José Carlos Fernandes

José Carlos Fernandes was born in 1964 at Loulé, Southern Portugal. He has no artistic training (he has a degree in environmental engineering, which is not of great help in this area) and started drawing when he was already 25. Before that his memories are kind of fuzzy, the fragments of his pre-comics life including things as weird as teaching botanics at the university and being a researcher in estuarine heavy metal contamination. The heavy metal studies weren't a complete waste of time, since he later applied some of the knowledge in his 6 or 7 years as a drummer in obscure garage bands.

Except for some rip-offs from Ray Bradbury and Gabriel García Márquez, in the beginning of his career, and two collaborations with the scriptwriters João Miguel Lameiras and João Ramalho Santos, the stories of his comics come out of his twisted mind (prolonged exposure to toxic metals may be responsible for this).

The series A Pior Banda do Mundo (The Worst Band in the World), with six volumes issued until now, is his best known work and is translated in French, Spanish, Polish and Basque. Some Portuguese would like to have it translated in Portuguese, because they complain that the author resorts systematically to antediluvian vocabulary, intricate syntax, and a Gongoresque tone.

The series Black Box Stories and Terra Incognita and O que está escrito nas estrelas (What is written in the stars) combine the texts of JCF with the artwork of Luís Henriques, Roberto Gomes and Manuel García Iglesias. JCF wrote more than one hundred stories for Black Box Stories and Terra Incognita, therefore the artists will be busy during the next decades.