* This is minicomic is part of the Grandes Expectativas memoir project, click here to see more!*

I graduated from college in 2001, with big dreams and a degree in Studio Art. With few prospects, a love of Brazilian music, and a thirst for adventure, I left the northeastern US for a gig teaching English in a German colony in the far south of Brazil.

“How Brazil Can Be” takes place within the universe of my larger graphic memoir project. Grandes Expectativas is a fictionalized account of the two years of misadventure that followed my initial arrival in Brazil, lovingly recreated with the help of over twenty years of hindsight and reflection.

“How Brazil Can Be” is set soon after my arrival in the German colony, here known as Pindorama. I didn’t speak any Portuguese at the time, or know much of anything about the place that I had landed. Since I wouldn’t start teaching for a month, I set out on a series of bus trips around the south, beginning to search for the Brazil I had imagined.

24 color pages, 5.5" x 8.5". Self-published August 2023.

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