No one said it would be easy but here we are! My comic book was released this week in Italy by Neo Comics, a tattoed tentacle from Neo Edizioni - and check this out, brothers and sisters: you can buy La Grande Crociata and take another book for free! If you can’t read in italian, there it is a good reason and motivation to learn, so take the book and some lessons with my formidable partner Desi Alessandrini and her brilliant Corso Brancaleone. An italian combo!
It would be published in other countries, like my native Brazil? I don’t know. I hope so.
La Grande Crociata (The Great Crusade) was first published in Brazil in 2015 thanks to an intrepid joint venture of crowdfunding and the publisher Devaneio. With 80 pages, the book corresponds to the first part of the misadventure. Here we have some pics from this distant era at Itiban Comic Shop, the temple of comics in Curitiba, my hometown.
A lot happened, another lot didn’t, and now living in Italy I had the opportunity to resume working on the Crusade, so I reworked some portions from the first part and made the second part, resulting in this beautiful single volume with 200 pages and bigger format than its first incarnation.
The story is inspired by the real-maybe-legendary events known as Children’s Crusades. There are factual vestiges and a lot of gaps in this topic, so I took the opportunity to put even more gaps and turn the work of future historians more complicated.
When I was a kid I had some obsessions, like comics, the Stone Age, listening to the noises between radio stations, science fiction, horror movies, the USSR and the Communist Bloc, black beans, football, that song by Kraftwerk, feudal Japan, that song by Jean Michel Jarre, World Wars I and II, that song by Vangelis,the South America’s indigenous peoples, nuclear holocaust, the space race, trees, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, Carl Jung’s Red Book, etc - and the Middle Ages is one of the strongest obsessions in the list.
So after years of working as an illustrator for a lot of books, newspapers and magazines, just eventually having the chance to make some short comics and comic strips, I decided to take back this obsession.
In the next chapters of this newsletter I’ll write more about La Grande Crociata and other comics, drawings, music and related phenomena.