April fools
New pens, old comics.
April is usually a month filled with things. It is the dawn of spring and pollen and grass allergies. It’s the month of sunshine, without excruciating heat. It’s also the month of rain, according to the popular saying “Abril, águas mil” (April, a thousand “waters”), but the impending climate change has put ancient wisdom under review.
April is also the month of the Carnation Revolution here in Portugal. We celebrate the 25th of April of 1974, the date when the fascist regime that ruled Portugal for over 40 years was overthrown by a military coup. It’s a political but also poetic celebration, take it as a yearly reminder that we have to actively build and protect our frail democracy.
Yet, also on the 25th of April, but in 1926 (exactly 100 years ago), this page of Little Nemo in Slumberland was published in the comic section of the Des Moines Sunday Register.
This original newspaper page, withered by time and aggressive Portuguese sunlight, made its way to my tiny living room. It depicts a circus scene, with horses, an elephant and all the recurrent characters jumping and twirling around in it. I got it in January 2020 at the Angoulême Comics Festival (R.I.P.), from a guy who was selling original pages and antiques. At the time, I was writing about early 20th-century comics in my master's thesis, and seeing this was way too overwhelming to even notice the date. I bought it, and he put it in a carton tube so I could take it with me to Portugal. I felt like I had found a treasure.
Last year, I moved to my current apartment/studio, but Little Nemo only moved in from my old room last month. I wanted to get a legit frame for it, with UV protection glass and everything, to compensate for the fact that it has been sitting in a cheap 5-euro plastic IKEA frame since I purchased it in 2020 (not my most clever moment).
And so, only last April, as I was reframing it, I finally noticed the date! Exactly 100 years after hitting the stands in Des Moines, this newspaper page makes it into a black wooden frame in an apartment/studio/basement on the Portuguese coast. I look at it and wonder if Winsor McCay, with his wild, colourful and inventive imagination, could have ever predicted this.
The coincidences don’t end here. On the back side of the page where Little Nemo was printed was the children’s section of the newspaper. In it, there’s a collection of fan letters sent by its young readers. I noticed these:
I wonder if Morris William Goodside kept drawing comics and cartoons, and I don’t know if Jean has a twin, but we do share the same birthday (December 4th).
I framed Little Nemo, knowing what was on the backside. And as the world changes faster than I can manage to keep up with, I look at this page from 1926 and hope that the things we are doing with passion, commitment and love will, somehow, last until 2126…
In April, we went to Poland. More specifically, Poznan and Warsaw. My graphic novel The Mongoose was translated into Polish thanks to a partnership between A Seita (my Portuguese publisher) and Timof (my Polish publisher). I was invited to present it at the Poznan Comics Festival, which happened over the weekend of 18 and 19 of April. Here’s what it looks like:
It’s intriguing to have your own book, something you wrote, in a language you don’t understand at all. Somehow, it’s relieving because I don’t feel the impending temptation of overreading it, looking for differences and questioning them.
It’s also getting weirder to present a book that has been finished since 2021 as if it were new. You have to find new ways to relate to it, and your relationship with it and the narrative of its process keeps transforming every time you retell it in a book talk. In other words, it’s weird, but not detaching. If anything, it’s incredibly moving to see that the book is still alive and is reborn in every new translation, in every new read. This mongoose from my backyard has been in Canada, and now has travelled all the way to Poland.
After a heartwarming stay in Poznan, we went to Warsaw for ‘tourism’.
I bought a bunch of new pens there, and I was excited to put them to work. Two of them were good old Pentel brush pens, my weapon of choice during my late teens and early twenties. It felt good to get back to those after “growing out” of them during my recent pretentious “adult” years. Inspired by my boyfriend’s life choices, I was drawn to buy a Lamy fountain pen, and now I love drawing daily comics with it. I also used it in class to take notes while I talked to students, and I feel that a new level of respect was established with it, something that with my usual BIC ballpoint pen has never been possible.
And now that May has arrived, here’s what’s next:
I’m co-hosting a screening of Ghost World in Lisbon on May 15th, and I made fan art for it with my new pens that no one asked for.
Physical Education, the English translation of A Educação Física, is out by Pow Powan along with an extremely kind and dedicated review at The Comics Journal.
Next stop: TCAF in June! More on that soon…
Thanks for your interest, but now I have to get back to work.
Enjoy the day the best you can,
Joana
Loove love the drawing at the end<3
♥️