CREATOR SPOTLIGHT: Eduardo Medeiros Revisits Friendship, Loss and the Summer That Never Ended in Battle in the Flower Gardens
·Al Mega
The celebrated Brazilian cartoonist opens up about Capão Novo, childhood friendships, arcade culture, family wounds, growing up, and turning one unforgettable summer into his most personal graphic novel yet.
Some comics start with a cool idea somebody scribbles into a notebook at two in the morning. Others hang around in the back of your mind for years, waiting until you’re finally old enough, experienced enough, or maybe just brave enough to deal with what they actually mean. Battle in the Flower Gardens feels like Eduardo Medeiros finally opened that old mental drawer, pulled out one summer from his childhood, and decided it was time to stop carrying it quietly.
Medeiros has spent years moving between deeply personal work and some seriously recognizable corners of the comics world. His credits stretch from Mondo Urbano, Sopa de Salsicha and Open Bar in Brazil to Marvel Strange Tales, Gotham Academy, Joker 80th, Funny Creek and Roderick and the City of Morhil. With Battle in the Flower Gardens, though, he’s not hiding behind superheroes, fantasy worlds or somebody else’s characters. He’s digging into his own childhood, and fam, once you know how much of Eduardo is buried inside Luke, the whole book starts hitting differently.
Written, illustrated and colored by Medeiros, with lettering by Deyvison Manes, Battle in the Flower Gardens debuts digitally August 25, 2026 through Comixology Originals. The story follows Luke and Mitchell, two young friends spending another summer in the Brazilian beach town of Capão Novo, surrounded by bikes, arcades, shifting friendships, awkward adolescence and those endless summer days that used to feel like they had no expiration date. Anybody who grew up measuring time by school breaks, quarters at the arcade or which friends were outside already knows that feeling, but Medeiros understands something we usually don’t figure out until much later: even the summers we swear we’ll remember forever are changing while we’re still living them.
We reviewed the graphic novel here at Comic Crusaders, and the nostalgia got our attention, but the stuff underneath it is what stayed with us. Behind those arcade cabinets and childhood adventures sits a much heavier story about belonging, guilt, friendship, family, loss and the uncomfortable moment when adulthood forces you to look backward and admit that younger you didn’t always make the right call. Luke wants what a lot of kids want, to be noticed, accepted and invited into the room, but getting what you think you want can come with a price nobody bothered explaining when you were thirteen.
Medeiros makes the whole thing even more personal by refusing to put a thick wall between fiction and memory. Luke carries pieces of Eduardo himself, Capão Novo is a real place from his childhood summers, family photographs become part of the visual storytelling, and Rodrigo is rooted in Medeiros’ childhood friend Bruno, whose loss still sits inside these memories three decades later. Once you know those pieces are real, Battle in the Flower Gardens stops feeling like somebody mining the ’90s for easy nostalgia and starts feeling like a creator sitting across the table saying, “Yo, this happened to me, this stayed with me, and I’m finally ready to talk about it.”
When the opportunity came to speak with Eduardo, tossing him twelve promotional softballs would have been a waste of everybody’s time. A book this personal deserves a real conversation, so we went there with him, talking about autobiography, unreliable memory, childhood social hierarchies, the strange power of arcades, apologies that can’t magically repair everything, seeing your parents differently once you become an adult yourself, and what happens when an artist finally puts a thirty-year-old memory onto the page.
Read our full review of Battle in the Flower Gardens.
CC: You’ve worked across very different corners of comics, from Mondo Urbano, Open Bar and Sopa de Salsicha in Brazil to Marvel, DC, Funny Creek and Roderick and the City of Morhil. Yet Battle in the Flower Gardens feels less like you’re showing us what you can create and more like you’re showing us a piece of yourself. Why did you reach this point in your career and decide, “Now I’m ready to tell this story,” and was there ever a version of Eduardo who simply wasn’t emotionally prepared to make this book?
Eduardo: When I started making my comics back in the 2000s, I was (and still am) super interested in autobiographical comics. All of them. So I started working on my own comic, called Sopa de Salsicha, and at that time I got some attention for it (which became a book years later). But after years of doing it, I started to feel interested in and confident about telling other stories. So, doing personal comics was always in the back of my mind. When we proposed Battle in the Flower Gardens to Comixology, I had been cooking this story for a while in my head and telling myself that I needed to tell it. Looking back, I definitely wasn’t emotionally ready to draw or write this story ten years ago. I needed time and to be able to look at these feelings with the right perspective.
CC: At the end of the book, you reveal something that changes how we understand everything we’ve just read. Rodrigo was inspired by your childhood friend Bruno, and Luke is very clearly connected to your younger self, even down to the wonderfully specific confession that young Eduardo thought “Luke” would have been a better name. Where does autobiography end and fiction begin here? More importantly, were there things the real Eduardo did, thought, or felt that were harder to put on the page than anything you’ve ever invented for a fictional character?
Eduardo: I think being personal is always difficult, and that’s the reason I enjoy autobiographical comics so much. When I started working on the book, I had to figure out the storyline, so there were a few things that I decided to cut out. Initially, the book was going to be something like 400 pages, but that was just too much.
I had to find the right balance. The feelings, the nostalgia, and the harder moments were all there, and putting those vulnerable, real-life thoughts on paper was much harder than creating any fictional story from scratch.
CC: Capão Novo isn’t presented simply as scenery. Luke describes arriving there almost like crossing into another identity, a place where he can become somebody different from the kid he is during the rest of the year. You actually spent your childhood summers there. When you returned to Capão Novo through memory to create this book, what did adulthood reveal about that place that the boy experiencing those summers could never have understood?
Eduardo: We spent every summer in Capão Novo, and it was truly magical for me. I was born and raised in Porto Alegre (which is about two hours from the beach), and my life there was basically going to school and coming back home during the year. Not because my parents didn’t allow me to go out, but now that I have a kid of my own, I can understand their concern about raising a child in a big city. In Capão Novo, it was different. I just had to be at home to eat, shower, and sleep. It was a safe place, and our parents didn’t know everything that was happening to us.
Today, I live close to Capão Novo, and since I started thinking about this book, I go there constantly. Adulthood showed me that everything is smaller than what was recorded in my memory. The streets, the houses, the distances… but somehow, the feelings and that sense of freedom still feel just as big.
CC: The book repeatedly reminds us that we’re not necessarily reading an objective record of one summer. We’re experiencing Luke’s memory of it decades later. Photographs, notebook paper, crossed-out thoughts, empty spaces and fragments all contribute to that feeling. How much do you trust your own memories of that period? Did you ever discover while making the book that something you’d carried as absolute truth for decades might actually have been childhood perception, guilt, nostalgia, or your adult mind filling in the blanks?
Eduardo: I tried to tell this story just as I remembered it, and it wasn’t that hard because it has stayed with me ever since. I also talked to people from that time, looked through family photo albums and my dad helped me find some 90s photos from Capão Novo that appear in the book. Of course, our memories can always trick us, but I think I did a lot of research.
At the same time, I think any memory is a mix of what actually happened and how we felt about it.
CC: The arcade fascinated me because it begins as Luke’s sanctuary. Games have rules. You learn the moves, improve, win, and suddenly people respect you. Real life refuses to cooperate with that system. By the end, Luke realizes there are things you can “win” while still losing something far more important. Was the arcade always intended as a metaphor for his misunderstanding of life, and did your own childhood relationship with games give you that same feeling of control when the world outside the cabinet felt harder to understand?
Eduardo: Totally. Games were always a refuge for me when I was young, and after that, comics became that same refuge. It’s funny to think that being good at the arcade could give you some kind of respect and admiration. I wasn’t the best gamer, but I wasn’t bad at all. I remember one time when my father went with me to the arcade and he was impressed with the kids talking to me and asking for tips and things like that.
The arcade was a microcosm of the world outside for me at that time, and I thought that could be a good metaphor in the book.
CC: Luke finally gets what he has wanted for years. The other kids notice him. He gets invited into the group. He’s good at something they respect. Then Mitchell arrives, and suddenly the friendship that once made Luke feel safe becomes inconvenient to the identity he’s building. That’s uncomfortable because Luke isn’t a villain. He’s just young, insecure and making some lousy decisions. How important was it that readers understand Luke without necessarily forgiving him, and how much of growing up, in your experience, is recognizing that sometimes we were the person who hurt somebody else?
Eduardo: I think everyone has actions that linger in our minds when we put our heads on the pillow at night. Not necessarily bad things. Sometimes it’s something you didn’t say at the right time, or something you said that makes you feel ashamed of yourself. Luke makes some questionable decisions, but he’s also a person in development, and everyone can relate to that. I think a big part of growing up is realizing that we’ve all been the “villain” in someone else’s story at least once.
CC: Mitchell could easily have been written simply as “the friend Luke betrays,” but he’s more complicated than that. He comes carrying his own loneliness, family history and expectations, and when Luke eventually apologizes, the book refuses to give us the Hollywood hug where everything magically resets. Why was it important that their friendship not fully recover? Have you come to believe that some apologies can be sincere and still arrive too late to restore what was broken?
Eduardo: I think life is made of moments like these. We grow up watching movies with happy endings, but it’s almost never that way. You can be absolutely sincere about your apology, but that doesn’t guarantee anything. Apologizing is about owning your mistake, not demanding a fresh start, and sometimes, the most honest thing you can do for a friendship is simply to let it go.
CC: William is interesting because he represents something almost every kid recognizes. The charismatic person who can decide who’s cool, who’s outside, and what everybody else is allowed to laugh at. Luke knows some of William’s behavior is wrong, yet the desire to remain accepted keeps pulling him along. Looking back at the social hierarchies of your own adolescence, what do you understand now about people like William, and perhaps more importantly, about why decent kids sometimes go silent around them instead of standing up?
Eduardo: Sadly, I think people like William have a tendency to succeed in life, most of the time. I have known a lot of Williams throughout the years, but it is especially during the teenage years that you get caught up with those personalities. It’s inevitable that you will admire someone who everybody loves when you are developing as a person, and sometimes you keep following this pattern as an adult.
Having a kid, I’m seeing these Williams again. As a father, and having gone through it, I try to make my son see these things that weren’t so clear to me growing up.
CC: Then comes Rodrigo. The book spends time letting that friendship become something wonderfully quiet and genuine before revealing that Rodrigo dies in a tragic accident. Luke doesn’t attend the funeral. Years later, he tells us Rodrigo “remains young,” trapped in a summer that never ended for him, and says that loss, in a way, ended part of Luke as well. Knowing that Rodrigo is rooted in your real friend Bruno makes those pages hit very differently. What did it cost you emotionally to recreate Bruno on the page, and what responsibility did you feel when transforming someone you actually loved and lost into a character readers would eventually have to lose too?
Eduardo: I see this as a tribute to his memory. It has been 30 years now, but thinking about it always makes me revisit that weird period. Of course, today it hits differently, but sometimes I think about the life he would have had, or if we would still be friends today.
CC: One of the quieter heartbreaks running underneath the boys’ story is Luke’s family. Early on he senses the silence between his parents without fully understanding it. Then they separate, eventually build other families, and adult Luke realizes he spent years feeling like “the fruit of what didn’t work out.” Did writing the book force you to reconsider your parents not from the perspective of their child, but as two complicated adults dealing with a relationship you couldn’t possibly understand at that age? Was there forgiveness in that process, for them or for yourself?
Eduardo: I don’t know, I think things should have been different. At that time, going to a psychologist wasn’t a common thing, and I think I only started to work through it as an adult by going to therapy. I understand that everyone makes mistakes, but you know, today things are good between us, and my parents are great friends.
CC: Visually, this book does something fascinating. The cartooning can be funny and inviting, while photographs, ruled-paper backgrounds, scribbles, altered palettes and increasingly heavy negative space make the same memories feel almost documentary. Then actual photographs appear, collapsing the distance between fiction and lived experience. How did you decide which memories should look like comics and which moments needed the visual weight of reality? Did the art style change because Luke was changing, or because adult Eduardo’s relationship with those memories was changing as you drew them?
Eduardo: Luke is at that age where he’s not a kid anymore, but he’s not a teenager either. So, after I chose the storyline, I decided to represent it in two ways, and the photos help the reader feel closer to the story I’m telling. I think the fun of making comics for me is trying to evoke those feelings in the reader.
CC: Near the end, adult Luke recognizes several illusions of childhood, belonging, permanence, even the belief that you can somehow win without losing anything. Thirty years later, everybody has moved forward except Rodrigo, who can only exist at the age Luke remembers him. After spending years wanting to tell this story and finally completing it, did Battle in the Flower Gardens change the memory itself for you? When you think about Bruno, Capão Novo and that younger Eduardo now, are you remembering the same summer you remembered before you made this book?
Eduardo: Unfortunately or not, I remember that summer the same way. Looking back, I can understand why I chose those actions. It’s easy to spot mistakes after you go through them (though I don’t think it’s even fair to ourselves), but it’s inevitable. Now I’m a decade older than my parents were in the ’90s. It’s weird to think about it, but honestly, I don’t think I could have done better than they did in my 30s.
Some interviews tell you how somebody made a comic. This conversation gets into something much more interesting: why Eduardo Medeiros had to wait until this point in his life to make Battle in the Flower Gardens. The story had been sitting with him for years, but telling it meant getting enough distance from the kid riding those streets, feeding coins into arcade machines, trying to figure out friendship, family, acceptance and loss before he even had the vocabulary to understand what any of it meant.
Thirty years later, Medeiros can walk through Capão Novo and see how much childhood exaggerates the physical world. The streets feel shorter, the houses smaller, the distances nowhere near as enormous as memory made them. Yet the freedom he felt there hasn’t shrunk one damn inch, and that contradiction may be the emotional engine underneath the entire book. We grow up, the places change, our perspective changes, but some feelings refuse to obey the clock.
His reflections on Luke hit just as hard because Medeiros doesn’t give his younger self a free pass. Growing up eventually forces most of us to confront an uncomfortable truth: we weren’t always the misunderstood hero of our own story. Sometimes we stayed quiet because fitting in mattered more than doing the right thing, sometimes we said something that hurt somebody who trusted us, and sometimes an apology came after the damage had already changed the relationship. Welcome to adulthood, fam. The graphics ain’t nearly as impressive as the brochure promised. 🎮
What makes Medeiros’ approach land is that he doesn’t manufacture some convenient lesson where everybody hugs, forgives each other and walks into a sunset with inspirational music playing. Bruno’s loss remains painful. Luke’s mistakes remain mistakes. The wounds created by his parents’ separation don’t disappear simply because Eduardo can understand them better as an adult and a father. Life rarely cleans up its own continuity that neatly, and Battle in the Flower Gardens respects the reader enough not to pretend otherwise.
Medeiros didn’t return to this summer so he could rewrite it. He returned because he was finally ready to look at it without flinching, to give Bruno another place to exist, to acknowledge the people his younger self loved, disappointed, misunderstood and lost, and maybe to understand that kid a little better without pretending he would have made every choice differently. There’s something beautiful about putting an arcade token back into a machine that shut down decades ago, not because you expect another game, but because you still remember exactly how those lights made you feel.
Readers may come into Battle in the Flower Gardens for the 1990s nostalgia, the friendships, the beach town and that glorious old-school arcade energy, but Medeiros is playing a much deeper game here. Don’t be surprised if you close the book thinking about your own version of Capão Novo, that old friend whose face you can still see perfectly, or one summer that somehow became part of the person you are today. Some memories fade into background noise, while others keep dropping quarters into the machine whether we’re ready to play again or not.
Battle in the Flower Gardens is written, illustrated and colored by Eduardo Medeiros, with lettering by Deyvison Manes, and debuts August 25, 2026, through Comixology Originals. Growing up doesn’t always mean leaving the past behind; sometimes it means finally becoming old enough to understand what the hell happened back there, looking that younger version of yourself in the eye, and carrying the good, the ugly and the unforgettable forward with you.
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