In 1920, São Paulo had 580,000 inhabitants, according to that year’s census. In just two decades, the population of the state capital more than doubled, reaching 1.3 million.
Until the mid -1920s, there was no in this city in transformation a character of the cartoons or comics of the press to regularly comment on increasingly urgent urban issues. The figures that appeared in the newspapers moved from the city to the countryside, without hardly facing the problems brought by this unbridled growth.
Until Juca Pato was born. The character created by the first time on April 30, 1925 at Na, a newspaper that sought to consolidate himself between workers, small traders and some other sectors of the middle class.
A personification of the common man, Juca Pato soon became a phenomenon of popularity. At the 1926 Paulistano Carnival balls, the year following the creation of the character, it was common to find adults and children with fantasies of Juca Pato, as journalist Gonçalo Junior tells in the book
Later, Juca Pato named the brands of notebook, coffee, cigarette, bleach and shoe grease, as well as a bar on São João Avenue. In 1962, the Brazilian Union of Writers (UBE) launched the name of the character, a one Trophy granted to this day.
“Juca Pato extrapolated the limits of the charge and became a symbol, a propaganda boy, a celebrity reproduced in all forms of communication of his time,” says the
That bald man, thin, with weakness and round glasses, who now completes a hundred years, fell in the taste of Paulistanos thanks to the detailed and elegant traits, who gave him charisma.
But the themes of the drawings are essential for understanding their success: it complained, between things, of the holes in the city’s pavement and the bureaucracy in the public offices – last was the subject of its debut in Folha da Night.
“Juca Pato was the first essentially urban character in the São Paulo press, which largely explains the immediate complicity he won with readers,” says historian Andrea Nogueira, who dedicated her master’s degree to Belmonte’s most popular creation.
According to her, one of the cartoonist’s inspirations was Carlitos, released by in 1914.
Belmonte used public transportation and knew very well Sao Paulo, where he was born in 1896. This experience, coupled with an acute critical sense, led the cartoonist to the irony of the drawings of Juca Pato, the “Fiscal of the People”, in the words of Gonçalo Junior .
“What was the big problem of the city of São Paulo in the 1920s? Lack of water. Juca Pato spoke of this and also of tram accidents, inflation, among other matters. So they all identified with him,” says the journalist.
Over time, although he never set aside urban issues, the character also mocked power in Brazil and abroad.
Among the politicians of the country, none were as satirized as. During Juca Pato won international air and proved especially critical with
For Gonçalo Junior, Belmonte and are the two largest Brazilian cartoons of the 20th century. There were other points in common among them beyond talent. “They put the rulers on the wall, they were not from palavras,” he says.
In addition, both had fragile health. The first died in 1947 at age 50 as a result of tuberculosis. The second in 1988, with only 44 years. He was hemophilic and contracted the HIV virus during a blood transfusion.
Andrea Nogueira indicates another aspect that brings them closer. “Henfil said that from a certain moment the]began to play with the public. Juca Pato had done it a long time before. He managed to create a humor pact with his readers.”
X-ray | Benedito Barros Barreto, the Belmonte
Born in the Brás neighborhood of São Paulo in 1896, he stood out as a cartoonist and cartoonist in publications such as Pyrralho and Kosmos. He started working at Folha da Night in September 1921, seven months after the newspaper’s creation. In 1925, he created Juca Pato, his most famous character and, this same year, also started to draw for Folha da Manhã, the group’s new newspaper. He published more than 10,000 works, including cartoons, cartoons, illustrations and chronicles. He died at age 50 in 1947.
