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Print: $12.95 Download: $3.75 “O Urso vai a Espanha”, acabado de escrever em 2005, é a minha primeira experiência no campo da novela. Fui por terreno conhecido, e inspirei-me no ambiente de uma banda desenhada feita cinco anos antes. Quem leu “Palmyra” (para adultos, também aqui na Lulu) há-de pelo menos reconhecer dois personagens, os funcionários que perseguem o Urso, frescos e a saltar, dessa vez atrás de Jau.
A história tem os mesmos elementos de movimento e rapidez duma banda desenhada. As personagens, para além dos portugueses uma chinesa, um angolano, um croata e um russo, são apenas esboçadas. No centro da história, um simples mas estranho mistério envolvendo um frete marítimo. É para ser lida entre dois pontos de uma viagem.
A história, que originalmente se chamava “Trottoir”, foi imaginada ainda em Lisboa mas escrita já depois duma estadia por terras de Andalusia. Daí que “O Urso vai a Espanha” seja uma mistura de argumento de banda desenhada com crónica de viagem.
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Print: $14.15 Download: $6.25 This is the first of a series of short stories about the travels, adventures and works of Costa, a retired sailor now dedicated to the exciting life of cooking simple and delicious meals, painting and drawing, and meeting mysterious women.
For many years the ideas for my stories came from magazine and newspaper articles and photographs, and also from pictures I took myself. I would sometimes make sketches of people and places, but the photographs would always be more inspiring. This sort of travelogue gives finally place to them, the drawings having in these stories just a supporting role.
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Print: $19.15 Download: $8.75 This story was initially conceived to be published in Portugal in the year 2000. The plot is set in Lisboa, by the mouth of the river Tejo, halfway between some time in the past and a vague future. Jau, the biologist, is pursued by two clerks of her boss, because she refuses to collaborate in the project of a transgenic fish. In meanwhile, Palmyra is keeping a record of the events. The choice of materials, paper Canson mi-teintes chanvre clair and black and white Caran d’Ache wax crayons, was intended to give depth and texture to a grayscale print, but it is presented here in color.
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Print: $25.75 Download: $12.50 Li Moonface is known in her neighborhood in Zagreb as Papalina. There she witnesses a murder and discovers an international scam that involves mafias from several origins and American and Chinese intelligence agencies. In meanwhile, under needle treatment and massage, clients tell Li their strange stories, but the strangest of them all is the story of the Persian ambassador.
Fernando Relvas is a Portuguese illustrator and author of comic strips with several books published in Portugal. In 2006 he moved his work to the internet with the blog The Hard Line Approach (http://hardline-approach.blogspot.com) and in the beginning of 2008 started a regular webcomic with the Chinese Master Spy (http://chinesemasterspy.blogspot.com). Some years ago he moved to Croatia, where he set these two stories.
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Print: $29.78 Download: $8.75 The Chinese Master Spy is the gentle love story between a bicycle mechanic and his Chinese neighbor in a world dominated, as usual, by greed and ignorance. It all starts in an unfortunate and very hot summer morning in the Croatian town of Zagreb. When the church bells stop Lokarda’s insults take its place all along the street. Then she goes to work at the candle factory. A while later Brzo, her husband, goes slowly by. Then Mr. Hu comes in his car. Nobody notices the other car coming down the street. The passenger draws a gun. Two shots only. And Mr. Hu is dead.
The Chinese Master Spy appeared in his own blog (http://chinesemasterspy.blogspot.com) as a weekly webcomic, between February and August 2008. There you can read the digital version and have access to other works by the author. The book is an edited version of the webcomic and is complemented with a final chapter and a selection of texts.
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Print: $25.35 All the stories in this book have few words and much ink, and were made with no preparatory sketch or planning. The best way to look at them is to keep the words as a background beat and follow the flow of the ink.
These short stories make part of a series of small hand-stitched booklets (16,25cm x 12,5cm), made between 2001 and 2003. All of them belong now to private collectors.
Since the support is different, the stories have been slightly changed. The English text is in many places different from the Portuguese original and the sequence of the drawings does not match exactly the content of the booklets.
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Print: $15.75 Download: $6.25 “The quest for a stolen painting may take a long time and a lot of patience. This one led me to the Adriatic and the Balkans, started far away from those places, with an encounter in Carmen’s café, a phone call and a meeting in a town where I had never been before and it still seems far from its end.”
A long time was what it took for this second issue of COSTA to come out, so I condensed in here the first chapter of Costa’s quest, “The Green Fish”. In the next two chapters Costa will meet Šofer, the chauffeur and Škarpina, the woman “all in flesh and blue”, but he will not reach the painting, “Der Grüne Fisch” by Paul Klee. And I start suspecting he never will, since those episodes took place in summer and until now there is no news about its recovery.
There is also in this issue a winter section, with the story of the mysterious cabaret chicken dancers, the drama of baka Buba and the secrets of the mighty sauerkraut with one recipe of musaka of sauerkraut as the main course.
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