Café Espacial is an independent comics magazine, edited by Sergio Chaves and Lídia Basoli since 2007, known for its artistic pluralism and for bringing together authors with very different styles in the same issue. Over the years, it has been shortlisted for the Angoulême Festival (the world’s leading comics event) and won the HQ Mix Trophy for best independent group publication seven times. Issue #13, from December 2014, has 100 pages, a cover by Portuguese illustrator Ana Vieira, and gathers comics by creators such as L.M. Melite, Alejandro Farías, and Cris Aguirre, alongside Lucio Luiz and Flavio Soares’s contribution: the story “Um último monólogo” (One Last Monologue).
Written by Lucio Luiz with art by Flavio Soares, the four-page story follows an actor reciting Shylock’s monologue from William Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” to a completely empty theater. The issue was shortlisted for the 2015 HQ Mix Trophy, in the best independent group publication category.
First page of “Um último monólogo” (the full story runs 4 pages).