Livres Hebdo: You won the Fauve d’Or in Angoulême on March 19th. What does this award mean to you?
Marcello Quintanilha: I will not say that I am sad! Just being nominated was already a victory for me. In fact, I’m amazed. For an artist, receiving the Fauve d’Or is really reaching the top of his career. I didn’t think that a story with a Brazilian culture could receive this award.
Yet you address in your album universal themes such as love…
Certain themes and sentiments are indeed universal and may affect a non-Brazilian audience. I’m talking about love and the difficulty of relationships between humans. There is always an element of violence in relationships.
Love and violence run through your album, are the two inseparable for you?
In Brazilian society, it is impossible not to show violence. Especially in places where the state is not present like the favelas. I wanted to communicate about love, friendship and trust which are important values. But sometimes we have to make extreme choices in life. This is also what I wanted to talk about.
How do you work on the graphics of your characters?
I don’t have a particular style. My story determines the design. Some of my works are more in realism, there I propose an expressionist graphic design. I used 28 colors to work on this album. I wanted the reader to have a feeling of color explosion with all these tones. They are different from reality: Marcia has purple skin, the sky is green… I see it as a metaphor for our disconnection.
A disconnection from yourself?
A disconnect in everything. People struggle to find their place in the world. This is all the more true with economic crises. Brazilians or even those who live in South America are more affected: it is even more difficult for them to find their place in this world.
Would you say that your album has a political bias?
Not especially. I tell stories of real people and especially the working class. These are not biographies, but I am inspired by real things to make my fictions. For example, the physique of certain characters is inspired by people I know, the first name Marcia is that of a friend… The symbolism is stronger in fiction. Marcia and her daughter Jacqueline, for example, are very similar physically. It is as if the mother saw her daughter in herself.
Characters of strong women, people from poverty, or in the drawing, corpulent bodies… Is there a particular desire to show these aspects of reality?
There is no contesting will. I wanted to do something without a filter. When I started doing comics, I was 16 and it was the 80s, it was very difficult to work like that. Today it has evolved, we see more stories with women with a strong background, there is greater universality in the representation.
Why was it harder in the 80s?
For example, I had shown a work to a Brazilian publisher where I spoke of the working class. He replied that we saw too much poverty in it and that it was not going to please. And yet, the subject of my album was not about poverty.
How was your collaboration with the editions Çà et Là?
I saw their work on the internet then I offered them my Tungsten project. Since then we have been working together. The publishers I work with have a lot of similarities: they are committed and often they are independent houses. The most important thing is the relationship of trust I have with them.
Tungsten had been adapted to the cinema, would this be the case for Marcia?
For now, there is no current project, but I would love to! I find it very interesting to see one of my works adapted in another medium, be it cinema, theater or other, and to see how another person works on it in their own way.
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