Book Review: Burning Down the House: Latin American Comics in the 21st Century.

 

reviewed by Maite Urcaregui

Laura Cristina Fernández, Amadeo Gándolfo, and Pablo Turnes, eds. 2023. Burning Down the House: Latin American Comics in the 21^st Century. New York: Routledge, 2023.  https://www.routledge.com/Burning-Down-the-House-Latin-American-Comics-in-the-21st-Century/CristinaFernandez-Gandolfo-Turnes/p/book/9781032148311 

Laura Cristina Fernández, Amadeo Gándolfo, and Pablo Turnes’ Burning Down the House: Latin American Comics in the 21^st Century (2023) is a welcome and worthy addition to the study of the “complex and multiple universe” of contemporary Latin American comics (Fernández et al., 2023: 1). The expansive collection includes thirteen chapters by fourteen contributors that discuss comics from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, México, Perú, Uruguay, and Spain. The editors recognize the difficulty, or what they call the “particular conundrum,” of writing about Latin America, which comprises many different national and cultural contexts (Fernández et al., 2023: 2). As they say, “while most Latin American countries have experienced similar political and economic processes, these have been filtered by the particular characteristics, history, social qualities and economic realities of each country” (Fernández et al., 2023: 2). The editors’ introduction thus begins by reviewing the similar and particular political and economic realities of Latin America in the late 20^th and early 21^st century: the failures of neoliberal governments in the 1990s and early 2000s; the rise of the “pink tide” of populist Leftist governments between 2002 and 2015; and the contemporary turn to centrist, right-wing, and alt-right governments. These political pendulum swings have coincided with various economic crise--from austerity measures to overspending to the neocolonial influence of the Global North--which have in turn exacerbated social inequalities and unrest.

“How does this political and economic process impact our topic: comics?” the editors ask (Fernández et al., 2023: 5). Well, in response, Latin American comics have proliferated, a growth that “often clashes with the economic reality of Latin American graphic production, made within an increasingly precarious context” (Fernández et al., 2023: 5). Fernández, Gándolfo, and Turnes further describe this growth, saying:

Twenty-first-century Latin American comics are deeply plural in its inspirations, subjects, drawing styles, political/social concerns and formats. At the same time, its evolution in this century has been marked by the emergence of three phenomena, often articulated with each other: the Internet as a means of publication and publicity; the graphic novel as a privileged format and organizer of the narrative; and, finally, the inclusion of the comic in state-supported cultural and educational projects (Fernández et al., 2023: 5).

With these three phenomena front of mind, the collection offers vital insights about the development of Latin American comics that speak to the evolution of comics in the 21^st century more broadly. Comics have long been intertwined with the construction of national identity, for better or worse, and the rise of the graphic novel in the latter half of the 20th century and the Internet at the turn of the 21^st century has drastically changed comics at the levels of form, content, production, and circulation. It is this attention to how comics respond to political and economic changes that makes Burning Down the House essential reading for all comics scholars

Burning Down the House is split into two sections that focus on “two main axes: politics, protests and memories on the one hand and gender and sexual dissidences on the other” (Fernández et al., 2023: 1). Part One: Politics, protest and memory “concerns itself with the different ways in which comics and graphic novels have dealt with the Latin American past, with the remembrance of lost struggles toward social justice and with newer processes of social protest which are reshaping the political landscape of our continent” (Fernández et al., 2023: 11). Contributor Hugo Hinojosa Lobos perhaps best sums this up when he describes “the clash between a discourse from history and another articulated from memory,” in his chapter on social protest comics in response to Chile’s 2019 “social outburst” (Hinojosa Lobos, 2023: 120). Chilean comics artists, Hinojosa Lobos argues, created a visual archive of the social outburst that acted as “a historical document and a testimony of a collective memory,” one that challenged official national narratives (Hinojosa Lobos, 2023: 129). Comics as a form of collective memory is a through-line that connects the chapters in Part One, especially Laura Nallely Hernández Nieto’s chapter on how comics remember the 1971 and 2012 student movements in México and Elena Masarah Revuelta and Gerardo Vilches Fuentes’ comparative analysis of the politics of memory in Chilean and Spanish comics that depict dictatorship. Another important contribution of Part One is its attention to histories of enslavement, anti-Blackness, and Black liberation in Latin America--histories that often get White-washed or erased under the colonial framework of mestizaje. Both Marilda Lopes Pinheiro Queluz’s chapter “Between comics and memories, other stories of Brazil” and Ivan Lima Gomes’ chapter “Black visualities in Brazilian comics: a historical overview” take up Afro-Brazilian comic artist Marcelo D’Salete’s Angola Janga (2017), a graphic novel about the establishment of the “Quilombo dos Palamares,” one of the largest Maroon settlements of formerly enslaved peoples in seventeenth-century Brazil. Lima Gomes’ chapter offers an especially powerful analysis of how Afro-Brazilian comics artists draw on “the potency of Black visual culture in comics” to resist historical erasure and to picture the complexities of Black life and liberation on the page (Lima Gomes, 2023; 115).

Part Two: Genre and sexual dissidence “deals with the way comics and graphic novels in Latin America have incorporated the demands for more diversity, for female and sexually diverse authors and for a representation in which they are present” (Fernández et al., 2023: 13). Jorge Sánchez’s chapter on Argentinian artist Nacha Vollenweider’s Notas al pie (2017) and Chilean artist Vicho Plaza’s Las sinventuras de Jaime Pardo (2013) problematizes the disembodied, authoritative narrator that has dominated documentary comics and comics criticism. As Sánchez argues, the discontinuous temporalities of migration and memory represented in these comics fundamentally “affect the presented bodies, turning them into precarious witnesses” (Sánchez, 2023: 151). Sánchez’s chapter significantly contributes to and complicates understandings of graphic embodiment and visual witnessing, two areas of scholarship that have surged since Hillary Chute’s influential work in Graphic Women (2010) and Disaster Drawn (2016). Janek Scholz examines the possibilities and failures of comic artivismo in the face of “the vulnerability of the trans community, above all for trans women of color and for elderly trans people” (Sánchez, 2023: 215), in a chapter that builds on Darieck Scott and Ramzi Fawaz’s formulation of comics as “as queer orientation devices” (Scott and Fawaz, 2018: 203). Jasmin Wrobel’s chapter, which traces a genealogy of “comics made by women and developed in the Peruvian fanzine circuit,” is one of my favorites in this section and will leave you with a rich reading list. Marcella Murillo’s chapter crucially critiques the misrepresentation of Chola (mixed race Indigenous women) mothers, daughters, and heroines in Bolivian theatre and comics. As Murillo argues, male and non-Indigenous creators often create fictional Chola characters are that conform to the nationalist project of mestizaje and contribute to marginalization of real Chola populations. Overall, the collection’s attention to multiple forms of difference and dissidence—gendered, sexual, and ethnoracial—resists the mythology of mestizaje and privileges perspectives that have often been marginalized within Latinidad.

Laura Cristina Fernández, Amadeo Gándolfo, and Pablo Turnes’ Burning Down the House: Latin American Comics in the 21^st Century is an ambitious collection, not only in its geographic and cultural scope but also in its central claims and contributions. The chapters speak to the shared histories of (neo)colonialism, imperialism, colorism, racism, neoliberalism, and political repression and resistance that shape Latin America while discussing the countries, cultures, and comics at hand with incredible detail, nuance, and specificity. Speaking to some of these connections in their introduction, the editors, citing Waldo Ansaldi and Verónica Giordano, understand Latin America “as a totality” that “is really composed of many diversities” (Ansaldi & Giordano, 2012: 25; Fernández et al., 2023: 3). In many ways, that is just what they have created in their collection, a body of scholarship through which we might begin to approach the totality of Latin American comics and unravel the many diversities therein.

References

Ansaldi, Waldo, and Verónica Giordano. 2012. América Latina: La construcción del orden Vol. 1. Buenos Aires: Ariel.

Fernández, Laura Cristina; Amadeo Gándolfo, Amadeo; and Pablo Turnes, eds. 2023. Burning Down the House: Latin American Comics in the 21^st Century. New York: Routledge.

Scott, Darieck, and Ramzi Fawaz. 2018. “Queer about Comics.” American Literature. 90 (2): 197-219.

 

Maite Urcaregui (she/they) is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San José State University. Her research and teaching explore Latinx and multiethnic American literatures and comics through feminist, queer, and critical race theories and histories. She is co-editor, with Fernanda Díaz-Basteris, of Latinx Comics Studies: Critical and Creative Crossings, forthcoming from Rutgers University Press.

Book reviews: Angeli: 50 anos de humor & Cartoons do ano 2022

reviewed by John A. Lent

António Antunes. Angeli:  50 anos de humor. Lisbon:  Documenta, 2023. 128 pp. ISBN  978-989-568-091-7.

 

Bárbara Reis, José António Lima, and António Antunes. Cartoons do ano 2022. Lisbon:  Documenta, 2023. 130 pp. ISBN  978-989-568-092-4.

It is not that common that a city commits itself to advancing and honoring the cartooning profession as does Vila Franca de Xira in Portugal. I can think of a few, such as San Antonio del Los Baños in Cuba, the village of St. Just in France, and Kyrenia in Cyprus, the latter depending on who holds the mayor’s position.

One of the features that stands out with Vila Franca de Xira is its publication of catalogues and anthologies that come out regularly on high quality paper, beautifully designed, and with both Portuguese and English language essays and captions. Responsible for curating the Cartoon Xira annual exhibition and supervising resultant publications is local cartoonist António Antunes, with strong support of Fernando Paulo Ferreira, current city mayor, as well as Bárbara Reis and José António Lima.

Two books, each of about 130 pages, were published for the year 2022; one was the annual cartoons of the year, the other a collection of the works of an honored cartoonist. The 2022 annual was broken into themes, namely, “Here Come the Russians!” “Absolute Governance,” “Marcelo-Rebelo’s Way of Acting,” “Cover up the Sun and the Sieve,” “Brazilian Brasil,” “Make America Great Again,” “Is the Horizon Red?” “…And God Saved the Queen,” “In the Name of the Lord,” and “A Window to the World.” They dealt with Putin, Trump, Xi Jinping, Portugal’s election and President Marcelo, the turmoil of air traffic in Portugal, Brazil, China’s effort to control the Covid-19 virus pandemic, the succession of three prime ministers of Britain in 2022, pedophilia and the Catholic Church, women protestors in Iran, greenhouse effect and climate change, salty consumerism, economic depression, and the energy crisis. Each section was introduced by a bi-lingual essay. For the most part, the 100 works were hard-hitting and easy to grasp quickly, the mark of a successful cartoon. A few were not.

Honored in the second volume is Angeli (Arnaldo Angeli Filho), the fourth Brazilian cartoonist so designated; the others being Osmani Simanca (actually born and raised in Cuba) in 2022, Cau Gomez in 2020, and Loredano in 2010. The 67-year-old Angeli is especially known for bringing out Chiclete com banana (Banana Bubblegum) in 1983, one of Brazil’s most important adult comic books. Many of Angeli’s pictured cartoons paint a pessimistic view of the world, concentrating on poverty, violence, injustice, blood baths, homelessness, war, racism, global warming, corruption, slave labor, the wide split between the haves and have-nots, pollution, and death. They are not drawings that elicit a giggle; rather, they provoke thought and perhaps anger and shame.

These catalogues are definitely worth having, studying, and saving as information resources, entertainment, and collectibles.

 

Meet the Quadrinhopédia, a Brazilian Comics Biographical Dictionary Database

 by Lucio Luiz

Quadrinhopédia is an independent database dedicated to publishing biographies of artists, writers, editors, journalists, researchers, comic shop owners, curators of events, and other professionals who are involved in Brazilian comics. Its name refers to the term “Quadrinhos,” which means comics in Brazilian Portuguese. Each entry is linked to a classification, or Terminologia, so one can search for all editors, for example.

The site debuted on May 10, 2023 with 850 entries, but with the intention of adding new bios and expanding existing ones. The main inspiration was the Dutch Lambiek Comiclopedia.However, I’ve chosen to order alphabetically by given name is because, culturally, in Brazil, it is more common for people to call each other, even famous people, this way (when someone will look for Mauricio de Sousa, for example, rarely will look for "Sousa, Mauricio de" unless it's an academic work). I know that the formally correct practice is to alphabetize using surname, but I pondered what would be easier for Brazilian readers in general and I took some other Brazilian cultural encyclopedias’ practices as a model. However, I’m planning an Anglophone page with a list by family name parallel to the main list as a cross-reference.

 

The site also features Brazilian artists who work with American comics, such as Mike Deodato (one of the first Brazilian to became famous in US in the 1990s, and whose father Deodato Borges was one of the great names in Brazilian comics), Ed Benes, Adriana Melo, Ivan Reis, Rafael Albuquerque, Rod Reis, Gabriel Bá, Fábio Moon, Cris Peter, and several others -- there are a lot of Brazilians working in North American comics.

And the opposite is also true, with the inclusion of artists who were born in other countries, but developed a large part of their career in Brazil, such as André LeBlanc (Haitian), Eugenio Colonnese (Italian), Rodolfo Zalla (Argentine), Jayme Cortez (Portuguese) and Malika Dahil (Moroccan), to name just a few.

 

The information comes from several sources: books, websites, newspapers, interviews and, in several cases, asking the artists directly. One thing about the Brazilian comics community is that, in general, there is great support and contact between artists, even between the "big" and "small" ones (for lack of a better expression).

I've been a Wikipedia editor since 2005 and have written more than a thousand articles related to Brazilian comics on the Portuguese Wikipedia (and a few also on the English and French Wikipedias). In Wikipedia, there is a (necessary) rigidity regarding the sources. However, many artists have sources that I know are reliable, but not according to Wikipedia's rules, so with Quadrinhopédia I have a little more "freedom" (but without giving up accuracy in research, which is something I take very seriously).

I'm the only person working on the site. The first 850 entries from the "debut," I have developed over the last four years in my spare time. But less than a week after the site launched, several people have already contacted me willing to collaborate. I was initially in doubt if it was worth publishing the site this way, but I realized that the chance of having collaborators would be greater if it already presented a "starting point."

This is not the first study of local creators of course. In Brazil, the first work that sought to compile biographies of comic artists was the book Enciclopédia dos Quadrinhos (Encyclopedia of Comics), written by journalist Goida and published by L&PM in 1990. The book had an updated edition in 2011 (this time with André Kleinert as co-author) with 536 pages and around 1,500 entries of comic artists from all over the world.

Between 1997 and 2004 there was a website, Gibindex, which had an encyclopedia of comic artists (from Brazil and abroad) with about 600 entries. It was created by historian Rubens AMSF, but today it can only be accessed through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine capture of it as it went offline in 2005. https://web.archive.org/web/20050211065132/http://www.gibindex.com/ *

More recently, in 2022, Noir published the book Grande Dicionário do Quadrinho Brasileiro (Great Dictionary of Brazilian Comics), by Gutemberg Cruz, focused on Brazilian comic book characters, with 416 pages and 1,035 entries.

On the internet, the main Brazilian database is Guia dos Quadrinhos (Guide of Comics) inaugurated in 2007 with information on all comic publications in Brazil, including data such as covers, authors, characters, original editions (in the case of Brazilian publications of international comics), etc. This site is collaborative and has more than a thousand users.

Quadrinhopédia, however, follows the Comiclopedia philosophy of not being open to wiki-style editing. Suggestions for correction or inclusion of new entries go through a team of researchers before being published.

The main objective of Quadrinhopédia is to help preserve and rescue the memory of Brazilian comics, in addition to promoting past and present artists in a completely democratic way.

 *Editor's note - this paragraph on Gibindex was added at the request of the author on May 23, 2023

 

Film Review: Bob Spit – We Do Not Like People by Cesar Cabral

Bob Spit – We Do Not Like People, Cesar Cabral. Coala Filmes, 2021.

Reviewed by Pedro Moura

Bob Spit is an hour-and-half stop-motion animation/feature documentary film directed by Cesar Cabral about Brazilian cartoonist extraordinaire Angeli. The film was awarded Best Feature at the Contrechamp section in the international animation festival of Annecy in 2021, a section which is “dedicated to,” in the words of Variety's Jamie Lang, “emerging talent from around the world and films that lie outside the mainstream.”

As the title reveals, the focus of attention is Bob Spit (originally “Bob Cuspe”), one of Angeli's most known characters from the 1980s. But it also threads the needle through the artist's oeuvre, his creative block, his aging, and a fair degree of nostalgia. This is a non-fiction project mixed with fiction, in which we'll slide through various degrees of remove from a purportedly “real” - stop-motion animation, documentary angles, the diegetic world of the character, historical contextualizations, fantasy, and so on.

Without wanting to rehash the discussion about the feasibility and pertinence of talking about “animated documentaries,” something that has been discussed by people far more informed than me, I believe that Bob Spit will nevertheless become a very good example of such an expanding field. Foremost, for being an exploration of interpretative frameworks larger and more profound that a supposedly “objective” or “journalistic” approach. We literally delve into Angeli's psyche, but in an oblique manner, so instead of having clear-cut decisive conclusions, we are rather invited to keep on thinking about the issues for ourselves.

The film follows two major storylines. On the one hand, we have an interview set in Angeli's apartment, where he clearly answers an interlocutor sitting off camera, discussing his work, career and life, showing archival material, and sometimes accessing third parties that talk about him. Angeli finds himself in a bind, and refuses to be stuck to older glories. So he resorts to recycling a strategy and decides to kill off Bob Spit, as he did before with other characters.

On the other hand, we follow what seems to be a fictive roadtrip adventure. The titular character, Bob Spit, embarks on a journey, crossing a desert-like, post-apocalyptic landscape, in his quest to meet his creator, Angeli. After learning of the cartoonist's plan to kill him – through the “prophecies” of tattered pages of the comics he stars in – Bob vows to take vengeance on his own creator.

We must always bear in mind that when we’re speaking of this whole interview setting, we are referring to a construction. After all, everything is depicted through three-dimensional puppets and backgrounds. The artificiality of the interview is made “natural” by making visible the presence of the filming crew, not only through dialogue but also through metatextual techniques such as video framing, timestamps, and other materiality traces. But if animated documentaries allow us to go well beyond indexicality, some of the less conventional techniques followed by Cabral bring about other issues, that keep us off balance and therefore alert at all times.

For instance, there are momentary “glitches” that allow us to see the actual photographic footage of the interviews Cabral and his crew did with Angeli, which can be seen as the supposed scaffolding of the final animated plane. So the film never leaves us in a continuously comfortable state of watching what unfolds. We are permanently jarred back and forth in these dimensions. According to Annabelle Honess Roe, “the use of animation as a representational strategy broadens the potential of documentary by expanding the range of what can be shown and told” (Animated Documentary). And what is shown and told in Bob Spit goes well beyond the Brazilian cartoonist's take on his own work.

Somewhat like the Quay Brother's Street of Crocodiles, it's as if we have access here to multiple levels of reality and existence – Angeli's “normal life” and Bob Spit's imaginary adventure storyworld –, but we do not have a precise map of how one level relates ontologically to the other. It would be easy to say that the latter is an extension of Angeli's “imagination” or “stories,” but it gets more complicated than that, in a crooked Lynchian logic sort of way. Nevertheless, there is a certain coherence and fluidity to this patchwork, as the director dovetails the artist's life, thoughts and art into a continuous unfolding thread. Mostly, this stems from the overall framing of Angeli's voice taking precedence over the whole narrative. At one point, someone asks Angeli if they can ask him a question. Angeli simply answers, “No.” Not because there are no questions to be asked or no answers to be given, but because we are always already within the discourse that makes up the whole text.

Notwithstanding, the projects allows for a number of shifting points of view. Apart from Angeli's speech, we go into the fictive underworld of Bob Spit, even if his adventure is mostly framed by the Kowalski twins. But, as mentioned above, we also have access to Angeli's wife Carol, fellow cartoonist Laerte (yet another giant from the 1980s, still extremely active today and admired by Angeli) and the ex-editor/taxi driver, which has a few words of choice about the author. Later on, other characters appear, bringing other types of “glitches” into the mix.  

Arnaldo Angeli Filho was born in São Paulo in 1956, and belongs to a generation of self-taught artists who were heavily influenced by the preceding golden age of Brazilian illustrators, comics artists and cartoonists, upholding thus a genuine national tradition, even if mixing it with the most diverse sources of foreign material. In Angeli's case, the influence of Robert Crumb is unmistakable, specifically his ability to come up incessantly fully formed characters, many of which would become recurrent. From the hippie duo Wood & Stock to the sexual deviant Rê Bordosa and, of course, the anti-social yet shrewd commentator Bob Cuspe. 

Most, if not all of these characters were born in the daily strips he created in the early 1980s in the pages of the Folha de S. Paulo, in which he had been working as a very politicized and combative editorial cartoonist since 1973. Around that same era, his interest for comics proper lead him to several editorial projects, thanks to a collection put out by the publishing house Circo, called Chiclete com Banana (“Gum with Banana;” really, I'm not kidding, it's not “of”). Its success was so great that the publishers decided to give Angeli a regular magazine. This also heralded an outstanding number of influential titles presenting a powerhouse new generation of cartoonists, including Laerte and Glauco, with whom Angeli would form an informal trio for years to come.

Chiclete com Banana would feature then a plethora of characters, including the “pervert” variant of the two-kid team trope Skrotinhos to con man/spiritual leader Rhalah Rikhota, both of whom appear in this very same film. But many, many others would be penned by Angeli, all of them hilarious stock characters very much related to the cultural specificities of the city of São Paulo (arguably the cultural capital of Brazil, or at least so “Paulistanos” like to believe).

This is not the first time Angeli is involved with filmmaking. In 2006 Otto Guerra adapted another character-driven strip into Wood & Stock: Sex, Oregano and Rock'n Roll. Cesar Cabral directed first a short based on Rê Bordosa in 2008, and in 2017 launched a television series called Angeli the Killer, in which he adapted many of the cartoonist's stories, brought his characters to life and conducted (and animated in stop-motion) interviews. To a certain extent, Bob Spit, the movie, is an extension of that project. But it is also a simplification, as it attempts to create a more or less linear and organized structuring of its themes, instead of the more loose, hectic and even frantic pace of the tv series. 

Bob Spit brings a visual dynamic that was not extant in the original material: color, three-dimensionality and a certain lightness to it all. We should bear in mind that Angeli's original work was made out of heavy, “scratchy”, “dirty” hatchwork, very typical of a certain underground aesthetics. Coloring, and subdued, murky one at that, would come later. But Cabral's own capability for character design and construction, their dynamic movements, the framing and camera work makes up for a technically solid piece of work. Cabral’s use of an incredible variety of sounds sources, including “classic” Brazilian punk rock anthems of the 80s, creates nonetheless a seamless surface that eases the many transitions between planes and subjects. To watch a stop-motion character drawing on paper is an amazing experience, even if for the briefest of moments.

To be precise, while the main two storylines are depicted through stop animation techniques, there are other interpolated techniques, used as brief transition bumpers (but which sometimes are also used to convey further contextual information). In some of these, the animations made out of the strip's art – basically quickly superimposing several of the strips' panels, but judiciously choosing similar positions of the character— is superb. And these scenes are particularly good precisely because they do not aim to disguise their origins or bring up the idea that “animated cartoons” are better than the original drawn cartoons, but because they leave visually present the variegated materiality of the original newsprint, including within their transition effects.

While Angeli's more recent work is slightly more introspective, sometimes with the cartoonist drawing himself, and engaging, quite often with zen-like adages, his 1980s and 1990s work, from which this movie stems, was quite virulent, frank and adversarial. In a word, punk. But what is at stake in Bob Spit is not simply an adaptation of those stories. Angeli appears in his present age, preferring to stay home, listening to records, working alone and uninterrupted. And Bob Spit himself is not his old self, living in the busy streets of São Paulo. He looks slightly tired, living off the flesh of maimed mutant Elton Johns, unable to spit (his trademark move, and hence his name). The possibility of killing his creator is the only little spark of joy that seems achievable, and even that does not change his demeanor. To put it simply, neither creator nor created character are the personalities that they once were, and that most people remember. There may be a hint of nostalgia in making this documentary, but both Angeli and Bob Spit himself suffer no fools gladly and are willing to disabuse people of their expectations.

 

Another potentiality of the animated documentary underlined by Roe is its capacity to what she calls “pointing inwards,” i.e., the possibility of employing non-mimetic strategies that go beyond issues of verisimilitude and evocative planes that open up to more complex, less directly accessible emotional or inner mental states of the portraitee. In this case, many of the silences, hesitations and half-explored emotions by Angeli gain a body of their own in the imagetic translations.  While the film is not dealing with repressed memories or clear-cut traumas, as is the case of the world-famous case of Ari Folman's 2008 Waltz With Bashir, Bob Spit sometimes hints at the idea that the “road trip level” of Angeli's characters may correspond to a “sub-level” of Angeli's psyche. Angeli speaks (in the film, but also famously elsewhere) of his problems with alcohol, drugs and sexual behavior. After all, the Kowalskis, the Elton Johns and Bob Spit inhabit sewers, underground bunkers and tunnels beneath derelict urban landscapes (even though it’s filled with Easter Eggs, such as the curvy hill of Mara Tara’s thighs). They cross dilapidated and abandoned streets and roads, and when finally Bob emerges into Angeli's world, he seems to comes from below a sofa in which Angeli was sleeping. Were we watching that which Angeli was dreaming? They seem to touch each other briefly, but Angeli awakes. But soon enough, while on the elevator, a scene plays out a wonderfully staged crossing of worlds, as Angeli and Bob Spit finally meet each other. Characters rebelling against their creators is not necessarily new (Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell dates back to 1918), and neither is the clash of the different ontological worlds of creator and created (e.g. Grant Morrison's Animal Man, or even the 2006 Marc Forster's Stranger than Fiction), but there is something strangely satisfactory in watching an old familiar character conquering a different degree of autonomy in relation to both his author and audience, confirming his contrarian, punkish ethos.

 

 

For the people who are knowledgeable about Angeli's work and these characters, the film offers an opportunity to re-engage with, and re-interpret it all with hindsight. Is Bob's punkish verve, the smash-it-all, kicking-against-the-pricks, spit-on attitude still an answer to society's problems? To apathy? To the sure destruction of the world? To the idiocy that surrounds us? Now that we are older, that our backs hurt, and that we don't want to get around much anymore, we may think we don't have the same energy, sure. But deep inside, just as Angeli in the end leans over his window, above the anonymous streets below, and spits, we think to ourselves, as Bob Spit would have said, “Fuck, yeah!

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 23:2.

~~~~~~~~

Since this material will be unfamiliar to many of our readers, the following is from the movie's press release and a preview is on YouTube :

BOB SPIT - WE DO NOT LIKE PEOPLE is a stop-motion animation that mixes documentary, comedy and road-movie. It tells the story of Bob Spit, an old punk trying to escape from a post-apocalyptic desert that is actually, a purgatory inside the mind of his creator, Angeli, a cartoonist going through a creative crisis.The story is freely inspired by the life and work of one of the most celebrated Brazilian cartoonists of all times, Angeli, who became famous in the 70s by releasing political cartoons in the midst of Brazil’s military dictatorship. In the 80s, he migrated to daily strips, showing an acid sense of humor to represent Brazil’s society, day-to-day life and customs. Angeli had editorial success with his monthly magazine “Chiclete com Banana,” which sold over 120 thousand copies per edition. During his time, the cartoonist has created some of his most famous characters: the bohemian diva Rê Bordosa, the hippie pair Wood & Stock, and the punk Bob Spit.

DIRECTOR’S BIOGRAPHY

Cesar Cabral has a degree in Cinema through the Arts and Communication School - São Paulo University (ECA-USP). He began his career as a stop-motion animator in 1998 and co-founded the animation company Coala Filmes in 2000. He directed the stop-motion short films The Re Bordosa Dossier (2008), which won more than 70 awards in Brazilian and international film festivals, and Storm (2010) selected to many prestigious film festivals all around the world, such as Annecy, Hiroshima, Havana and Sundance. Cesar created and directed 2 seasons of the young adult stopmotion animated series Angeli The Killer, selected to 2018 Annecy Film Festival and broadcasted at Canal Brasil. Bob Spit - We Do Not Like People was awarded best feature at Contrechamp section in Annecy 2021.
 
With the voices of Milhem Cortaz, Paulo Miklos, Grace Gianoukas, André Abujamra, Laerte, Hugo Passolo, Angeli.

MILHEM CORTAZ does Bob Spit’s original voice. One of Brazil’s most exciting actors, he has played parts in films such as “Elite Squad”, “Elite Squad 2”, “Carandiru” and the DGA nominated "A Wolf at the Door." He has also voiced the character in the series “Angeli The Killer”
 
PAULO MIKLOS does the characters’ original voice for THE KOWALSKI BROTHERS, who live in the desert gathering pages of the “Chiclete com Banana” Magazine. When they meet Bob Spit, they encourage him to find Angeli.  A gifted actor and musician, he played in seminal Brazilian rock band “Titãs” and had striking parts in films and TV Series such as “O Invasor”, “Estômago” and “É Proibido Fumar”, “Sessão de Terapia” e “Os Normais.”

ANDRÉ ABUJAMRA does the characters’ original voice  of RHALAH RHIKOTA, a charlatan guru who had his fame and followers in the 80s. He is the mentor of the Kowalski brothers.  A musician, comedian and actor, Abujamra has a long story in Brazil’s pop rock scene. He was the composer of “Carandiru”, and has parts in films and tv shows such as “Estômago” and “A Grande Família”.
 
GRACE GIANOUKAS is Rê Bordosa’s original voice. RÊ is a junkie diva who was the most famous of Angeli’s characters. The cartoonist killed her in the 80s, and since then she is a lingering presence in his life. An actress, director, screenwriter and producer, she had several roles in theatre, TV and cinema. She is currently starring in the TV Globo soap opera “Orgulho e Paixão”.