A story and its many forms: interview with Marcello Quintanilha

Marcello Quintanilha is certainly the best known among contemporary Brazilian cartoonists in Europe. Translated into multiple languages, his stories do not resemble one another: from the psychological thriller Polvere di Vetro to the choral and social thriller Tungsteno, from biography to more intimate tales, Quintanilha’s stylistic and narrative research never seems to stop, even though some patterns can be found in all of its works, as the social narrative of Brazil as a central element of his poetics.
Ascolta, bellissima Marcia, the latest work published in Italy by Coconino Press, presented at Lucca 2022 and awarded Best Comic at Angouleme 2022, marks a further step in this constant evolution, as we have reported here. We had the chance to talk to the author not only about his work, but also about his career,his style and the relationship with his country.

Hi Marcello, thanks a lot for your time. Ascolta, bellissima Marcia arrives in Italy four years after your last work published in our country, Polvere di Vetro, and six years after the critically acclaimed Tungsteno. In those cases you were dealing with a tensed psychological thriller and a choral noir, respectively, now instead we have a tale that oscillates between tragedy and comedy and has also some romantic moments. How did Marcia’s story was born?
Ascolta, bellissima Marcia was born out of my intention to write a story about maternal love, through a mother who must make an extremely difficult decision to save her daughter. A decision that subverts her condition as a mother and for many years I have been building the structure of the story. Above all, I wanted the character to be able to make such a decision only after a personal transformation, provided by contact with a piece of art, in this case, the song she listen for the first time “Escuta, formosa Márcia”, an old modinha (lyrical popular song, with a strong emotional and bucolic appeal), because I really think that art has the capacity to transform lives, to put us in touch with the most intimate part of our humanity.
Likewise, the Brazilian police chronicle never leaves my field of vision and, like many other stories, Ascolta, bellissima Marcia is also based on a political plot.

How did you choose a female protagonist for this story and who is her character inspired by? How did you develop the relationship between her and her daughter Jacqueline, which is the real focus of the story?
Nothing is a mere choice. I never think about whether my characters will be men or women. They condense from the premises of the story itself, that is, the very structure of the story suggested a female protagonist.
The story is not based on any specific real event, although realities like those shown on the album are perfectly conceivable in a country like Brazil. Characters are usually inspired on real people, living or dead. I’m afraid Márcia is inspired on my own mother, while her face is inspired by someone who reminded me of the song that ended up giving the book its title. The song is the fundamental piece of the story, because it is thanks to it, to the contact that the character has with it, that her decision can be made.
I don’t see her as a strong woman, as has been so often said of her, but as a woman who didn’t have the opportunity to experience her own fragility, and yes, not only my mother, but countless women from the working class can identify with this particularity, and we all know that having the opportunity to experience our own fragility is the only philosophical question that really matters nowadays.
The relationship between mother and daughter is built somehow like a mirror. Jaqueline is the living portrait of her mother and I wanted to create a feeling of discomfort when both interact, because we often have the impression that Marcia is talking to herself when she argues with Jaqueline. Although at first the two seem very different, we will see that perhaps this is not entirely true.
I never judge my characters. Not even someone like Jaqueline. I leave them free to make the decisions they deem necessary and to bear the consequences of them.

In your career you have often changed genres, from thrillers to psychological stories, from drama to comedy, from stories set in the present to historical ones. What drives you to this continuous challenge of renewal and to range between so many types of stories?
Probably because I never think about genres when I write my stories. The characteristics of each one can place them in a certain genre or another, of course, but this is an afterthought, because the birth of each one is linked to experiences that I experienced in first person or were experienced by people close to me, converted into fictional dynamics, as well as in the connections that this set of experiences can have with the past from a cultural and social point of view.
So, in that sense, it’s extremely difficult to categorize my stories into a single genre. What would we say about Marcia? Thriller? Social history? Customism? Brazilian noir? Favela story? History? Honestly, I don’t know. And honestly, I don’t care. Because life is all that together.

In this story, you used a very particular style: the strokes of the faces and bodies are deliberately exaggerated; the table construction is clear but fluid, with non-regular vignettes and blurred contours; the colours are acid and have strong contrasts, really far from the realism you searched for in previous work. How did you decide to tell this story in this style?
I worked with a palette of just 28 colors, which have no correspondence with the real world. I intended to create a metaphor with the disconnection with reality that exists today in the world in general and in Brazil in particular. A disconnect that gives us clues as to why people like Trump or Bolsonaro were able to reach the highest positions in public administration.
In fact, each story determines the way in which it will be told, and from one album to another I find myself forced to relearn how to draw, relearn how to write, which always puts me in a minefield, in which I have no idea where I’m going.
With Ascolta, bellissima Marcia, I drew directly with the colors. The entire album is done digitally. There is no paper involved. Drawing with colors put me in front of a formal contingent that defined drawing in that way, let’s say “semirealistic”. Drawing with colors put me in front of a formal contingent that defined drawing in that way, let’s say “semi-realistic”, whose main characteristic is a balance between volume and form, both no more than suggested, and whose definition is expressed in a lacunary way, through an incomplete line, which exists only when it is indispensable as a defining agent.

One of the constant elements of your work is music, which is always very present in your stories. The very title Ascolta, Bellissima Marcia is taken from a very famous modinha, a musical form with roots as far back as the 18th century. What importance does music have for you in the process of creation and storytelling? And why did you choose such an ancient and classical musical genre?
Well, it used to be very famous in the debut of XIX century, but… not now!
The development of popular music throughout the 20th century, from the perspective of the record market, pushed this type of composition towards a more lyrical and less popular terrain, which is a shame, because I’m very interested in the roots of popular culture in Brazil and it’s impossible to investigate them without taking into account the lyrical influence on their formation, when the popular classes appropriated erudite European sources, re-signifying them from the perspective of African or Amerindian ancestry.
Music is everything to me, I’ve always been influenced by it, and I make a real effort to translate its rhythmic tension into a reading code, in the sense that I want the reading experience to be marked by an effect of musicality in the chain of words.

You have lived in Spain for many years, but your works are always set in Brazil, of which you always narrate various aspects of society. Can it be said that the genre of the story doesn’t matter, because the real protagonist of your tale is your country of origin?
No, it can’t, because the Brazil expressed in my stories is the Brazil that is with me, not the country in which I look for inspiration, not the country I want to turn into a protagonist, because the protagonism of my stories takes place within the human condition, a condition based on cultural paradigms from which I cannot get away, because they represent the series of factors that formed me as a human being. The idea of making the country a protagonist seems to me to be diametrically opposed to this basic premise, because a country necessarily develops autonomously, within its definition as a political-social entity, witch implies a distance between author and object that has never been in my perspective, because I never work from a distance.
On the other hand, such a profound representation of a social paradigm is not as common in the world of comics as it is in my stories, to the point that it was unknown to many people the fact that readers who were not familiar with the universe of Brazilian culture could identify with my narratives. Time, however, has demonstrated that there is no need for anyone to know or be close to Brazilian culture to be interested in my stories, because, as I said, they are based on the problematic of the human condition and no one needs to be familiar with a culture in concrete to identify with human issues.

How have you seen Brazil change in recent years and how has it been for you to filter this change through your stories?
The first major transformation I experienced was that of my birthplace, an old working-class neighborhood in the city of Niterói called Barreto, once a strong manufacturing region and an important trading port. With the displacement of the country’s economic axis from the 1960s onwards, in the wake of the construction of Brasília, the current capital of the country, Barreto began to lose economic importance and everything that I saw over two decades as I grew up in that environment, were factories closing their doors, the service sector being deactivated, cultural activities being emptied and nothing could be done. I think this made my work acquire an extremely nostalgic characteristic, in the sense of recreating an environment that I was unable to retain.
In a broader landscape, the country has been experiencing the results of the exercise of democracy, since from 1985 up to now, we are living the longest period of full democracy in our history, marked by military coups and political authoritarianism. Despite the mishaps of the continuous exercise of democracy, the population is becoming more and more aware of the responsibility for its decisions, which represents a significant change in relation to the beginning of redemocratization since 1989.
My work takes into account not only the socio-political transformations that I was able to witness, but also the specificities related mainly to the beginning of the republic, and the way in which man at the time related to his surroundings.

Brazilian comics are little known, at least in Italy. Which authors from the past do you think we should rediscover in Europe? Which are the most interesting new authors?
Undoubtedly Angelo Agostini (1843 – 1910), Flávio Colin (1930 – 2002), Renato Silva (1904 – 1981).
Nowadays, I would recommend Lourenço Mutarelli, Marcelo D’Salete and André Toral.

Since you are always ready to amaze with your stories, the final question is a must: do you already have the next one in mind? At least its genre?
No, I haven’t. Apparently it is going to amaze me too.

Interview realized by e-mail during January 2023

Marcello Quintanilha

Marcello Quintanilha was born in 1971 in Niterói. He currently lives in Barcelona. Self-taught, he became a professional cartoonist while still a teenager in the 80s, drawing horror and martial arts comics for the publisher Bloch. In the 90s he started publishing his comics in magazines such as General, General Visão, Nervos de Aço, Metal Pesado, Zé Pereira and Heavy Metal. In 1991 he received an award at the Ribeirão Preto Humour Salon. In the same year he was awarded at the 1st Bienal de Quadrinhos do Rio de Janeiro. He won another prize at the 2nd Bienal in 1993. In 1999 he won an award at the Salão Carioca de Humor. Also in 1999, he published his first comic strip: Fealdade de Fabiano Gorila, published by Conrad. At the time, Marcello Quintanilha still signed himself as ‘Marcello Gaú’. Conrad released two more of his albums: Saturday of My Loves (2009) and Public Souls (2011). In 2016 came international success with Tungsten (published in Italy Edizioni BD), winner of the Fauve Polar SNCF in Angouleme. In 2018 he published Powder of Glass, in 2019 Luzes de Niterói, a biography of his father, a football player in Niterói. In 2021 he published Listen, beautiful Márcia, which won the Best comic album award in Angouleme.