André Pereira

(Portuguese - 1987)

Sisyphus on the Plain

Original bookplates for The End of Madoka Machina

21 January - 4 March 2023

André Pereira's exhibition, which is now on show at Tinta nos Nervos, brings together a significant number of comic strips from the book The End of Madoka Machina, which brings together the various instalments of the original mini-series in a single volume, adding some unpublished and exclusive chapters for the new edition.

Madoka Machina follows the romantic relationship of a triad of young adults trying to integrate into a society dominated by technology and standardised by access to the internet. It's a parallel vision of a future that is all too current, fabricated through a combination of anthropomorphic figuration, existentialist questions and an architectural geometry of spaces that harks back to the virtual register of electronic games. 

In addition to the core of the artwork on display, there are preparatory sketches and artwork from other stories that, although not part of the book's narrative, already outlined the characters that would feature in the saga that is now being published in full. 

THE END OF MADOKA MACHINA

‘I started writing what would become this book sometime in 2015. At the time, I wanted to start writing short stories around a fixed cast of characters, liaising with each other as necessary. In practice, the plan was to contribute these short stories to various independent publications and later compile them all into a single volume. Each of the stories would then become a chapter in a larger, not necessarily closed narrative, the whole of which would read less like a structured plot and more like an overview of the lives of a few characters.

The first publication for which I produced a Madoka Machina story was the anthological zine Carne e Osso, coordinated by Marco Mendes and Sofia Neto; it was there that I developed what became the opening chapter, in which only the protagonist, Leonor, is alluded to, without ever revealing her. The following stories, which I was already planning in mid-2015, would be about her and I would submit them to other publications (probably zines) (...) when Rui Brito invited me to publish something for Polvo I ended up reformulating my plan for Madoka Machina, proposing the publication of a mini-series in six instalments. The story ended up materialising in these six issues, 16 pages each, which came out every six months between September 2015 and May 2018. (...) The narrative autonomy of the chapters lay mainly in the composition of the boards, which I organised according to different grids, case by case. The outline for each chapter of Madoka Machina always began by testing the rhythmic possibilities of these grids, looking for the most suitable one to explore the central theme of each episode. (...)

I imagine that the origin of the miniseries' title hasn't gone unnoticed by many people: it's a play on the title of a 2011 anime phenomenon, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, which I watched in 2014. (...) I've always been fascinated by the settings where these anime battles took place: magical landscapes, carved out by the force of human anxieties and desires, which manifested themselves physically in the form of atmospheric or geological phenomena, capable of shaping the geography in their own image. I thought that the Madoka of the title immediately summoned up this universe, freeing Machina to launch itself into another domain that I was interested in exploring: that of technology; in particular, the way it submerges all social, labour and love interactions.

(...) The fact that the characters are funny animals (...) is not much to know: the period in which I conceived the mini-series coincided with a revisiting of my formative references (which were closer to Uncle Scrooge than Spider-Man). I lost my inhibitions about exploring this childhood vein when I saw the work of other artists I was following on Tumblr at the time: people like Dane Martin or Simon Hanselmann, who had no shame in drawing anthropomorphised animals to tell their stories, made more disconcerting by the use of a figuration normally associated with childhood. I also got closer to a more cartoony register because, at the time, I was reading a lot of Osamu Tezuka (...).

Embracing manga and the register of funny animals was an important moment of graphic liberation for me. (...) Self-publishing also allows for total control over the finished piece. In my case, that meant being able to expand the story with new episodes.’

Excerpt from the afterword to The End Of Madoka Machina, by ANDRÉ PEREIRA, Massacre edition, 2022

André Pereira has a degree in architecture and has been making comics since 2012. He started publishing zines with Clube do Inferno, which has since ceased to exist. He is the author of Safe Place (2014), Madoka Machina (2015-18) and O Sangue (2019), among others. He has taken part in several anthologies such as QCDA#1000 (2014), š! #20 (2015) and Querosene (2021), which he also edited. In 2020 he founded the collective MASSACRE with Hetamoé and Mao, contributing the silkscreen piece Reforma Agrária to the group's inaugural exhibition, Loot Box. He is also the editor of the Erva Daninha zine label and a teacher at Ar.Co