Born in Ituiuitaba, Brazil, Gazy Andraus is a comics researcher and author. He studied Visual Arts at the Art Institute of the Federal University of Goiás (1986-1987) and graduated from the Faculty of Plastic Arts of the Armando Álvares Penteado Foundation in São Paulo in 1992. He then became a Master of Visual Arts from the Institute of Arts of UNESP in São Paulo in 1999, and a Doctor in Communication Sciences. His collection includes Brazilian zines he created and collected over his lifetime.
The Leila Míccolis Brazilian Alternative Press Collection consists primarily of political and countercultural pamphlets and periodicals, concrete poetry, neo-concrete poetry and other vanguard/avant-garde artistic experimentation, fanzines, film reviews, university publications, theater, and musical pieces.
As opposed to the commercial and widely-circulated press of "official" Brazilian governmental venues, the publications contained in the collection especially treat stigmatized or marginalized groups, such as Afro-Brazilians, women, sexual minorities. It accomplishes this goal by utilizing various mediums including literary pieces, editorial cartoons, political comics, sociopolitical critiques of "Brazilianness," humor, and the promotion of ecological and environmental awareness. The collection also contains a large variety of materials from the 1970s Marginália movement, a term used to describe a series of underground publications which circulated during the military dictatorship.
The collection was painstakingly accumulated over the course of forty-five years by Míccolis who decided to place the archive in a North American university so as to assure the preservation of the collection, as well as to prevent its censorship.
