DECEMBER 2024 - JUNE 2025
Photo Catarina Bandeira

José Bandeira

An interview with the creative of all crafts

Humourist, columnist, cartoonist (represented in the Sammlung Karikaturen & Cartoon Basel and in the international anthology The Best Political Cartoons of the Year), visual artist, graphic designer, photographer, musician… You’ve been published in O Século, Diário de Lisboa, Diário Popular, Diário de Notícias and Jornal de Notícias, among other newspapers and magazines. You’ve worked in advertising and as a Creative Director in graphic production for television and multimedia. You created animated films. You have received too many awards for us to list here. With so many creative endeavours, it’s hard to identify your main one. Here at Invade, we like to think of you as a ‘Renaissance man’. Do you see yourself that way?
That’s a flattering, kind, and clearly exaggerated description, for which I’m very grateful. Thanks to my exposure in the press, I was once perhaps more widely seen as a cartoonist, but I don’t rank the things I do hierarchically. All of them bring me joy, or I wouldn't do them.

Is it possible to combine all those artistic disciplines into a single work? Or do your creative activities unfold in distinct phases?
Wagner defined the concept of the ‘total work of art’, a synthesis of all artistic disciplines — music, visual arts, theatre, poetry — that transcends the boundaries of individual art forms to create something greater than the sum of its parts. There’s something very satisfying about today’s technological landscape and its relationship with the arts. It allows creatives to produce ‘total works of art’ virtually on their own, something unimaginable just a few decades ago.

You work with both words and images. Are they equivalent?
Both mediate between humanity and the world. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a word can also be worth a thousand images, because our imagination is capable of performing a thousand extraordinary feats with it.


('Earthquake felt at Arraiolos', Comic Strip Stuart Award 2010)

In your drawing, writing, and even photography, you’ve always worked with humour. Are there subjects that shouldn’t or can’t be joked about today?
There are no serious things — there are only things that should be taken seriously because they have consequences. It’s up to the humourist to weigh the consequences of their humour and act according to their conscience.

You’ve been published in many of the major Portuguese newspapers. Is publishing in print still important today, as the Historical Route does with Invade magazine? And online, as with InvadeMAG?
It’s essential. A printed magazine carries the credibility of a traditional, reliable process, offering a sensory experience that no other medium can replace. The online version is the perfect tool for disseminating content, expanding it, and making it accessible in places the print version can’t reach. If, absurdly, we were to print the web ‘to read later’, there wouldn’t be enough paper in the world. Granted, much of the content online is rubbish. That’s why I’d say the most important websites today aren’t those that simply provide content, but those that organise, select, and classify it — essentially acting as editors. The Historical Route’s InvadeMAG portal fits into this category as an aggregator of information or, if you prefer, as an interface between the reader and the region of the Lines.

Can regions, and the Lines in particular, aspire to greater cultural recognition?
Not long ago, it was necessary to be in a major city to succeed in the cultural sphere. Today, a region can outperform any city if it sets its sights, not on mediocrity, but on excellence. Aiming only for adequacy is a sure path to mediocrity. Publishing a magazine is always a cultural act. Doing so from a region is a necessary cultural act.

You drew InvadeMAG, which is a technological product. Not only are you unafraid of technology, but you thrive on it. New technologies have paved the way for creativity, but there’s concern they may also foster mediocrity.
Though I tend to be a pessimist — and a pessimist is just an optimist who’s well-informed — I prefer to focus on the potential. Not long ago, making a film, for instance, required funding inaccessible to most creators. Today, a talented videographer can produce a small film on his own using affordable technology. Of course, the ratio of rubbish to worthwhile works is overwhelmingly skewed toward the former — but so what? Ignore the rubbish. Visit the archives of a large or medium-sized library, and you’ll find them packed with bad literature produced over the past two centuries.

Some see AI as a form of ‘democratisation’ of talent. Are you impressed by this ‘creative takeover’ by machines?
More than by what the ‘machine’ does, I’m impressed by the speed at which it does it. Semiconductors intimidate me more than lines of code. Some trees live for millennia; some insects, only days. For each, time is a very different thing. Our time is not binary time. Creativity, however, still (for now) belongs to humans. Many writers — including some who churn out bestsellers — compensate for a lack of talent with formulaic processes, a reasonable grasp of language rules, and a strict writing routine. A talented writer, on the other hand, may fail without productive work habits. Imagine the masterpieces we’d create if we could just stay locked at home…

This ‘democratisation’ — and I emphasise the quotes — happened before, for instance, with photography, which was hailed as an opportunity to ‘democratise’ the visual arts. We know what happened: painting didn’t die (whether you like the paths it later took or not), and photography didn’t become ‘democratic’ in the sense of turning every photographer into an artist. What we saw instead was the mass adoption of cameras and a clearer distinction between artistic photographers (who create works of art), professional photographers (who produce creative and technically proficient images for commercial purposes), and amateur photographers (who take snapshots, more or less automatically, for leisure or memory). It’s not the absence of a physical process — the ‘creative hand’ — that stops an AI prompt from being art; it’s the lack of artistic method and intent.

Would you say AI-assisted writing or drawing tends to follow repetitive formulas?
Now that social media has lifted the veil on the sorry state of written expression — and thus reasoning — among so many of us, AI will allow those with poor language skills to communicate in a socially acceptable way. The price, however, will be an even weaker command of language and a lack of creativity in expression. Detecting irony and other literary devices requires a capacity for non-literal interpretation, as well as the open-mindedness — not to mention intellectual preparation — to appreciate their possibility.

The composer Charles Ives sent his meticulous music publisher a note with his scores: ‘Please do not correct. All the wrong notes are right’. If you give a very well-written text to an AI tool, it will tend to normalise it, ‘correcting’ the most creative elements that make it a good text — and thus rendering it banal. It’s likely that, as systems become more sophisticated, this limitation will diminish.

Are we ready for the technological innovations around the corner?
I remember — this was probably in the early 80s — a typesetter in his dark blue overalls showing me, with pride, a proof of one of my drawings made by photocomposition: ‘Mr Bandeira, could a computer ever do a job like this?’
We’ll never be completely ready, but today we’re certainly more aware — and, because of that, more prepared — than ever before.

Things seem to change every six months. What can we do to keep up with technological evolution?
Certainties have become dead-end doubts. Suddenly, something we took for granted changes: after all, the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth. These new paradigms demand that we adapt to the disruptions they bring to our ways of life. A little healthy scepticism can help. Not the kind of denial that rejects all change as negative, nor the nihilistic belief that everything is pointless and thus nothing is worthwhile, but the kind of scepticism (some might call it curiosity) that drives us to keep seeking solutions even after we’ve found them.

Does adapting mean a continuous pursuit of knowledge?
Time is a good teacher, but only if we give it the chance to teach. Our third and fourth decades of life are crucial. These years are, in general terms, what the ancient Greeks called akme — the peak of our capabilities — and it’s during this time that we cement the mens sano part of Juvenal’s famous dictum. It’s also in this phase that many of those who consider themselves enlightened realise their ignorance and experience the epiphany that changes their lives forever.

What message would you like to leave for Invade’s readers?
Paul McCartney once said the Beatles would cross an entire city just to see, in some obscure bar, how a guitarist played a particular chord. Knowing that one tree is a plane tree, another an ash, and yet another a willow changes how you see the garden on your street — and the world. In a plane tree (sung in Händel's Ombra mai fu), an ash (the sacred tree of Norse mythology), or a willow (that impassively witnessed Ophelia’s death), there is far more than trees: there is an entire universe. Today, when virtually all information is at our fingertips, it’s up to us to use it to enrich our view of the world. The alternative is to turn this brave new world into a dystopia, where we reduce ourselves to the gesture of swiping a finger across a screen, in a perpetual, sterile motion. 

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