A disastrous fishing trip in 1950s Guanabara Bay tests the bond between friends in the Brazilian cartoonist’s The Lights of Niterói.
Set along the beaches of Brazil, the graphic novel delivers an invigorating but poignant adventure of football, the sea, and wounded pride. It’s “adventure storytelling with disarming emotional heft—a taut study of wounded pride, precarious camaraderie, and words that can’t be taken back,” per PW’s review.
In conversation with PW, Quintanilha reflects on how his personal and familial history informed his telling—and how even as an ex-pat living in Europe, Brazil forever lives inside of him.
What was it that attracted you to writing about the 1950s in Guanabara Bay?
It’s where I was born, where I was raised. This neighborhood always had a nostalgic atmosphere for me. It used to be culturally and economically lively, but that part of the state of Rio de Janeiro was kind of forgotten by the government. Since the ’60s, lots of industries were transferred away. Everything got poorer and poorer. Growing up, all I could see were shadows of the past, you know? My work is, in a sense, recreating something that I feel I lost, even if I didn’t live it.
I understand your father played soccer professionally, as Hélcio does in the graphic novel.
Football was a taboo when I was growing up. My father had to stop his career early because his knee was cracked. That can almost destroy a family—so much pain involving ‘what if...?’ I cannot remember seeing my father supporting a team, but even if we never talked about football, football was very present.
As a kid, were you interested in the sport?
Well, I’m Brazilian. All Brazilians are interested in football. But the only thing I can do with a ball is to draw it.
How did your main characters take shape?
They arrived as a pair. Hélcio is my father. Noel was one of my father’s best friends. They used to be a very good pair, really.
In the midst of a violent storm, Hélcio calls Noel a “useless old cripple.” Was that moment part of the story from the beginning?
Really, all of the story was built around this moment. Some situations bring the worst from us. You cannot control what you’re going to say. You just act, and you say things that have consequences. I think the story is about asking for forgiveness.
The precise linework and objective realism is a visual departure from the vivid colors of Listen, Beautiful Márcia. How did you settle on this style?
I strongly believe that each story decides the way it must be drawn. Each time I need to relearn how to draw. I relearn how to do comics all the time.
Your dialogue has a lived-in naturalism. How did you approach writing for these characters?
Getting the dialogue right is difficult, the way I do it. I say the lines out loud until they sound natural to me. I declaim the dialogue. And of course, I love Brazilian movies from the ‘50s and Brazilian literature. But with comics, I need to comprehend the mechanisms that make the symbolic language of letters sound natural, and translate it into line, into letters.
You live in Europe now—did making this book offer a line back to home?
You cannot miss what you never lost. And I must say—and this is a very important thing—I’m not an observer. I think that when you work from observation, there is necessarily a distance between the one who observes and the thing that’s observed. I never work from the distance. The Brazil that’s in my stories, it’s not the Brazil in front of me. It’s the Brazil that is inside me. Whether I’m in Brazil or not in Brazil, Brazil is what I am.
Read more from our spring 2026 comics & graphic novels preview feature.
