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pentângulo is an annual publication resulting from a partnership between escola ar.co and the association chili com carne, aimed at publishing authors who have attended the illustration and comics course at ar.co, involving students, alumni, and teachers. the cover of the first issue is by daniel lima, with editorial coordination by jorge nesbitt and marcos farrajota, and design by joana pires. participating authors include amanda baeza, anna bouza da costa, cecília silveira, carolina moreira, dileydi florez, francisco sousa lobo, gonçalo duarte, igor baptista, joão carola, joão silva, luana saldanha, martina manyà, mathieu fleury, pedro moura (as scriptwriter and also with an essay titled plágio!), rafael santos, rodolfo mariano, sara boiça, simão simões, stephane galtier, coletivo triciclo, and vasco ruivo. some of the initial comics focus on the work of early 20th-century avant-garde women artists, especially russian nationals. in the newspaper a batalha, russo wrote the following review of the first pentângulo: *"the folks making comics are clearly the lumpenproletariat of portuguese literature: they have no class consciousness and contribute little to shaking the economy (some are academics, others public servants; some hold the official artist certificate from the regime, others hunt for zinc sheets for their post-industrial music project; some make zines and live off unemployment benefits, others carouse loudly on thursdays at cais do sodré), having abandoned their revolutionary potential to transform society (they’d rather attend another independent publishing fair than clock in at another housing protest), they are undisciplined (a comics book about the january 18 anarchist uprising has been promised for two years and still nowhere to be seen) and, of course, are despised by marxists. perhaps because they have been ghettoized and marginalized by the portuguese publishing market, forced to beg for a corner in bookstores and generic book fairs, comics are the most alive literary genre here in the burgh. attentive readers might say: 'comrade russo, what do you have to say about the illustrations in _______ (fill in with any mediocre poetry magazine)? or that comic in the boring yet avant-garde portuguese edition of le monde diplomatique? and you’re forgetting the contributions to the high-circulation newspapers?' comrades, all these are just ornaments and accessories that serve to enrich poor prose, dragging comics into a subservient condition, stripping it of legitimacy as an autonomous literary genre. as if the undead wanted to eat the flesh of the living, dragging them into their cadaverous state. this first edition of pentângulo shows that the vitality of a literary genre depends on renewal, on giving space to publishing new folks. but it’s not about publishing the new just because they’re new, but mainly because they have a perspective on the world that is of this time. this is evident in joão carola’s comics about the aesthetic deconstruction of russian suprematism and constructivism or those of simão simões and amanda baeza exploring the imagery of the amorphous. from this anthology also came the fold-out ‘make your own dictator’ by mathieu fleury (...) oh, and there’s a bonus comic by francisco sousa lobo! who would have thought the déclassés would shake the provincial literary cesspool?"* texts by erradiador on the blog my nation underground.

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pentângulo #1, february 2018, 118 pages, two-color print; cover in four-color process, 16.3x22.7 cm. edition: ar.co and chili com carne.