When I finished the script for the first chapter of Brazil’s Childhood, I was very disturbed. After all, I had to imprint in my characters an extremely macho voice. In that world 500 of years ago, women, at least the ones imported from Europe, were seen as goods, a means of perpetuating one’s lineage. This was a concept that annoys me, because when one sees another person as an object, the object becomes easily disposable. The most disturbing is, however, that until today there are men that see women in a similar way to that of the characters I created for this chapter. When we think of the past, we tend to think that the world has evolved. But it is way easier to list the technological advances than the social ones. Certain values may be so rooted in our education that they may haunt us to this date. I hope that we prepare a better world for those who are still to come in this world. There are days, however, that visions as limited as I tried to imprint on my HQ come back and haunt us full on.

Thus, I hope that, in the future, when people look back at our civilization, they deem us primitive. Not because of prejudice, though, but because the world will have truly evolved. This is the kind of thing that I think when I do my job, be it on a comic strip, on a short HQ, or even on a graphic novel. Furthermore, a project like Brazil’s Childhood is something inevitably reflexive. At least for me.

When speaking about a particular historical period, it seems easy to use our contemporary view. We decode past worlds with current values. This is, however, not reliability. It is a fact that we can never portray other times like it truly was. The memories of just a few years ago betray us, imagine trying and assembling places, people and dialogs through mere fragments of information we can consult in the books! Perhaps, the hardest part in this process of reinvention of the past is to place the right voice on each character. I do not need to agree with my characters, but I need to give them the highest veracity possible. I need you to believe in them.

In the first chapter of Brazil’s Childhood, we travelled to a place in the second half of the sixteenth century. That was a more pragmatic world with a different sense of morality. People who needed to be brute, religious people who needed to impose some sort of order in the New World made up this place. Brazil has always been a mash up of contrasting realities. So says my character Gabriel: “This land defined by some the heaven and by others the hell?”

In order to learn more about the historical context of the fiction I created, please access here on the website the complementary text Sixteenth Century: the birth of Brazil.

What makes it complicated to reconstruct a house, a garment, or even the physical type of characters that make up such a clouded up period like the sixteenth century in Brazil is the lack of reliable reports about what was there to be found in here back then. What was left from the wooden and clay buildings of that period? Simply nothing. What do we know about the indigenous people that lived with the settlers? Very little. The few recordings made by the then Portuguese were not concerned like cartoonist Debret who only came here to register our landscapes and daily lives of the nineteenth century. The settlers were not exactly settlers per se, for back then there was barely any real interest in founding a colony in here. The reason for having Europeans living in our coast was basically to extract wood and keep possession of this territory. One of the few architectonical memories of this period was the Fortaleza dos Reis Magos, Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, initiated in 1598. Our project, however, is not about military feats of the official history, but about the life of the common people, especially that of the children.

Therefore, I opted for a more cartoon-like approach to represent especially the characters. We know that the then Brazil was a rough land for the settlers. Men and women with tough life stories that lived here under precarious conditions made it up. Therefore I aimed at representing their faces marked by the hardship, their crooked bodies, their simple clothing resembling rags. Cinema has given us some clues to assemble my “caricature” of the old days. Films like “Desmundo”, “Hans Staden” and even “1492 – the conquering of paradise” (not aired in Brazil, but is set in the same historical period) and “A Missão” helped me think how it felt like to be a dweller in Brazil around 500 years ago. From then on, the challenge was to find my form to represent them. As I choose a less “naturalist” language, I hand you the task to wear each character, to imagine their textures, scents and paths. This way, we reconstruct together the people that might have truly existed.

The last Saturday, 12^th of September, the Gibiteca de Curitiba got crowded with guests that wanted to watch the workshop by José Aguiar, which marked the official release of the first chapter of the comics. The public that was there travelled through the interactive possibilities in our webcomic, though the career and new projects of the author and especially through the importance of rescuing and discussing Brazil’s History from the perspective of the childhood.

Those who turned up also received a free pressed sample from a magazine preview of our project. We, at Quadrinhofilia, thank Gibiteca coordinator Maristela Garcia for hosting us once again in her venue. We also thank Fundação Cultural de Curitiba and Caixa Cultural for the incentive that enabled this project to come true.

We immensely thank each of our present friends, the interested, the team of the project, and everyone that turned that night into a historical event! In November, we are going to be at FIQ, International Comics Festival, promoting our webcomic! By the way, have you read the first chapter? Follow us every month, after all the journey has just begun!

Write down in your agenda! On Saturday, 12th September, we are going to travel through time with the official release of the first webcomic chapter “Brazil’s Childhood”, by José Aguiar!
If you come, you will receive a free pressed sample of a magazine preview of our project. What’s more, you will be able to buy other books published by Quadrinhofilia at a promotional price specially thought for this occasion!
Do not miss this historical event!

Service: Launch of the webcomic Brazil’s Childhood
When: Saturday, 12th September 2015, at 7pm
Where: Gibiteca de Curitiba / Solar do Barão
Rua Carlos Cavalcanti 533 – centro – Curitiba
f. 41-3321-3250

Program:
7pm: Worshop with José Aguiar about the project Brazil’s Childhood.
9pm: Autograph session.
* the magazine preview Brazil’s Childhood will be distributed for free. Sample numbers are limited.
Further information:
www.quadrinhofilia.com.br
www.ainfanciadobrasil.com.br

Brazil, nineteenth century, a country has just been born and a page of a book too!
Our journey through time starts on 12th September! Coming soon: a 6-chapter saga.

Fernanda Baukat, José Aguiar and Claudia Regina B. Moreira, many months ago, at the end of the first meeting about this project.

Hello! This is the first post of this blog. I intend to tell a little bit of the creation process of the project Brazil’s Childhood. I believe it is a little complicated for me to tell exactly when this idea was born. However, my interest for childhood was certainly born together with my first son. Ever since, images, flavours, scents, it is, sensations from my own childhood, have been vivid in my mind. To watch a child grow is to open a gate to an inner child that had been asleep. To see myself in the small things that your son does is to resuscitate neurons that you didn’t even know existed. This is the ludic and delicious part of the thing.

The other side of the coin is to have to deal with social issues. From the family expectations to sexist issues such as wearing blue or pink. Then there comes the worry with the exposition to child publicity or the search for a school, which has the proposal of inclusive learning. Believe me, it’s not easy to find one that doesn’t alienate or inserts my child into the mass. Yet, the school needs to be in a place near our home and the fees must fit our budget.

I believe in the importance of the ludic, that being a child is to have time to play. But many parents demand from educators, even in a kindergarten, that their kids are prepared to face a competitive world. For them, the earlier you teach literacy to a child, the better. The better they dance the choreography and sing the stereotyped song, the more satisfied they get. When I saw myself with insights so different from as to what childhood is, I slowly started to question myself about how we got to this current state.

In the past few years, be it due to the political and economical scenario, the World Cup or the Olympics, Brazil has become an occurring topic for discussion worldwide. Football and Carnival, of course, have been on the spotlight of the media. Not to mention Protests and corruption. These are the common places when the topic is Brazil. I believe that, over here, we are living a moment of deconstruction, to reflect so that, who knows, we create a better country for our children. Therefore there is so much tension, ideology conflict, and conservative views clashing against the new ones. We’re crossing a period of transition that may take us to new paths or bring back old ghosts. These are things that we had forgotten, that we deemed out-dated, but that knock ever so strongly on our doors. It’s time for us to rediscover ourselves.

There is even curiosity, by those who live abroad, to learn more about the Brazil of today. There is curiosity over there, but there is the need over here, I believe. Since we are not very used to treating our memory very well, let alone revisiting our history so we can understand who we really are. This project was born from a long elaboration of questions and investigation on the different versions of what it is to be a child. Come and follow me in this journey through time. Welcome on board!