Nau Negra, The Last Black Ship

NOW AVAILABLE, English version of NAU NEGRA. For details visit CALL ME JET LEG and THE BLACK SHIP FILES.

CALL ME JET LEG

Site under construction, Call Me Jet Leg, will be joining these blogs.

THIS SUMMER I have ORIGINAL ARTWORK from the 70s and 80s for SALE. Visit my other blog URSO DO RELVAS.

The Slipper

"I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease three years ago and I suspect it has its roots deep in the past (...) What used to be just an annoyance, one day evolved steadily into a weird relationship of my body with the rest of the physical world. And one of the things that puzzles me, in my new situation, is that I have trouble kicking off my left slipper. Just the left one. I can't find any logic in it. It is not like having difficulties tying a shoelace, something that requires a certain manual dexterity, it is just kicking off a slipper, easier done than said. This is why I think that understanding what makes it so attached to my foot will take me closer to the root of the problem, but for the moment I am so ignorant of the primary causes of my troubles as you, the scientific community or my right slipper."

THE TRUE STORY OF MY REBEL LEFT SLIPPER is my next story and it is mostly autobiographical. Here are the first two pages.

In meanwhile...

Nau Negra is still looking for a publisher. Anyone out there? In meanwhile, I try some brushes for next story. All of them are faces in profile, none of them has anything to do with the story.

Season's greetings from Nau Negra.

The word FIM (THE END) has already been written on the last page. Soon we'll have other news from Nau Negra.

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THE PERSIAN AMBASSADOR, Historical Transrealism?

Following a discussion about literary Transrealism, I wondered if anybody ever had the idea of applying the term Historical Transrealism to some literary works and, what excited my curiosity most, to graphic novels, a field that owes a lot to the type of novels that fall in the Transrealism category. Not that I'm apologist of cataloging everything, which in general serves badly the most intricate works and spoils some of the fun, but I think that, in what concerns some of my most recent projects, it is a correct presentation card. A short story published online, The Persian Ambassador, finished by the end of 2008 (it is also one of two stories published on paper in a 2011 Portuguese monochrome edition titled Li Moonface, by Pedranocharco) is the best example I can find. An unfinished novel from 2009 and the graphic novel Nau Negra, heavily documented on the historical side and near completion, also go on the same direction.

Adass Polo, one of the main characters of The Persian Ambassador, does mix up two very different realities in his life, one our own present world, where he tells his misadventures to the Chinese acupuncturist Li, and his claimed original world at the service of Cambises, the Persian king, that functions as his own reality. Polo dismisses the future he is in as a world full of seated people and tries to put the record straight about what we think of his own time and about his mission as ambassador and explorer in ancient Ethiopia, an adventure that somehow ends somewhere in Southeastern Europe in the twenty-first century, in a place where people go to eat fried fish. The connection between the two is established during events described at the end of the story, as you may see in here.

finis