We like to say of José Bandeira that he is our ‘Renaissance man’: artist, cartoonist, humorist, photographer, graphic designer (he designed InvadeMAG and the new version of Invade magazine), musician, columnist, writer, publicist, videographer, animation filmmaker... and the list is sure to grow, because he has an insatiable curiosity.
For the anniversary of the Historical Route, which is celebrated in October, there's nothing better than challenging him to create a comic strip inspired by the Lines of Torres Vedras. That's precisely what we did, and the result is ‘O Forte’ (‘The Fort’): a graphic novel that, in the author’s words, ‘combines events about which people know little — the defence of the Lines of Torres Vedras — with Classical Culture, about which people no longer know much at all.’ The idea is that,’ he continues, ‘two minuses make one plus and this unpretentious and accessible work feeds curiosity about both subjects’.
In ‘O Forte’, Bandeira writes and draws, using the events of November 1810 in front of the Lines, an allegory of the human condition, contrasting the figure of the ‘universal soldier’ with fate — personified in archaic antiquity by the figure of Moira, who weaves the lives of all of us, inexorably and without appeal.