#brazilian supervillains

[maxwell-grant]

I was reading one of your posts that crosslinked to another post about someone named the Grey Claw, but the link wasn't working. What's the Grey Claw all about?

I was planning to hold off talking about him until I could finish translating his comic or wrote a story with him proper, plans I still intend to get around to but are gonna be on ice for a long while. So in the meanwhile, let's finally set the record about this guy.

Said to be the star of Brazil's first horror comic, he is unarguably the first Brazilian supervillain, and I'll make an argument that he may very well be The First Comic Book Supervillain proper, inspired by the pulp master villains but something much different than the drab Fu Manchu clones of the time, something new and costumed and strange and fantastical in ways that were years if not decades ahead of his time. Predating the first recognized American supervillains in comics, at the midpoint between Fu Manchu and Doctor Sivana, between Fantomas and The Joker, between Doctor Quartz and Lex Luthor, there is: The Grey Claw.

Murders, underground connections, secret laboratories, opium dens, a secret society of crime and a mysterious super-villain challenging all of police and society. São Paulo was still in it's quiet beginnings, but even then, it dreamed of being a grand shadowy metropolis, like the ones heard about in movies, pulps and North-American comic books.

And that dream made the success of The Grey Claw series in the 1930s. For months, paulista readers eagerly followed the perils of Inspector Frederic Higgens at the hands of The Grey Claw's semi-anarchist gang, with exotic characters such as the robot Flag and the sensual Dame in Black.

Considered by many to be the first Brazilian horror comic - due to it's plot full of monsters, mummies, grave defilings and mentions of life after death - The Grey Claw is a direct spawn from the seedy and mysterious texts of north-american pulp magazines. Soon, those masked avengers and horrific villains in non-stop action would reach the world of comics, giving birth to the superhero revolution. - The City and it's Monster, by Worney Almeida de Souza

The Grey Claw was the star of a comic published in newspaper A Gazetinha starting July 1937, just short of a full year before Superman's debut in June 1938, and it would run for a hundred installments until wrapping up it's story circa 1939. The same newspaper would eventually debut both Superman and The Phantom (second only to Superman and maybe Batman in terms of imitators worldwide among Golden Age superheroes, and I say maybe because they overlap a bit but The Phantom was definitely the go-to superhero to rip off basically everywhere outside of the States) to Brazilian audiences, running alongside The Grey Claw during his brief run. The strip is a police procedural that gradually turns into a sci-fi horror story, a pastiche of film serials and pulp novels that focuses on the titular strange, powerful masked villain running amok in a seedy metropolitan area, and a police detective's efforts to uncover who is behind said villain.

The basic skeleton of it is a fairly cut-and-dry police procedural with a square-jawed Sherlockian policeman investigating a string of calling-card murders with more suspects and victims picking up along the way. Our heroes are mostly colorless and dull archetypes, although the protagonist Higgins is amusingly dickish at several times and I'll go to bat for the female lead Kay Tornhill, she's a fairly progressive character in spite of limited screentime as the detective's partner (not romantically, she joins the investigation to protect her younger brother from the Claw). She's a skilled fencer / marksman / equestrian / swimmer who doesn't really get to show these talents in the story, but they make a point of bringing it up, and I think Kay's presentation probably did the most in convincing people for decades that this comic was penned by a woman under a male name, because, well just look at her.

But as is Pulp Supervillain Lead tradition, it is the villain who has more than enough charisma to spare to carry us through, and a lot of what makes The Grey Claw feel distinct is that he winds up remixing stock pulp/serial villain traits in novel ways, the result of him making his debut in a fairly new and developing medium and growing stranger as the issues develop as he takes center stage more and more. Everytime he shows up, he brings with him things like televised death traps (television hadn't yet been brought to Brazil), underground torch-lit lairs, rabid ape monsters in chains who used to be humans, and a gigantic automaton who walks around making turkey noises and killing everything in sight unless reigned in by The Grey Claw, who names it "FLAG" and treats him with great fondness as if he were a best friend and a sidekick and a dog all in one and bemoans that one day, he will be able to give his berserk death machine friend the power of speech.

FLAG! FLAG! It is I, FLAG! Calm yourself, FLAG!

My poor FLAG! Some day, I shall give you the usage of speech...

Here's one thing about the character upfront: The story was drawn by Renato Silva (who also did Nick Carter stories) and written by Francisco Armond, but nobody knows who Francisco Armond is. For a while, the most likely candidate was Helena Ferraz, a poet and co-editor/director of the paper who had already published under the male pseudonym Alvaro Armando (named after her two sons), but relatives of hers confirmed it wasn't her, and so currently nobody knows who wrote this. I actually still have no idea who, if anyone, currently owns the rights to The Grey Claw, because although he's had a recent reboot (by the same creator of Doutrinador and in the exact same vibe, which means it's dogshit and I will not entertain it), he's long passed the point where he should be public domain.

The comic was a great success for it's time and would achieve a level of fame none of it's contemporaries would by being reprinted internationally. In 1939, it was reprinted without permission by Mexican editor Sayrol in 1939 and made it's way to European publishers through there. Between 1944-1947 it had a very popular run in Belgian magazine "Le Moustique", and he was adapted to France under the name "La Griffre Grise", which is where I discovered the character while looking for French pulp characters. Unsurprisingly, the character was never credited as a Brazilian creation, and for 50 or so years went almost completely undiscovered by even the most hardcore researchers.

Even in Brazil, nobody knows about this guy, and it was only in 2011, 74 years after his debut, that the character's entire saga was finally collected and reprinted in trade paperback by Editora Conrad. It's not cheap and it's really hard to find and order, completely out of stock in most online stores, but I got it as a birthday gift from my sister a couple years ago. I have it on hand right now to help put this post together.

It's a fairly weird comic that's in many ways aged really poorly but also tapped into some veins superhero comics and future supervillains would take a long while to even approach. The dialogue is a couple steps clunkier than even your average Golden Age comic, almost impenetrably outdated with Portuguese linguistics (a poisoned character saying out loud "Oh no! I've just been narcotized!") and weird malapropist English terms hastily translated and inserted in, and conveying the feel of it is even beyond my own skills at translating. It's a unique time capsule of how Brazil was still adapting to rapidly developing times, recently loosening up from centuries-spanning shackles of Portuguese and Spanish colonialism and with a newfound input of foreign media in pulps and serials and theater, and adapting and developing new subcultures and ways of expression as a result.

This was one of the first times a Brazilian comic would play around this much with USAmerican tropes and archetypes (cultural imports from the USA were all extremely new and viewed as a hot new alternative to European art and culture that had otherwise been the dominant form), a São Paulo-published comic set in a seedy, Depression-choked American metropolis, a big monument of brick and poison and inequality, which is exactly what São Paulo would become. There is something oddly alien and prescient about The Grey Claw because it's rooted in a fictionalized fantasyland idea of 1930s New York, that would nevertheless predate São Paulo's trajectory into becoming the country's big American-Style Urban Center, over the decades later when it would be the USAmericans' turn to tighten those colonialist shackles back on.

The dialogue also makes it pretty funny to read as a result and especially when the villain shows up, because The Grey Claw himself is pretty goddamn funny. Not just funny: I think his characterization is actually pretty damn impressive, and it's certainly the main draw of the thing for me. There's one sequence I'm going to post the whole page to be appreciated. I can't scan it so you'll just have to take my word as is that this is the whole page.

For context: It is revealed that The Grey Claw has been on a mad quest to unlock the mysteries of life and death via a formula that can bring the dead back to life. He monologues quite intensely about having unveiled and unlocked the secrets, saying to FLAG that he was the first step in giving life and intelligence into inanimate matter ("You would be a perfect creation, if only you were able to express your feelings", he says, to the horrid gurgling automaton who murders everything in sight), but that this time, he shall perfect the breath of life.

But it is eventually revealed, when he is exposed as Dr James Stone (a "famed young chemist, one of the most well-liked men around town") after his explosive demise, that he had in fact stolen the formula's recipe from a former partner, Professor Curberry. Curberry was the ape monster he kept chained in the basement, and that he visited in order to whip while it writhed in chains, with the narrative stating The Claw was "blinded by hate" towards him. At the end, it's revealed that Curberry's corpse coming back to life as a half-man-half-ape monster was a side effect of The Grey Claw "getting the dosage wrong", and we're just gonna ignore the can of worms that ending brings to focus on when The Grew Claw actually succeded.

For his test subject, he picked the corpse of the scientist's secretary he murdered within the 2nd strip, over a week well into death, and injects her at the dawn of midnight. And I'm gonna have to transcribe it:

Mid-night at last! The "Claw" begins the grand experiment.

The ghost's hand shakes slightly as he injects the licor of life in the dead woman's arms. And this is the first time the steely nerves of that insensitive creature have ever faltered.

"Twenty four minutes and...she'll be back to life! Ah, this time the triumph will be complete!"

"Will I fail yet again? No, failure is not possible. However, the experiment realized with Curberry was definitive...how horrible it would be if the experiment failed again!"

"It would be horrible! But no! If I fail, I will not allow her to survive...Yes! I shall exterminate her! Curberry and Mac-Flagan were more than enough!"

The minutes drizzle out slowly. As the pointers walk across, the mysterious ghost feels his nervousness grow.

They dedicated an entire page's worth just to The Grey Claw stressing and worrying and having a breakdown over the prospect of his formula not working again. But he does succeed, and the secretary comes back to life devoid of any memories and in great shock. Here's how the "insensitive creature" reacts

Despite his great dominion over his own nerves, the "Claw" can barely repress his restlessness. The living dead woman stumbles around her with a look of fright.

DAME IN BLACK: "What an emptiness in my head! It's all confused, scrambled, obscured!"

THE GREY CLAW: "This time I've won completely, FLAG!"

He later tells her that, with no memories of her own, she might as well not "cling to the past" and instead join him as his "Dame in Black". But in the aftermath of this, while he's busy boasting and jeering that the world belongs to him now, FLAG immediately zeroes in and tries to maul the woman before The Claw shoos him away. And then in the next strip, he writes in his diary about how his two besties are getting along now-

The next day, certain that FLAG would no longer try assaulting the "Dame in Black", the "Claw" penetrates a discreet cabinet next to the laboratory

"My memories...they shall be worth a fortune later..."

"I have triumped! She transcended the throes of death and returned to life, thirty minutes after the injection. She showed herself a bit stunned, undecided, wowed; she spoke, she walked, she fought…yes, she fought the idiot automaton, who was startled by the new companion…But now, they are both great friends."

"I have taught her the process of turning FLAG docile as a lamb. She is of sane mind; her mind has shed, however, all impressions of the "past". My voice, however, brought her memory-"

Did I tell you guys already that, before the police blows the two up, FLAG ultimately mauls The Grey Claw to death while his last words are him desperately trying to get the robot to calm down, saying "It's me!" instead of fleeing? I'm posting like one highlight, but to post all of them would be to post basically every time this character shows up in the story.

(Art by @zanzooeditorial)

There's just such a fascinating mismatch between how the narration and everyone sees him, as this stone cold invincible death-dealer turned death-master who holds the entire country in a grip of terror, and his characterization when he's actually on-screen going about his affairs. The narrative goes through lengths to paint him as an unfeeling soulless monster that is almost patently contradicted with most of what he says and does in-text, which veers widly between pitiable and even sympathetic to, actually worse than if he was fully pragmatic chessmaster genius the police perceives him as, and it's not even really played for laughs, it's more like a side effect of this being published peacemeal over 2 years and shooting for new directions and thus contradicting itself. He's afforded this emotional range that's just really unheard of, not just in the pulp villains he's based on but in all the Golden Age supervillains that came after him, it's something that only really started catching on with Marvel and their attempts to add extra dimension to their villains.

The Grey Claw is a brutal murderer and a cutthroat terrorist who has an innocent woman shot in the heart within the second page, and he's a wisecracking goofball who delighs in showing off his advanced intellect and machinery before his police nemesis. He commands vast invisible communications networks and armies of brutal thugs, and then he writes diaries and plays pranks and poses dramatically. He is a vicious man who turned his former partner into a mutant ape and keeps him locked up and whipped while constantly berating and cursing him ("Ah Ah Ah! I wish your university colleagues could see you now!"), but he did forsake victory and spared his worst enemies from a horrible end to save the life of a woman he liked among them. He is a deeply lonely gothic dweeb who casually engages in constant banter with the monstrous unresponsive automaton, whom he asks for input and talks to and holds tight in moments of emotion or camraderie that is entirely one-sided on his end, he barely restrains it from murdering everything in sight at all times and winds up being mauled to death the second that grip is loosened. He has one friend in the whole entire world and it's the one he made himself.

He is desperately driven to prove himself and have that blasted resurrection formula he's been developing for years work, even though we learn that it was apparently stolen from someone else the whole time and he was just, what, passionately pretending to himself that it was his life's work? We never get to see his face, only a last-minute identity as a respectable young chemist and "the last suspect anyone would have", and given he was indeed able to reverse death and decay, seemingly permanently, it would have been extremely easy for the series to continue, and for The Grey Claw to come back again and again as many times as it took.

He is humorous and childish and absurd and even quite likeable, but the bodies do not stop piling near him, and the more he shows up, the weirder and bloodier things get, until what began as a bog-standard police whodunit ends with a violent struggle between a former professor turned bloodied giant ape man and a titanic lumbering murder robot deep within an underground dungeon system, where said murder robot proceeds to slaughter everything in sight including the Dr Frankenstein-gangster-pirate who created him, as the police throws dynamite at them because nothing else has worked so far in stopping them.

By all means, The Grey Claw had everything necessary and then some to make it into the biggest leagues of supervillain history, on the strength not just of his initial outing but his inspired characterization and great success and popularity by his time. Today he's remembered only among diehard afictionados and collectors, for spearheading many firsts within Brazilian comics and being one of the very, very few figures among Brazilian superheroes/supervillains to achieve any kind of fame at all. The scene and history when it comes to Brazilian superheroes, and reasons for the lack thereof, is a topic for another day.

Some fans have tried boosting the character's rep by claiming he was an influence on several marginally better-known characters such as Marvel's Blazing Skull or the nascent villain protagonist genre of comics that would pop up throughout Europe in the 50s-60s, but even I'll say that's a stretch too far. Records show The Grey Claw was popular in his time and region for sure, popular enough to be reprinted without credit across the globe and popular enough to be remembered and redrawn in present day (can't discount the strength of a good design, at least), but he was an anomaly at the end, a missing link untethered and unprotected from time.

A gothic horror alchemist who skulks around medieval dungeons, weaponizing every latest technological advancement and social anxiety to his advantage and even some that didn't really exist yet. A totem of death obsessed with life, the first comic book villain to surpass death if only for a moment, an inhuman murderous monster who turns out to be as painfully human as it gets. A skull-faced harbinger of death who foregoes the cloak and scythe to don a panama hat and fancy apparell and The Chest Logo Of His Persona and Brand. Just one year before some gringo strongman was doing that but with circus colors and a letter instead.

Pfah, fashion visionaries never get their due in time. But if conquering death was a trivial task for The Fascinora, conquering time and returning to his true self should be achievable in no time at all!

Ah Ah Ah!...

Give or take some 90 years, maybe.

(Art by @necronauta)

[weonlyneedfour]

(Background by Ele.D)

The Grey Claw

Character created by: Francisco Armond

Home series: A Garra Cinzenta (1937-1938)

Title: Fascinora. Alter Ego: Thiago Fragas. Doctor Stone.  Nationality: Brazilian. Occupation: Crimelord. Chemist.  Group affiliation: His gang. Base of Operations: São Paulo, Brazil.  Likes: His robot companion. Jazz. Attention. Dislikes: His arch-enemy. Dying. Being unrecognized. Skill: Resurrection. Revenge. Building models replicas of haunted castles.

Powers: None on record. Access to a vast arsenal of strange weapons, devices, death traps, and henchmen. Deadly claw gauntlets able to puncture concrete and tear through flesh and bone, below-average fighter otherwise. Chemical and bioelectrical genius. Built self-sustaining automatons. Devised a chemical formula able to resurrect the deceased, albeit without memories. Failed prototypes of said formula were used to transmute living and dead humans into mutant creatures, most frequently reminiscent of chimpanzees and gorillas. Possibly immortal.

The Grey Claw was the man who lit the world on fire in the process of trying to start a match. 

The Grey Claw was among the first recorded black hats operating in Brazil, a master criminal of a sort thought to have died out after the end of World War 1. Distinguished by his grim yet flashy buccaneer grim reaper costume, his deep and nasally voice, and his appalling chuckle and sense of humor. The Grey Claw perpetrated a series of high-profile thefts, murders and bombings at his debut, quickly consolidating São Paulo’s criminal underworld and newfound industrial advancements under his grip and holding the country in a grip of terror for over a year. And this was but the start, a cheap façade over his true plans of alchemical research and global domination.

Notorious for his mysterious technology and bizarre resources, The Grey Claw’s highly advanced arsenal included early prototypes of television screens, recording devices across the entire city, mummified corpses rigged to spasm and perform simple tasks, rampaging mutant apes, and FLAG, a titanic murderous automaton bodyguard that rendered The Claw untouchable, and whom The Claw displayed a bizarre degree of camaraderie with. Constantly outfoxing the police and with little to no white hats to oppose him, The Grey Claw eventually achieved his world-changing breakthrough: perfecting a formula that could resurrect the dead. 

His success would be seemingly short-lived, as a police raid on his underground lair quickly buried the Claw’s discoveries. His persistent enemy, the police inspector Higgins, would find the corpses of his fellow officers, one of the Claw’s mutant apes, and the Claw himself being mauled to death by FLAG, as Higgins had his men bring down the machine and the surrounding cave with grenades, burning the laboratory and notes in the process. The Grey Claw was identified post-mortem as the famed young chemist, Doctor Thiago Fragas, said to be driven to crime by his sheer hatred of his former partner, Professor Curberry. Curberry was identified as the mutant ape corpse in the basement, and with all knowledge of The Claw's research scrubbed from public record, for many years that was assumed to be end of the sadistic crook’s reign of terror, as both Higgins and “The Dame in Black”, the Claw’s resurrected victim-turned-partner in crime, eventually took all knowledge of The Grey Claw’s research into their graves.

But The Grey Claw would return over the following years. Although Doctor Thiago Fragas remains buried, sightings began emerging locally as well as internationally during the war years, with a man wearing the original costume last seen following in the wake of The Golden Bat’s psychic meltdown and disappearance. Variants in costume and body type over the decades indicate that the Grey Claw has become a mantle, worn by criminals pursuing the original’s infamy to their ends. Fascist coalitions, anarchist gangs, doomsday cultists, black hats and white hats alike have turned The Claw’s image to their own ends, using it as a persona with an extra layer of anonymity to escape accountability, and with little interest in the original’s great scientific genius, which would be the most unforgivably offensive part of it all to him.

Some among these believe that Thiago Fragas never died at all, and that he’s merely biding his time, tinkering with the next great electric brain of his design, merged inseparably in the shadows of the city, if not outright merged with the city itself, waiting for the next perennial motivator. Waiting for the next target of his eternal hatred. That he waits for a worthy arch-nemesis, to at last take his throne as the world’s greatest villain.

Or that perhaps he waits, only because when death itself is beyond reach, there's not much else you can do.

[darkeagleruins]

CENSORSHIP: When Elon Musk refused to violate Brazilian law Brazil's supervillain - Justice @alexandre illegally seized $3.3 million from Starlink and 𝕏 bank accounts in Brazil.

[anonymous-dentist]

Okay, so SWAG

Spider-Man With a Gun was originally conceived as a Spiderbear fic way back before the eggs had even arrived on the island. We didn't know the eggs, we didn't know the Federation even existed, we hadn't even dreamed of having the Brazilians on the island, let alone the French. I had a huge plot planned and I had one chapter up on ao3 and I was super excited!!!

I got exactly one chapter in before Spreen stopped logging onto the qsmp in part because of the shipping stuff going on that he did Not want anything to do with. So I deleted the fic off of ao3 and I haven't even thought about it since

But then I was going through old google docs and I found the SWAG planning doc and I realized that the plot that I had planned for a Spiderbear fic actually works way better as a Spiderbit fic!!! So!

:D

Plot has changed just a little, just slightly, and idk if I'll ever finish it, but I have some very fun ideas (like Roier being canon to the multiverse as Huntsman Spider, Spreen being Just A Guy, and Cellbit being a 'reformed' supervillain working at Starbucks) that I wanna play with, so? Idk! :D

[ariel-seagull-wings]

THE COMICS OF MAURÍCIO DE SOUZA AND ROMANCE

@themousefromfantasyland @the-blue-fairie @thealmightyemprex @piterelizabethdevries @amalthea9 @barbossas-wench @tamisdava2 @princesssarisa

Monica's Gang (Turma da Mônica in Portuguese), also known as Monica and Friends, is an ongoing Brazilian comic book series, created by Mauricio de Sousa.

The series was originally based on a newspaper comic strip in which the protagonists were Blu (Bidu) and Franklin (Franjinha), launched by the newspaper Folha da Manhã in 1959. Over the years the series has been gaining a large audience, with new characters constantly being added to the lineup. Jimmy Five (Cebolinha) and Monica (Mônica) were eventually given their own comic books, hence the title "Monica's Gang." The characters and comics were eventually adapted into films, video games, TV shows, theme parks and a wide range of products.

The stories revolve around the adventures of Monica and her many friends in the fictional neighborhood of "Limoeiro" in São Paulo. The neighborhood was inspired by the neighborhood of Cambuí, in Campinas and the city of Mogi das Cruzes, where de Sousa spent his childhood. However, the comic books do not simply revolve around the stories of Monica and her friends.

The Monica's Gang series has an extensive amount of main and secondary characters. It has as main protagonists Monica, Jimmy Five, Smudge, Maggy and Chuck Billy (the latter derived from Chuck Billy 'n' Folks) and each has its own comic.

Other characters from other series created by Mauricio de Sousa are also included on Monica's, making crossovers or quotations from each other in several stories,among several other characters. The main setting of the stories is the fictional neighborhood of "Limoeiro" in São Paulo.

Most stories focus on the daily lives of the main characters and occasionally on the secondary characters; the humour usually uses various types of repetitions, allusions, appeals to the nonsense, paranomasias, sarcasm and metalanguage. The stories with Monica and Jimmy Five revolve around the conflict between the two. Jimmy Five is a troublemaker

who always tries to scold Monica or steal her stuffed bunny to give knots in its ears (usually having Smudge or another boy accomplice), always having Monica get her revenge by hitting him with her stuffed bunny, often leaving him bruised and with black eyes. Often Jimmy Five makes plans against her with various traps, sometimes using Franklin's inventions or talking Smudge into helping, but he always loses to Monica at the end.

Smudge's stories usually focus on his penchant for dirt and mess and his fear of water, without ever having taken a bath in life, and constantly being threatened by villains or his friends to take a bath whenever he gets away with a result at the end of the story. The stories with Maggy generally focus on her gluttony, with a superhuman ability to eat more than a normal person without ever getting fat and sometimes stealing food from her friends.

Among the villains are Captain Fray, a supervillain with the power to control garbage and dirt, and Lord Big Rabbit, a space bunny whose first appearance was in the movies. Lord's design was inspired on the iconic Star Wars' villain and main antagonist, Darth Vader. A joke often breaks the fourth wall.

So, I learned to read and became a lover of comic books due to Monica's Gang and its several spin-offs.

The writers used the medium of comics to branch into the most varied genres with the same characters: gags, slice of life, horror, sci fi, fantasy, action, adventure, parodies of classic literature, TV shows and movies, and of course, romance.

While usually the main characters went trough the Will They or They Will Not melodrama, we saw side characters who lived long love stories that overall, while not necessarily without disagreements, could still enjoy peace and comfort in a romantic relationship born of great respect, friendship and complicity, and there two pairings I would like to highlight.

TIA NENA AND TIO PEPO

Tia Nena and Tio Pepo were created in 1989 at the launch of Maggy's magazine to be Maggy's permanent great uncles.

Tia Nena is a great cook, considered by Maggy  to be "the biggest chef in the neighborhood". As time went by, the scriptwriters began to give her an extra layer, revealing Nena to be a good witch.

Her husband, Tio Pepo, is a carpenter, ready to make toys for the neighborhood kids.

Nena has a very maternal personality and genuine affection for those she loves, always protecting them with her heart as sweet as the delicacies she makes.

Even with her graceful manner, Nena always keeps an eye open towards some people, especially knowing that she is the target of malicious actions due to her magical powers, serving as a wise, ruthless and comical "fairy godmother", always willing to end injustices with your courage and determination.

Maggy's sweet and caring great-aunt has a long line of Moon witches in her family. She uses her magical knowledge to prepare delicious recipes and protect her loved ones. It is known that she has had powers since she was little and, with a touch of humor and wisdom, Nena guides Maggyon her journey of discovering magic, teaching her valuable lessons about family, friendship and the power of love.

Pepo is very kind, naive and affectionate, he has a childish soul and no evil in his heart, he is the typical little man who tries hard to please everyone, especially children. Since he was little, he was someone creative, who looked at the world through the eyes of a child. He knows about his wife's magical abilities and participates in fantastic events together with her. 

Love is something that builds over time. We usually are led to assume is only resumed to the conquest leading to the wedding.

Tia Nena and Tio Pepo show us that the building of an affectionate relationship goes beyond that, always expanding independently of age. And trough their companionship and love, they not only enrich each other's lives, but are inspired to always make the world a better place for all the people around them, and that is why I find them wholesome.

PUFF AND STEVE

From the light hearted teenager and young adult focused Tina's Pals magazine, comes the couple Puff (Pipa) and her boyfriend Steve (Zecão), the best friends of protagonist Tina.

Puff is very cheerful, passionate, super humorous and happy with life. She is the classic goofball when it comes to friendships, because she makes everyone and everything happy, always with the right opinion to give at the moment.

Quick on the verbal trigger, she doesn't let anything go unnoticed and is quite intelligent, a classic colleague who never lets you down, as she understands the value of companionship.

Because she is chubby, she keeps trying to go on a diet with a "deadline", but cannot resist a good chocolate bar, generating themes of body acceptance and self-esteem.

Despite her extremes, such as judging a lot (even without intention) or her insecurity (a result of her appearance, but she always tries to deconstruct this), she is a good confidant, well, just to vent, but one must be careful because Puff loves gossip and, from time to time, ends up releasing one or another valuable piece of information. Sincere, polite, but with a loose tongue, she is not afraid to express herself and say what she feels, especially to her boyfriend, Steve.

Despite working, Steve is a loose boy who likes to just spend time with his group of friends. He hates extending conversations or taking serious responsibility, but when he strikes a mature pose, he tries to show confidence.

He is absent-minded, carefree, calm and relaxed. This sometimes ends up hindering his relationship with Puff, as she, on several occasions, becomes frustrated with the coldness with which Zecão treats her weight and beauty (always, unintentionally), describing her as something that does not need to receive attention (even more so when others are around).

Steve has a huge passion and admiration for Puff, who is his opposite because she is very energetic and has an extroverted personality, always knowing how to start a conversation, unlike him, who doesn't even know how to answer clearly what people ask him.

He doesn't care that Puff is chubby. He loves her and is an incredible confidant. He has flaws, but he always decides to fix them, trying to be the best version of himself, without completely letting go of his essence as an individual.

Meanwhile, while Puff comits mistakes from which she has to grow and learn, the main lesson she learns from being with Steve is to take what she sees as "defects" in her, and start to see them as her best qualities.

In the world of Tina's Pals, Mauricio de Sousa reverses the roles imposed by society, as the main character Tina, who is tall, thin and determined, never finds someone to have a romantic relationship with and who would actually do her good, while Puff, in her conditions, dates Zecão, who accepts her the way she is.

Showing once again that you maybe can lose weight if you want to or not, but in Mauricio's world, your way of being, thinking and acting guarantees you a happy ending.

[just-an-enby-lemon]

I'm on the footbal match in hell Dungeons and Daddies episodes and I never had felt the "well actually" energy until Anthony gave Will a yellow card for pulling his shorts up.

Because well actually while you can't take off your shirt without suffering a penalty in a football match you can take off your shorts. No one does it because it's weird and takes a long time. But pulling them up? Players do that all the time in the bench so they can strech and throw water in it. The "keep your shirt" rule isn't a rule that exists for anny form of modesty bs. It's just a capitalist bullshit law. A player can't take their shirt off in a celebration because the advertizers have their logos on the shirt. It interferes with propaganda and FIFA is too much of a money hungry cartoon supervillain mob to let it stride.

Not only that but the fact this rule affects Lincoln is really funny because is a rule that only affects official matches (as again it is an advertiziment centric rule and it would make no sense in a game without advertizers). This means the hell soccer game is a FIFA official and the kids have magical hell brand placement in their shirts actually.

Anyway as a brazilian watching how soccer centric but by the lens of peoole that don't get soccer (is footbal but since I'm not even using futebol I will play with the american stupid word) is soo funny. I wish I didn't know as much as I do about soccer lol!

[vithebean]

Behave.

Never, spider boy.

Here is my Marvel superhero OC Mavis, annoying the shit out of Miguel. Just because she can. They're 'besties'. She's Brazilian/American. Her hero name, Raposa, means fox in Brazilian Portuguese.

If there's more than one supervillain in a universe, there can be more than one hero.

I picked up my drawing tablet again only a few days ago again after not touching it for a year, so I'm rusty as hell. I also forgot her tail but whatever.

Still can't draw people, lmao.

Enjoy them!

[cryingforcrocodiles]

*turns around like a supervillain in a chair*

lucas paqueta and declan rice you have a mission for us destroy the magpies bastards and win if you do you get out of relegation and knock down newcastle the choice is yours…..

😭😭😭

im begging for a west ham masterclass. you have a beautiful moroccan masterclass, a brazilian dancer, and that 100 million midfielder declan rice ... (i want him to stay in west ham. he seems so loyal) ... i hate relaying on teams it rarely works in my favor except if im praying on [REDACTED] & [REDACTED]

[interact-if]

Day 5 of the interviews! let’s give it up for Ligia! :chinhands:

Ligia, author of Love the Guard, Be the King

Latino Heritage Month Featured Author

Mathias' heart has been bleeding since his father, the former King, decided to punish you for his mistakes. As the youngest child of a lesser bourgeois, you were raised in the castle, between the King’s cruelty, the Queen’s friendship, and  Mathias’s kindness (or supposed kindness?).

Now, more than twenty Carnivals since your arrival, the King is dead and the Queen’s sickness  worsens each day. As the azure taint spreads in the kingdom and the Opalean Wars come to an end, it’s Mathias’s time to sit on the throne.

Will the docile Prince become a kind King, a violent Monarch, or a ruthless Tyrant? Will you have any say in it? And how much will your relationship change?

Love the Guard, Be the King Demo | Author’s Kofi | Read more [here]

Tags: historical, romance

(INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT UNDER THE CUT)

Q1: So, tell us a little bit about the projects you’re working on!

With pleasure! Right now, I’m working on three main projects. My personal Visual Novel project, “Love the Guard, Be the King,” a second Visual Novel I’ve been secretly working on with a good friend for the past 10 months or so, and I also have an ongoing book series about hot, quirky supervillains—but I’ll focus only on the first two cause that’s what we’re here for, right? Hahaha.

LtGBtK is a really intimist experience, focused more on the MC’s and RO’s character arcs and how we can change depending on our experiences and how we feel about them. The entire plot happens in only four days, but it takes into account almost 30 years of history—basically Mathias’s (the only RO) entire life!

“Crystal Library” has mystery, romance, magic, 6 ROs, and a ton of memorable scenes already. I’m working on the graphics and the programming for this one, while Coco Nichole (@dreamybard), one of my favorite writers ever, is the brilliant mind behind the plot and all of CL’s characters! I can’t wait to share this one with you all. Romance is optional in both. :)

Q2: What excites you most about using interactive fiction? What are some of the biggest challenges?

What I LOVE and FEAR about all types of interactive fiction is how it invites players to, on a much deeper level, be part of the narrative. When reading books, we all work hard to translate beautiful sentences and scenes into images in your head. We interact with it, yes, but when playing IFs, we also explore the narrative in a different way; we have so much more agency over what happens! We sometimes have different paths to choose from, beautiful illustrations to unlock, or character traits that change depending on our choices… it’s amazing, and, IMO, it’s a very unique way to experience narratives.

But it’s also very complex, very demanding, and it can easily get out of hand if you give the players too many options/branches to follow, mainly when working with small teams or, in my case for LtGBtK, alone. *takes a deep breath* I just hope I’m doing a good job. .-.

Q3: What has been something in your project you’ve had to do a weird amount of research for?

Besides programming lol basically everything. For LtGBtK, I’m trying to create this weird fantasy with a modern-medieval society (?), so I’m constantly researching medieval customs, traditions, tools, and weirdly specific stuff like socks. Did people wear socks in the medieval era? What were their playing cards made of? When was ice cream invented? How did they shave? How did kids become knights? What were their perfumes made of? And soaps? What did they eat? How different was their wine? And what kind of materials or slang or fabrics can I use, and what can I change without completely breaking immersion?

 And then I shove all that into a pot and adapt it to a world where Mathias can literally put the world on fire with a wave of his hands. ♥

Q4: Which of your characters is most like you? How?

I think I’m a mix of them all, but mainly Mandra and Rafa (one of my main characters in my supervillain books). They have wildly different personalities and stories, but those two have clear views of the kind of person they want to be, they’re not afraid of their soft sides, and they are ready to work hard to become good at what they love. Rafa has a specially strong connection to her brother, like my siblings and I, and Mand is often locked in an eternal state of wanting to be alone and wanting to be surrounded by family/loved ones, so I guess we meet there too!

Q5: Does your heritage influence your characters as you create them? (How? Why or why not?)

Yes! There are the very basic ways, like habits, names, food, family dynamics, settings (mainly in my books, which are all very Brazilian), and Holidays. And then there’s a more personal way that I’m not entirely sure I can explain because I lived in Brazil for 28 years, and I’m not sure I can put that into words. The classics of our literature are different, Art, architecture, and music developed differently, my country was violently colonized and still faces the results of that violence (including but not limited to structural racism, classism, misogyny etc), I learned some Capoeira in my physical education class at school, we call non-Brazilians “gringos,” and so on. This is my normal, and this is what my characters would see as normal too, because I don’t know any different.

At the very core, all my characters are influenced by my country’s history, by our relationship with other countries, and by the values my parents taught me, passed down to them by my Indigeous-Spanish-Portuguese-German foremothers/fathers. :P

The main, more palpable way my heritage influences my characters, though, is through humor and theme. I think Brazilians have a very specific, sharp, and often very smart kind of humor that, IMO, stems from the type of history our country has, and the way we look at life, sometimes translating pain into humor. As for themes, I usually write about what makes me angry... and there’s a lot in Brazil’s history and modern society that causes me that. :)

But all I know for sure is that I want to show the world Brazilians are much more than samba and soccer.

 Q6: What is something you love to see in interactive fiction?

Other people! In the same way I add my history and worldview to my creations, I always approach stories thinking that there’s a whole, well, history behind them. And I love that! Also, I adore choices that feel impactful + good friendships and family relationships + soft romances with mutual respect. ♥

Q7: Any advice to give?

Hmm. Be proud and celebrate who you are and where you’re from. Learning and understanding the world inside us is a life-long process, so it’s always a victory to discover new pieces of ourselves. :) Also, if you can, talk to people that come from different cultures than yours to expand your worldview, don’t be afraid to be soft (the world needs more kindness), and please study personal finance. Seriously. XD

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

The Unveiling of Bolsonaro’s Supervillain Plot Is Weirdly Gripping

[Image description: illustration of Jair Bolsonaro’s face in black and white under a red cover pierced with dozens of small holes.]

t’s not often that a congressional inquiry can lift your spirits. But the Brazilian Senate’s investigation into the government’s management of the pandemic, which began on April 27 and has riveted my attention for weeks, does just that.

As the pandemic continues to rage through the country, claiming around 2,000 lives a day, the inquiry offers the chance to hold President Jair Bolsonaro’s government to account. (Sort of.) It’s also a great distraction from grim reality. Livestreamed online and broadcast by TV Senado, the inquiry is a weirdly fascinating display of evasion, ineptitude and outright lies.

Here’s one example of the kind of intrigue on offer. In March last year, as the pandemic was unfurling, a social media campaign called “Brazil Can’t Stop” was launched by the president’s communications unit. Urging people not to change their routines, the campaign claimed that “coronavirus deaths among adults and young people are rare.” The heavily criticized campaign was eventually banned by a federal judge and largely forgotten.

Then the plot thickened. The government’s former communications director, Fabio Wajngarten, told the inquiry that he didn’t know “for sure” who had been responsible for the campaign. Later, stumbling over his words, he seemed to remember that his department had developed the campaign — in the spirit of experimentation, of course — which was then launched without authorization. A senator called for the arrest of Mr. Wajngarten, who threw a contemplative, almost poetic glance to the horizon. The camera even tried to zoom in. It was wild.

That’s just one episode; no wonder the inquiry holds the attention of many Brazilians. So far, we have been treated to testimony from three former health ministers — one of them had major issues with his mask, inspiring countless memes — as well as the head of Brazil’s federal health regulator, the former foreign minister, the former communications director and the regional manager of the pharmaceutical company Pfizer.

The upshot of their accounts is obvious, yet still totally outrageous: President Jair Bolsonaro apparently intended to lead the country to herd immunity by natural infection, whatever the consequences. That means — assuming a fatality rate of around 1 percent and taking 70 percent infection as a tentative threshold for herd immunity — that Mr. Bolsonaro effectively planned for at least 1.4 million deaths in Brazil. From his perspective, the 450,000 Brazilians already killed by Covid-19 must look like a job not even half-done.

It gets worse. According to both Mr. Wajngarten and Carlos Murillo, the regional manager of Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company repeatedly offered to sell its Covid-19 vaccine to Brazil’s government between August and November last year — but got no answer at all. (Perhaps the health ministry had more important things to do, like learning how to properly use masks.) Considering that Brazil was one of the first countries to be approached by the company, a quick response would have secured Brazilians as many as 1.5 million doses at the end of 2020, with 17 million more in the first half of 2021.

Continue reading.

[maxwell-grant]

Are the any superhero type characters from Brazil you wish got more attention internationally?

The ones I create, hopefully I don't really want specific characters to get more attention internationally, so much as I want more interesting characters to be developed, because most Brazilian superheroes (and that goes for a lot of other international superheroes) tend to be stuck on creative dead ends. I can elaborate more on that and the history of Brazilian superheroes if asked but if you want a specific answer, I'll give three, first one being, Tales of the Orishas by Hugo Canuto.

Tales of the Orishas fuses the pantheon of the African diasporic religion of Candomblé with the Silver Age comic aesthetics of Jack Kirby into a riveting tale of high adventure. The story centers around a celestial battle between the gods of Brazil, who are worshipped by the Bahia people, and a fearsome conquering force led by a dark and malevolent overlord. Only Shango, the god of fire and thunder, can lead his people into victory while the fate of creation hangs in the balance.

It is considerably popular already and even used for didactic purposes in classrooms overseas. but I can say very comfortably can say that this is a thing that should reach as large an audience as possible by any means. I mean, fucking look at it.

I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I've seen enough pages of it that I can very comfortably call it the best Jack Kirby tribute I've ever seen, even though it's ambitions are way higher than just doing that, and It's been heavily recommended by everyone I follow within the Brazilian comics scene for very self-evident reasons. Gets my strongest recommendation out of all these as proof of concept for what can and should be done with Brazilian superheroes.

Danilo Beyruth is one of the biggest names amongs the local comics scene, and has done several works with superhero-esque characters like The Necronaut, which is about a Spectre-esque "lifeguard of the dead" who wanders the world helping spirits carry over and resolve their unfinished business, and Days of Horror, which is a showcase piece for 50 major names in Brazilian comics, in a story about a Dr Doom analogue named Doc Horror standing trial for his role in an alien invasion that murdered his world's Trinity as well as thousands of civilians. He's done five books on the Astronaut series, which are a space-opera superhero-esque revamp of Monica's Gang character Astronaut, more in line with their more adult-themed Graphic MSP line-up.

The power to change the world lies in his hands...but he only wants to play king.

Rei de Lata is set in a world ravaged by war that faced it's worst disaster: a biological weapon that practically drove an entire country extinct. Unexpectedly, however, all children born after the attack developed some kind of abnormality, some kind of power generated by a survival instinct, trauma or extreme situation. Due to their immunity to the toxic air, the surviving adults detest and fear them, and wish to hunt and study them, and so the super-kids must battle for their survival in a post-war country.

And I'm also gonna be including Rei de Lata (I think you can loosely translate it as The Can King but that is way too clunky and isn't quite right for what the name is supposed to mean and sound like), which is available on Webtoon. It's more along the lines of a shonen battle manga, but it is about distinct, superpowered characters, it's invited enough comparisons to MHA and the main character is a supervillain so I feel comfortable putting it here. It's been ongoing since 2017 and I think it got a physical release, it rules and rises above a lot of it's inspirations, the protagonist and side characters are all great opposite perfectly detestable villains. Very strongly recommend it, really excited to see where it's going.

[broken-endings]

Wonder Woman Reimagined

A friend and I were discussing how best to make Wonder Woman her own hero separate from being the “token big name female hero.”

This conversation started when my friend said no one can name a Wonder Woman villain other than Cheetah. And they weren’t wrong. I had to look it up to even be like “oh yeah, i know Ares” etc. et.c

PSA: I myself am not well read on Wonder Woman and my only knowledge stems from the cartoons I’ve seen her in, Justice League, Young Justice, etc. with a smidgen of reading teen team books pre-52. Not sure about my friend’s level of knowledge.

BUT

I wanted to save our discussion for dexterity.

It all started with my linking Dresden Codak’s reimagining of the Justice League because I like his take and redesign on Wonder Woman

(Link)

TLDR for the link; Diana is a living statue, a golem, brought to life by the women of Themyscira to watch over the island. She has immense strength and durability and wields weapons of the Greek gods.

Enter our takes: (literally just gonna copy our text conversation here) T=Them, M=Me

T: I actually agree with his thinking: she’s too grounded in just being “female hero.” Making her more of a construct that is an aspect of femininity, and also just living stone is great; I always wanted her powers and villains to be more mythical: she has an array of magical items that help her fight, and all her villains are supernatural in theme. Make her the anchor for all things supernatural in the league.

M: Like supernatural creatures/beings but no the straight up magic part of the supernatural? Taking all her adventures and obstacles out of folklore as well as myth? Minus straight up spell-casting. Lean into her interactions with Ares and Apollo but throw in more individuals from Greek and world mythology.

T: Actually, yeah. She’s not a spell-caster herself. Just very good at fighting the monsters that lurk in the shadows, and also keeping the myths as just that, myths. WAIT: what if part of her construction as a golem made her immune or partially immune to magical attacks and mind control?

M: What if every region’s gods and goddesses from every age was like that century’s Justice League and supervillains for that era? So the Greek pantheon were the superheroes of that time, ancient Egyptian gods were in their time, and so forth?

T: You actually hit something. Supposedly in the JL movie Snyder cut he does go on about the old gods protecting earth like the league does now.

M: so Wonder Woman is a surviving superhero from an old superhero team from centuries ago and even more so than Captain America is totally out of her element due to the advance of time?

T: I really really really like that idea of her being the team’s experienced member.

M: That is the exact angle that all Wonder Woman mythos should go in on. And she’d be indestructible physically but perhaps have less offensive power than currently. So she’s the tank.

T: So a tank, with basically a perfect recall memory who remembers all of history and has experienced so much. She also desperately wants to connect with humans again after sleeping for so long? Wait, what if she locked herself away because she’s haunted by memories of all her friends dying?

M: Yep. And being immortal makes it even harder to relate to humans. Perhaps it was easier when she was new and learning about basic knowledge of the world.  That sounds like good backstory too.

T: What if she was the cynical voice to foil the idealism of Superman? Like, Superman won’t kill, but Wonder Woman will in a heartbeat because she’s seen this over and over and is jaded?

M: Absolutely. Practicality and experience. She learned from too many mistakes that some villains cannot be contained. She would logically weigh the power levels of a criminal against the risk they pose based on their character. She knows mercy and compassion and the respect for life BUT She would be in the school of thought “I respect the lives of too many people to not take the life of one who would willfully endanger them and had the power to do so.”

T: That is a perfect summation

M: “There is a point of no return when a rabid dog can no longer be saved.”

T: I always wanted to give her a sidekick character. Like, she’s old, jaded, and probably carrying a millennia of outdated moral views. Give her a young open-minded partner from a vastly different walk of life. I was thinking the Brazilian Fire.

M: As in just “Fire?” Though there is a wonder girl who got her powers from Ares. And Troia. But Troia needs a new backstory too.

T: I wanted a character with no real thematic ties to Wonder Woman, so that would include a vastly different power set. Going dor the buddy dynamic of opposites attract. Where Wonder Woman is a tank, Fire is pure DPS.

M: But isn’t Fire a Leaguer? I’d look at the young heroes from Titans or Young Justice. Like Ravager. Or even more obscure, Secret or Empress from the original Young Justice book.

TBC...?

[bridgetinerabbit]

Some stuff that stood out to me in Chat Blanc, besides the apocalypse.

1) Adrien was chastised because his award ceremony took too long. Then Gabriel couldn't be bothered to hear that he had won. He is required to excel, but even his excellence is a nuisance. That wasn't some calculated supervillain move. That was how he parents.

That is directly juxtaposed with Marinette or Brazilians or whoever handcrafting a gift for something as arbitrary as the feast day for one of his middle names. The difference is like black and white.

2) Adrien now owns two things that theoretically have Marinette's signature on them. One of them was hand delivered by Ladybug.

3) Rose doesn't hesitate to make good on a bet. (Sorry, I just love her so much.)

[that-spider-fan-over-there]

You know, at random times, like right now, it hits me that one of the most popular media that came from Brazil is a comic that broke the now nonexistent fourth wall (before Deadpool made it cool) about:

short-tempered buck-tooth kid, that hates even being slighted and has Hercules' strength (because of course) and a blue rabbit plushie, and her group of misfits that's "basically" - because that thing is weird enough as it is:

a boy with rhotacism, five points of hair and a God complex that rivals Light Yagami's and an obsession with the girl's plushie,

literally stinky best friend who never took a shower in his life (for real) and doesn't intend on ever getting close to water, plus a supervillain for an uncle (who somehow manages to out-stink him, perks of being the Horseman of Pollution),

girl whose appetite is the equivalent of a personification of world hunger and apparently has a strong connection with moon witches because of her bloodline or something. And a huge obsession for watermelons.

Like. How that one became more popular, I don't know, but it lasted 60+ years, had a spinoff manga, movies, three - maybe more! - series and a freaking manga crossover with Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy and Kimba: The White Lion. Yes.

Oh, and I didn't even mention there's ongoing standalone stories with:

The kids' pets either as pets living their lives or as celebrities behind the scenes, sometimes both;

A bunch of monsters living in a local cemetery with Lady Death;

Brazilian Native-American culture;

Lonely astronaut who should've just retire if he didn't want to be lonely and girlfriend-less;

Hillbilly kid, his classmates, his ditzy cousin, the love interest and City Boy Rival (who's a selfish prick);

Jungle Kingdom wannabe (and a green elephant that appears in tomato sauce cans);

Pre-historical romcom clan;

Teens/Young adults trying to be Archie Comics and;

Philosophical vegetarian baby T-Rex.

All taking place within the same exact universe. Yeah.

And honestly? Somehow, that's exactly on brand with Brazil, but it deeply concerns me a little.

Though, the weirdest part of it all?! Despite being really successful, I've seen only two, or three posts about it.

Which is why I ask: does anybody know what I'm talking about? Because I gotta know how popular this is.

With that being said, I'm gonna stop or else I'm gonna lose it.

So if you read this: Have a good one, ILY, and Peace Out!

Edit: I FORGOT TO PROOFREAD ONE SENTENCE F-

[ligiawrites]

Villains are meant to stay away from Heroes, no matter how powerful--or hot--they are. But when a famous hero becomes a criminal and sparks start flying, can a villain resist?

You can read my books in: https://www.wattpad.com/user/LigiaNunes

To a Brazilian writer coming from nothing, this is a huuuge step and I’m so proud, so grateful, and so happy ç-ç. This will always have a special meaning to me. A HUGE thank you to all of my readers and to my wonderful friends! ♥

Supervillain Léon Dickens aka Reality Warp, loves the perks of working under a world-dominant megacorp that buys-slash-steals lifeforce. TV appearances, evil schemes, explosions, latte machines--he has everything a villain could dream of. For him and all the other employees at Invidia Corp, being selfish is great.

Things start to change when internationally famous (and hot) superhero, Grizzly Bear, invades their secret HQ and--wait for it--asks for a job!

Read BISCA.