The Positives: Difference between revisions
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The P+ had a double story line: from time to time, we’d be pulled away of Xavier and friends adventures only to find ourselves on a television studio were those events were being recorded. In this suddenly new reality, most characters had very different personality than the one they were performing for the camera. Xavier, for instance, who plays the hero on P+, turns out to be a very obnoxious person off-camera. Susana, depicted as a very sweet and angelical person, was actually a slutty porn star doing a gig in P+ between other adult flicks. In these off camera moments, we were introduced to the rest of the P+ cast: Director (also known as Dictator), who runs P+ in a constant state of nerves, trying to make good of his cast of misfits , Shark (the only non-human character), the greedy lawyer / producer whose schemes to make money out of the P+ tend to provoke Director’s anger, and Animal, a reincarnation of a younger Director that shows up on stage only to further annoy him with accusations of selling out to the system. To further complicate the P+ story line, sometimes Animal enters the “filmed” adventures of Xavier and friends as himself, against Director’s willing (who tends to cut the scenes when it happens). |
The P+ had a double story line: from time to time, we’d be pulled away of Xavier and friends adventures only to find ourselves on a television studio were those events were being recorded. In this suddenly new reality, most characters had very different personality than the one they were performing for the camera. Xavier, for instance, who plays the hero on P+, turns out to be a very obnoxious person off-camera. Susana, depicted as a very sweet and angelical person, was actually a slutty porn star doing a gig in P+ between other adult flicks. In these off camera moments, we were introduced to the rest of the P+ cast: Director (also known as Dictator), who runs P+ in a constant state of nerves, trying to make good of his cast of misfits , Shark (the only non-human character), the greedy lawyer / producer whose schemes to make money out of the P+ tend to provoke Director’s anger, and Animal, a reincarnation of a younger Director that shows up on stage only to further annoy him with accusations of selling out to the system. To further complicate the P+ story line, sometimes Animal enters the “filmed” adventures of Xavier and friends as himself, against Director’s willing (who tends to cut the scenes when it happens). |
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== External links == |
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* [http://fanzinesdebandadesenhada.blogspot.com/ Geraldes Lino's blog about Portuguese fanzines] |
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* [http://www.bedeteca.com/index.php?pageID=links&cat=10 Lisbon's Bedeteca with links to on-line zines] |
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Revision as of 19:56, 13 April 2009
The Positives
The Positives (Os Positivos) was a Portuguese comics fanzine drawn by Valter de Matos that run through the years 1997 and 1998 before folding as all fanzines tend to.
The main series, known as “XXX-Irritant” followed the day-to-day adventures of Xavier and friends until his suicide in the final volume. Although the end of their adventures is known, mainly because the last published volume has a flash back narrative that slowly unveils future events, the final issue was never made public and since then Xavier has appeared in many short stories of the Positives universe, supposedly taking place before the events of that last number.
The Positives (also known as “P+”) started off as a vehicle of animal rights and direct action awareness, but soon turned into another autobiographical comics that relate back to the sixties underground comix tradition.
Using as their own motto “true underground comix”, P+ was drawn with a punk D.I.Y. attitude, and the quality of their artwork was definitely not their main concern, although throughout their existence there’s a visible evolution on the comic style, until it became a recognizable format: simple black outlines with no shades or fills drawn on cheaper paper. The Positives had a remarkable poor layout in terms of comic language, but the author has excused those transgressions time and time again as “at the speed at which the characters talk to me I can’t concern myself with small things like continuity” (link to source citation). On the plus side, one major P+ feature was the total absence of eyes on their characters, definitely an important asset to any comic as a mean of expression, but somehow P+ manages to convey all sorts of feelings without them.
If the artwork got the backseat, the story line was definitely driving the P+ forward. Written on a very non colloquial language to say the least, the street tone at which the characters spoke set the pace to one of the most candid comics at the time, pulling the reader deep into the story, which revolved around the Xavier’s love for Susana.
The P+ had a double story line: from time to time, we’d be pulled away of Xavier and friends adventures only to find ourselves on a television studio were those events were being recorded. In this suddenly new reality, most characters had very different personality than the one they were performing for the camera. Xavier, for instance, who plays the hero on P+, turns out to be a very obnoxious person off-camera. Susana, depicted as a very sweet and angelical person, was actually a slutty porn star doing a gig in P+ between other adult flicks. In these off camera moments, we were introduced to the rest of the P+ cast: Director (also known as Dictator), who runs P+ in a constant state of nerves, trying to make good of his cast of misfits , Shark (the only non-human character), the greedy lawyer / producer whose schemes to make money out of the P+ tend to provoke Director’s anger, and Animal, a reincarnation of a younger Director that shows up on stage only to further annoy him with accusations of selling out to the system. To further complicate the P+ story line, sometimes Animal enters the “filmed” adventures of Xavier and friends as himself, against Director’s willing (who tends to cut the scenes when it happens).