Contemporary Authors

Paola Gaviria is an outstanding artist born in Quito, Ecuador and raised in Colombia. In the last six years, she has been drawing in different cities around the world—from Paris to Sydney, where she now lives and sees her life as a foreigner through lines and colors. Her latest exhibition, "Drawing Around," which is featured at the First Draft Gallery, captures the eclectic scenarios of Sydney's red-light district, Kings Cross, where she lives amongst the drug dealers, prostitutes and backpackers of the area.

Power Paola
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Power Paola (Paola Gaviria) is a Colombian-Ecuadorian comics creator. She is one of the very few female comics creators working in Colombia today. "Virus Tropical" is the title of her first graphic novel, an autobiographical account of her childhood in Quito, Ecuador, as part of a very conservative Colombian family.

Power Paola has published in Larva and Arcadia, in Colombia. Internationally, she has collaborated with titles like Argh! (Spain), Carboncito (Perú) and Kovra (Spain). She also published part of her work in the Argentinian site Historietas Reales. She is part of the online collective Chicks on Comics.

Drawn Interview With Power Paola
Posted on November 5, 2013
Power Paola is a Colombian cartoonist and illustrator living in Buenos Aires who I got to know back in days when people were still posting their comics and drawings on Flickr. So when I finally got to meet her in person at the Entreviñetas festival last year, it felt like seeing an old friend after a long time apart. At the time, she was just finishing up the French translation for her graphic novel, Virus Tropical, which is excellent and you should seek it out if you can read Spanish or French. It looks like its being made into an animated feature too (see trailer here).

Paola does drawn interviews with cartoonists and we sat down at one of her favorite drawing spots, cafe Varela Varelita, to have a chat about what I was up to. I’m pretty sure I wrote too much, but she was very nice about it.

Review: New comics from Jerome Charyn and Jacques de Loustal, Dame Darcy and Powerpaola
SEAN ROGERS
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Aug. 19, 2016 11:04AM EDT
Last updated Friday, Aug. 19, 2016 11:04AM EDT

Virus Tropical

By Powerpaola, 2dcloud, 160 pages, $35.95

Powerpaola’s detailed, deadpan memoir depicts her upbringing in 1990s Ecuador and Colombia, where she comes of age and finds her calling as an artist amid a feverish combination of religion (her father’s a former priest), fortune-telling (her mother’s clairvoyant), drugs (the cartels are warring) and wiser older sisters. The book opens with a suite of doctors misdiagnosing Paola’s gestation, claiming her mother’s pregnancy is actually a “tropical virus.” A similar confusion marks the rest of Paola’s youth, as her home life fluctuates – her father leaves, her sisters rebel, the household becomes more eccentric and cash-strapped – and the young artist endeavours to free herself from the manic influence of others. Her learning curve is erratic, like her slightly skewed drawings: For instance, one sister leaves coke spoons for the youngster’s Barbies to use; the other, later on, fills her in on slang and condoms, so kids in her class will stop teasing her. The artist reconstructs these memories with meticulous attention but flattened perspective, so that her experiences seem both true and surreal, unmistakably personal in their distorted contours, but universal in their insights about sisterhood and adolescence.

Virus Tropical

Powerpaola, trans. from the Spanish by Jamie Richards. 2dcloud (dist. by Consortium), $22.95 (160p) ISBN 978-1-937541-23-1

Virus Tropical
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Powerpaola’s family is a frayed patchwork of tension and love in this debut from the Colombian-Ecuadorian cartoonist. The members steal one another’s chocolate, move to Colombia from Ecuador, pierce their ears, and sob along to telenovelas. Passive-aggression runs rampant, a simmering stew of squabbles and endearments. This is all well-trod ground, as far as autobiographical comics go, but the details ring true, and this heartfelt honesty enlivens every page. The sisters are snotty, the mothers are overbearing, the fathers are foolish, but isn’t that messiness the very meaning of family? Visually, Paola delights in contrast: areas of heavy texture (hair, floorboards, fabric) are set against empty, open shapes. This gives the book a wonderfully worn-in appearance, reminiscent of Jennifer Hayden’s recent and similarly successful autobiographical comic, The Story of My Tits. Though it could use a little pruning, this is a fond look at family and friendship that benefits from keeping both of its feet firmly planted on the ground. (July)

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2017
2Dcloud: Powerpaola's Virus Tropical
The beauty of reading a childhood memoir like that of Ecuador's Powerpaola and her Virus Tropical is that contains a number of familiar elements as well as some aspects that seem remarkably strange. When the author notes that even within her own countries (Ecuador and later her adopted Colombia), her upbringing was unusual, it makes for an even more fascinating read. The overall effect, if I can make a crude comparison, is somewhere between Julie Doucet in terms of style and bluntness and Lat in terms of bringing a place to life with both a sense of innocence & naivete as well as its rough edges. Told entirely from a modern, first-person point of view, Powerpaola tries to be as brutally honest about everything as possible regarding her family's highly disfunctional yet still somehow quite loving dynamics.

Two odd details surrounded Paola's birth. First, no doctor believed that her mother could be pregnant because she had had her tubes tied, and one doctor wrote it off as a "tropical virus" and another said it was simply "air". The unexplained detail in the book was that Paola's father was a priest. He no longer seemed to be practicing clergy (nor was he Eastern Catholic) and he was much older than her mother, so there was a major bit of drama there that was simply never touched on. Her father Uriel stopped being a priest to marry her mother. She then experienced life growing up with two much older siblings, which put the middle child (her sister Patty) in a position of being jealous and giving her sort of a distant relationship with her oldest sister, Claudia. Paola depicts herself as having a sense that something odd was going on but never quite understanding what it might be, and no one was interested in cluing her in.

The book follows her father leaving to live with his demanding mother in Colombia, then her older sister leaving to also go to Colombia after conflicts with her mother. Paola's whole world revolved around her family, especially her sister Patty, who changed course as a teen and saw herself as Paola's real caretaker. Even working with a mostly six-panel grid, Paola was adept at portraying the claustrophobic nature of their living situation, and not just because of a lack of room. There was a surfeit of strong-willed personalities, none of whom were interested in yielding to each other. When you throw in the maid, that added another dimension of conflict, as she was practically a family member considering how young she was when she came there, yet was explicitly reminded that she wasn't a family member. Because of my own South American heritage, I was aware that maids were not a status symbol the way they are in the US, and that most families had them. That said, it still created a strange dynamic to have this person who was sort of a sister but also someone you could boss around, and Paola does not ignore this fact.

Like most coming of age stories, Virus Tropical is about the struggle to go from someone who is unwelcome and unwanted to someone who has found their tribe. Paola at first resents the fact that she doesn't fit in because she's poor and doesn't have the right pair of sneakers, but when she too moves up to Colombia, she also resents being mocked for having a different accent and vernacular than the students at her middle school. She also happened to arrive in Cali right smack-dab in the middle of a drug war that often saw shoot-outs break out in the middle of the street, making her resentful of drug culture and the liars and show-offs she saw that seemed to represent it. She looked to her sister on advice for everything, including and especially boys but also fashion and career advice. Their mother wound up having a minimal influence on all three of them, and it speaks to her frequent absences (she lived between Colombia and Ecuador) affected her connection with her children. Indeed, Paola's memories of her father are even less distinct. Once again, it was a demonstration of how the bonds of family are far more fragile than one might think, especially when one is a very young child.

It's not a surprise that Paola found her people when she started hanging out with a group of artists. the immediate sense of energy and warmth she felt from simply staying up all night doing a mural with her new friends was clearly a life-changing event. It's interesting that without specific guidance, Paola still chose certain events to mark growing up, like having her first period (depicted in the title page of this section with a Julie Doucet-style drawing of her flooding the town with menstrual blood), or consciously deciding to put away all of her toys when she had her first date. Whether or not she was actually ready to grow up, she decided to try to at least act the part. Paola's use of the grotesque, much like Doucet, was another key aspect of the comic, like when a boy who made fun of her for having bad teeth is depicted as having an impossible number of tiny, misshapen teeth in his own mouth. Like Lat, Paola drew inspiration from both members of her family and her friends, until she found her own tribe. The drawings may be grotesque, but it's not just that they're frequently and deliberately ugly--they are also exaggerated for comic effect. Huge heads, nests of scribbles for hair, bulging eyes and long faces are all part of the artist's arsenal that's used as much to make the reader laugh as it is to simply express herself in an honest and direct manner.
POSTED BY ROB CLOUGH AT 3:00 AM
LABELS: POWERPAOLA