I was exploring comics online recently and discovered that someone translated these amazing Brazilian Mega Man comics from the 90s to English, and I also discovered the internet was shocked by it haha
If you've read my previous rant, though, you already know we were raised a bit differently...
So the first video I watched was a very funny and short one by Death Battle with over 650k views already, but the really cool one is a two parter, almost one and a half hours long, by The Cellar, that analyzes the whole comic and tells a lot of cool stories about it. I had a few issues back then, but I didn't know any of this, so it was a really great watch. Both channels, though, highlight the insanity of the first writer José Roberto Pereira, also known as BK around here, and his "xenophobia".
So BK was very frustrated with early critics because of the poor quality of the comics - yeah, when I said "amazing" in the first line I was overselling it haha. It's pretty funny, though. People, and include myself on that, didn't understand why this third world project with literally zero funding, which was being made for free, didn't hold the same standards of Marvel productions with huge teams and tons of money behind. The Cellar points out how amazing this actually was, it was done by fans, some of which were just teenagers - and others that ended up getting an international career in comics working for Marvel and DC. So you may think this was not a big deal, just a third world country, but at the time Brazil was the 5th most populated country in the world. Imagine being in high school and having a comic that you've drawn being distributed nationwide in a country that big. That's pretty damn cool, if you ask me, and as The Cellar says, with all its faults, the only thing this comic never felt like was "corporate". It was a very authentic work made out of pure love for comics.
Well, the other part is how BK complains about American comics, and how they were "destroying the Brazilian comic scene"... but what the hell is that!?
So I'm sure when BK is talking about American comics he is not actually talking about all comics from the USA, just the corporate, mass produced, generic Marvel and DC superhero vanilla crap. I'm no scholar, but I think to talk about comics in Brazil we would have to start with a magazine from the early 70s called O Grilo - which the name already references local counterculture. It would publish Schulz's Peanuts side by side with other great American comic artists like Robert Crumb and Richard Corben, along with tons of European artists, and also Brazilian artists like Sérgio Macedo that went on to work in France with Métal Hurlant. So, yeah, kids reading Peanuts were also reading Fritz the Cat and a bunch of stuff with strong social and political commentary and takes on morals and ethics.
Another important context here that people may not know is that we lived under a bloody Military Dictatorship from 1964 to 1985, they killed journalists and intellectuals that they considered too subversive, arrested and tortured those that were too well known to get rid of, and dozens had to flee the country and live in exile. At the time we also had a newspaper called O Pasquim that was of huge political importance due to their opposition of the government, and everyone that worked there was arrested and kept in prison for months. No trials, no defense, no anything, they were just being bullied, and some big names of our comics worked there, like Ziraldo, Millôr Fernandes, Jaguar and Henfil. They were all put into surveillance and considered dangerous to the State because of their comics. Henfil's sister-in-law was arrested and tortured by the regime for being a leader of the students' movement, and after the physical torture they would play a record of children screaming and crying in the next room and claim they were torturing her daughter. There are real records of our dictatorship torturing pregnant women, little kids and even babies, so she lived in real fear not knowing what happened to her child. After some protests, the political prisoners acquired the right to one hour of sunbathing and to read the newspapers, aware of this Henfil made a little comic strip that was published on a newspaper with a guy telling a kid "Juliana, stop eating so much strawberry ice cream, you are going to have the shits!" so this seemingly silly strip of a relatable casual life interaction that was just humorous because of the informal language used in a newspaper allowed his sister-in-law know that her daughter was with him, she was safe and having a lot of strawberry ice cream... and I can't even imagine how much it meant to that mother... you know, going back to my previous rant and that comic about moral infants, I catch myself thinking about grown-ass men saying they got emotional when Captain America lifted Thor's hammer... then I think about comics here being repressed for being a threat to fascism, and being used to bring hope and peace to political prisoners. Henfil's little comic strips became the symbol of the democracy movement, and the slogan he created "Diretas Já!" started with only a few dozen of people in 1983 and ended up with a million and half marching for democracy in 1984. The Brazilian comic scene meant counterculture and resistance!
"We want to vote" "Go back home, the people are illegal"
During the Dictatorship we had real government censorship agencies, newspapers would publish cake recipes when their news were censored, musicians would sing "La La La" when their lyrics were censored, and so on, so they had to be really smart to be able to get a message across. In 1985, though, with the end of of those dark years, censorship was no more and other great comic artists like Angeli, Laerte, Glauco and Luiz Gê started a magazine called Chiclete Com Banana, where nothing was too sacred to not be made fun of and being sued by politicians and religious authorities was just another Tuesday. Another publication I can highlight is Níquel Náusea with names like Fernando Gonsales and Spacca, that also worked on O Pasquim and Radar. Comics at the time were highly connected to counterculture, there were stories with hippies, punks, beatniks, jazz musicians, they'd talk about social and moral themes and didn't shy away from sex and drugs. Our comic scene was subversive as fuck!
So there was another thing going on during that time, something pushed by our corporate mass media. I feel like my parents' generation had a far richer cultural background in the 60s and 70s, stuff coming from the USA represented a big portion of what was consumed here but not the biggest, it wasn't just local art, we would watch movies and listen to music and read comics and books coming from Europe and Latin America as well, and it was here because it was good not because it was part of a media bundle. Quino's Mafalda was immensely popular, and I feel like that generation has a really good grasp of history and geography just by growing up reading Asterix and Tintin - instead of shit like Superman. Somewhen during the 80s it changed, mass media conglomerates got exclusive contracts, we started to only import stuff from USA, and during the 90s when I grew up all that was on TV, movies, radio and comic book stands were corporate American productions. We even had a name for it, we called it the "American canned goods", because they all felt like mass produced industrialized crap. And here is where BK's rant about American comics destroying the Brazilian comic scene comes into place:
Chiclete Com Banana ended in 1991 but it continued with a magazine called Tipinhos Inúteis. It died in 1995, though. Níquel Náusea died in 1996. That year Novas Aventuras de Megaman started being published, a work with absolutely no backing, and we see BK's rant. So publishers and sponsors could put their money on cheap bland industrialized corporate American canned goods they didn't need to produce, that came with a huge marketing aided by TV cartoons, movies, toy lines, clothing lines, footwear lines, video games, fucking cereals, chicken nuggets and shampoo bottles to help the sales... or they could put their money on local artists with none of that... what do you think happened? Do you still think BK was just being xenophobic?
Don't get me wrong, I was a part of it, I was a kid in the 90s and I loved everything related to X-Men and Spider-Man, but a few years later when I was in high school and got my hands on some Chiclete Com Banana I saw a completely new and authentic world. It was daring, informative, thought-provoking, subversive, and already buried by corporate media.
It's Worth mentioning that there was one last breath for local comics in the late 90s, although it was already very disconnected from that subversive and transgressive comic scene from the 70s till the mid 90s in the vein of European and underground American comics, and linked to manga and Japanese culture instead - surfing in the local anime explosion of the time. Besides Mega Man, somehow Brazilian artists got the rights to make Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat comics as well, and those had a far higher level of production. Trama Editorial did an amazing job holding the line, but it fell by the mid 00s.
I have to mention too, although periodical publications aimed at older kids, teens and young adults kinda died, when it comes to comics aimed at little kids nothing ever beat A Turma da Mônica (Monica's Gang) here. Many of us learned how to read with it.
Back to Mega Man, which I absolutely love, my main exposure to it as a kid was with a cousin that had Mega Man 7 for SNES, where our hero is out of fucks and was straight up going to murder Wily in the ending, and Mega Man X5 for PS1 that another cousin acquired a few years later. With all the robot uprising and post-apocalytic background adding to the New Adventures of Megaman I had read a few issues, I always thought the series was darker and more mature. It was a big disappointment when I got to read American and Japanese Mega Man comics in recent years and discovered it's actually very childish and silly.
ps: Another Brazilian comic I find legendary is Banda Grossa, for this one I wasn't too late to the party, and had read when it was released in 2006, and it was only possible because they got public funding, but it turns out that they told the city they were going to make a tourist's guide to hotels and restaurants and when they were cleared to press they sent their comics instead haha
Besides being sued by the city, they were also sued by a church. Among other stories, one that left a mark on me was "Armless Jesus". In the first part he is taking a shit and calls his mother "Mommy, I finished." and she says "Go clean your son, Joseph." to which Joseph replies "Oh, so now the son is mine!?" haha. In the last part he finally rose to the challenge to fulfill his destiny. He is captured by the Romans and is going to be crucified... but how, if he has no arms!?
Checkmate!
These are great comics right there!
ps²: That disturbing Mega Man page, it's not anything pedo, she was just a homeless orphan that was kidnapped with other girls and was chosen to be cut open and have her organs sold in the black market while her brain is used for human experimentation. Nothing to worry about.
I had that issue, it made me quite sad because I loved Roll and she suffered a lot... I also always thought this was canon haha
ps³: I briefly mentioned Ziraldo. When I was a kid I didn't know his work on O Pasquim and how dangerous he was considered to fascism, being arrested three times by the regime. He died this last April and I just want to take this opportunity to thank and praise him. O Menino Maluquinho (The Nutty Boy) was the first book I ever read and was my absolute childhood favorite.
"And that’s when everyone discovered that he hadn’t been a nutty boy.
He had actually been a happy boy!"
Update: I was talking to my mother about this, and she told me that when she was in middle school, in the 60s, there was a very popular comic book artist among kids, Carlos Zéfiro. His distribution was limited, so he was mainly found in the big cities, but there was a comic book stand near every school, where kids could acquire it... the stories? Some very nasty taboo porn haha
His comics were nicknamed the "catechesis", as it was most kids' introduction to sex in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Legends say that at some point some kids from higher-ups in the government were caught with it, and the comic was forced to add a "Strictly prohibited for minors under 18 years of age" sticker to the cover - which, of course, meant jack shit haha
Another important context about our dictatorship's censorship is that it was very political, they didn't want anyone questioning or denouncing the regime, its corruption and crimes, but they weren't overly culturally moralistic, in fact, the most popular movies being made at the time were of a genre we called Pornochanchada, which was softcore porn comedies mostly involving taboo themes. The government quite liked people being distracted by pornography, as it moved the focus from previous highly subversive movies like the Oscar nominee and Palm d'Or winner O Pagador de Promessas (The Given Word), and the Palm d'Or nominees Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Black God, White Devil) and Vidas Secas (Barren Lives).