Between October 20 and 30, the most recent edition of Amadora BD will be in several cultural venues in this municipality, such as Ski Skate Amadora Park, Galeria Municipal Artur Bual and Bedeteca da Amadora. This year, the widening of the commercial area allows the festival to have its widest edition ever, trying to establish itself as a “multidisciplinary experience”, with exhibitions, presentations, launches, workshops, gastronomy and, for the first time, a gaming area.

In the thirty-third edition, part of the Temporada Cruzada Portugal/França, which has marked the Portuguese cultural context this year, the aim is to reflect and reinforce cultural ties between the two countries in the exhibition programme. At Ski Skate Amadora Park, we highlight the show 4 quartos (e são nossos!) – title that refers to the essay A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf -, with works by two Portuguese authors (Mosi and Patrícia Guimarães) and two French authors (Elléa Bird and Blanche Sabbah), mirroring together in an individual exploration on the sharing of a common knowledge, with themes such as “female visibility” or “women’s rights” that “are part of these and other struggles”.

Also part of this mix is the show Os Portugueses, featuring the homonymous comic strip by Olivier Afonso & Chico, which tells a story of Portuguese emigration to France. This is also a union of experiences, where Olivier Afonso tries to answer part of his parents’ emigration story; for Chico, life on the outskirts of Paris.

We must also bring up the exhibition of the comic series Armazém Central, written and drawn by Régis Loisel and Jean-Louis Tripp between 2006 and 2014, narrating the lives of the inhabitants of the village of Notre Dame Les Lacs, somewhere lost in huge Quebec, during the 1920s. Or Balada para Sophie by Filipe Melo and Juan Cavia, winner last year of the Award for Best Comic Book Work by a Portuguese Author at the festival, and which is now highlighted in this edition. There are also works by André Morgado, Rodolfo Oliveira, Hugo Van Der Ding, Nunsky and the publisher Comic Heart, all with exhibitions at the Ski Skate Amadora Park.

Finally, there are commemorative exhibitions. One is dedicated to the 60 years of Spider-Man, highlighting “the main authors that developed the character”, gathering part of Bob McLeod’s archive (Marvel author, co-creator of The New Mutants series, who will be at the festival), as well as editions and series produced in Portugal. The other is dedicated to the 45th anniversary of the Franco-Belgian cult comic strip Thorgal, telling the story of a young Viking, with mythological, sci-fi and horror elements.

Galeria Municipal Artur Bual will have two solo exhibitions: Panoramas, a monographic show by illustrator and cartoonist André Carrilho; and Desenhar no Escuro, a series of fragments of daily life drawn in white on black sheets, by António Jorge Gonçalves. At Bedeteca da Amadora, there will be an exhibition of one of the great names of Brazilian horror in comics: Jayme Cortez.

The festival will have more than 15 national and international authors, not only the ones responsible for the exhibitions that will take place, but also, for example, the Brazilian Marcello Quintanilha, recently winner of the Comic Strip Album of the Year Award at the Angoulême International Festival for the work exhibited at the last edition of Amadora BD, Escuta, Formosa Márcia.

The Amadora Comic Strip Awards ceremony will also return, this year in the amount of 5000 euros, for the Best Comic Strip Work by a Portuguese Author, in a festival that is becoming more and more comprehensive.