Literatura em qudrinhos no
Brasil: acerevo da
Biblioteca Nacional. Moacy Sirne
et
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