This is one of two books that Júlia Barata, a Portuguese illustrator who has been living in Argentina since 2013, is working on and for which she has already applied for support in Portugal without success, she said in an interview with the Lusa agency. The starting point for the conversation with the author was a roundtable discussion that Júlia Barata shared with fellow illustrator and comic book author Filipe Abranches at the Buenos Aires Book Fair, which is taking place in the Argentine capital, with the city of Lisbon as the guest of honor. At that session, the two authors, who are dedicated especially to comics, complained about the lack of support and the difficulty of publishing in Portugal, if not through large publishing groups. According to Júlia Barata, it is easier to publish in Argentina, where the publishing market dedicated to this genre is much larger and where there was more support, until the inauguration of the current president, Javier Milei. "I would really like to have some support. Now I am in a particularly serious moment, because in terms of support everything has died. The National Arts Fund, which supported me twice, was one of the entities that [Milei] dismantled, 15 days after taking office," she said. For three years, Júlia Barata has been applying for funds in Portugal, with two projects, and has never succeeded. One of them is the adaptation to graphic novel, which she is doing together with the writer Isabela Figueiredo, of the novel "Caderno de Memórias Coloniais", centered on Mozambique in the 1960s and which "requires a lot of documentation and a lot of work". The author of the book is adapting the text and Júlia Barata is illustrating it, but they have no support. "We applied to the DGLAB [Directorate-General for Books, Archives and Libraries], but the project was rejected. I continue to work on it blindly, in the early hours of the morning, with a son and 20 other jobs. Isabela also continues to work and has no subsidy for it," she revealed. The author's other project is based on a series of interviews with people with backgrounds in historical and political conflicts, such as a Chilean refugee from Pinochet's dictatorship, a Spanish woman who has a great-uncle who died in the civil war, one from Taiwan, one from Mozambique, one from Argentina or an Israeli. They are "very different backgrounds, which require a lot of documentation. In general, this implies a whole team in cinema, in this case, it's all on me, and I also paint and do editing. It's crazy," she said, specifying that this novel has been in production for three years, at an intermittent pace, because "it requires a lot of concentration, blocks of hours, a continuity, like a doctoral thesis, but in support". With this novel, Júlia Barata applied twice to the Directorate-General for the Arts, the second of which was last year, with a production company, within the scope of a specific line for the 50th anniversary of the 25th of April, on memory and democracy. "It fit in perfectly there. I had a childhood in Mozambique and grew up after decolonization. What connects the interviews is a kind of alter ego of mine who will talk about this process of post-decolonization and civil war," crossing all the other stories from different countries at different moments of the 20th century, but all with backgrounds of migration, conflicts, dictatorships and wars". Júlia Barata does not understand how, in this context and with a novel all about memory and history, she did not get the support, not even when she applied with a production company, which had associated activities, such as street actions to record people's memories about the 25th of April. "Here [in Argentina] I had much more support, with other governments. I won a scholarship, a course at the cultural center for memory and human rights, they gave me money. In Portugal I can't get anything," she lamented. The two novels are entirely in watercolor, one frame per page, she described, considering that this is another "interesting" concept of the graphic novel: "when you make a frame, you sell a frame. We work with 300 frames here, if the novel has 300 pages, and I don't earn anything, and I'm not going to earn anything and I'm not going to sell them. It's a shot in the foot, it's desperate". Despite this, Júlia Barata, an architect by training, but who currently teaches drawing and does illustrations as a means of subsistence, says that she will not give up, because comics are her great passion and her dream was to be able to live only from that. "I will continue, but it is a tractor action. I've been going on for 10 years, but there comes a time when it's 'please, give me two cents, I have to pay rent, I have a son, I want to do this and I believe in this immensely'". Júlia Barata published "Gravidez", which has also been published in Portugal by Tigre de Papel, and launched about a year and a half ago another graphic novel, entitled "Família", which is scheduled to be published in Portugal this year. Filipe Abranches has a background much more linked to illustration, with works published since 1979, in Portugal and other countries, and with the creation of short films, having won an award in the category of best director with the film "Pássaros", of six minutes, at the IndieLisboa festival. Even so, he has the same complaints, namely in a "strong project" that he is developing, a "story set between Poland and Portugal, about the Warsaw ghetto", for which he has not yet found funding. "I tried for support, but it's not for everyone. I'm going to look for other ways to publish the book. It's very difficult to work on 'comics' without other support," he told Lusa. Filipe Abranches, whose current sources of income are animated shorts and a work he is doing for a more 'mainstream' album for a Levoir collection on Portuguese figures, laments the difficulty of comics as a profession. "It's difficult because if you don't have a grant to do a project for a graphic novel, you have to do a lot of things at the same time. You can always knock on the door of big publishers, but even the advances they give you are not enough to live on". Regarding the project proposed for a grant and which failed to attract funding, he says that he will look for another way, publishers, partners, financing and is "very much turned towards 'crowdfunding'" or something that he would very much like "which was to convert this project into a newspaper publication format, in series, but newspapers are not accepting proposals in this area because they say they do not have financial resources". The story is about a character who does "trench tourism", visits Europe to places where great battles took place, and takes place between Portugal and Poland". The author says that he was doing research on the Jewish question and on the Warsaw ghetto, when he came across "a strong and harsh scenario and geography". "My travels to southern Poland also took me to unbelievable places in the middle of the forest, where there are 'bunkers', remnants of the war, border areas that were never very clear, and it occurred to me to put together all the notes I had to make a story about memories, unresolved issues in history, and I wanted to do something historical, journalistic work, in comics, documentary". Another complaint from the illustrator is related to the publishing market, an issue on which, "sooner or later there will have to be a discussion". Filipe Abranches refers to "comic book publishers that have started to aggregate many small publishers and to become very allocated to festivals, which may, in some way, be harming diversity". Also Read: Beja Comic Book Festival announces this year's program (Portuguese version)