For the film I only had to draw, draw, and draw. I’m my own secretary, accountant, and community manager, and cartoonist. Generally in my line of work I decide everything on my own. I’d made a short film with Santiago Caicedo before that where we used the same team and the same technique, but this was a huge undertaking. I drew mountains, trees, extras, floors, architecture, objects, all kinds of things. I drew all the characters, for example, and then the animators vectorised them and transformed them. Everything needs to be drawn on its own, like an inventory of my life. They weren’t additional drawings: I drew everything all over again, because we wanted to be its own separate thing. I read that you had to draw an additional 5,000 drawings for the making of the movie, and I’m curious about the work that goes into taking art that is 2-D and static to create something more 3-D and dynamic. The real comic book fan was my sister, Patty, however. When I was a kid, though, I read the comic strips that came in the paper. The magazine Aline Kominsky and Diane Noomin used to publish, Twisted Sisters New York Diary by Julie Doucet – actually, there’s a sequence of panels in Virus Tropical that are a nod to one of her strips Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, of course Mark Beyer’s comics. Lots of comics inspired me, particularly lots by women. I was always drawn to unconventional stories, where the art style communicates something new, something specific and unique to that style of drawing. Which graphic novels or comics influenced and inspired you when you were starting out as an artist, and what drew you to visual narratives as a medium? We’d pretend that our family’s story could be a movie and that Almodóvar could be the director, with his aesthetic combined with an Ecuadorian and Colombian aesthetic. I don’t know if I always expected it, but it was a story my sister and I would return to often, to better understand who we were, I suppose. It’s the place where we learned everything, where we came to know the world for the first time you revisit it to understand where you came from, to understand your connections, attachments, and emotional patterns.
I think that childhood is something we all return to, in some form or another. I know you’ve drawn on your own life experiences in a few of your other books and pieces, but what was it like to look back at your childhood specifically, and to turn it into art or a story?
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