“Estamos vivos e produzindo”: narrativas, práticas e visualidades do fazer quadrinhos em Natal (RN)e João Pessoa (PB)

Abstract

This study aims to understand the dynamics and practices of the making of comics in contemporary times, considering, as a privileged locus, the independent production scenes of comics in Natal (RN) and in João Pessoa (PB). Considering comic books as the result of the development of the technical and press reproducibility, we mention its importance as a cultural and artistic phenomenon, beyond a mere mass consumption object. As the result of an industrialized Occident, comics have become popular in several societies. In Brazil, they were appreciated by certain social groups, such as young university students who produced alternative publications. In local contexts, like Natal and João Pessoa, the role of particular interlocutors had great value for the construction and maintenance of memory and affirmation of a local history of comics. Their narratives, collected through interviews, are situated in a historical and social becoming, bringing memories and forgetfulness, as well as raising questions about working with drawings, visuality constructions, the production/consumption conditions of comics and possible arrangements between experiences and collaborative tactics. These narratives, in a general sense, show abilities in local contexts, negotiating individual projects with other fields. Our analysis continued ethnographing some spaces of comic book artists circulation, in events where comics culture is promoted, and we were able to reflect on the perspective experience of the comics language in its ritualization. As they are products of the creative human imagination, comics also present some poetics in the construction of fictional worlds. Thus, by claiming an anthropological aspect to the comics, I emphasize how these can be the focus of anthropological concerns by conceiving sociocultural worlds and systems of thoughts. To this end, I make myself closer to the artistic creation of two interlocutors whose graphic narrative has the fear as a central category in its development. As I pore over the contributions of Visual Anthropology and the Anthropology of Emotions, I analyze the plot of a copyright and independent comic. Ultimately, by making an exercise of giving an anthropological look towards the different contexts where the interlocutors of this research are, it is possible to understand that making comics is a lively way of potentialize their existence in the world of art, exploring the interdependence with institutional and market logic.