O Guri Comico #73
O Guri Cômico #73 (June 1943) marks the first appearance of Captain America — and his partner Bucky — anywhere in Brazil, making it the earliest known Timely Comics super-hero reprint published on South American soil. The issue arrived while Brazil itself had entered World War II on the Allied side, lending the patriotic super-soldier an immediate local resonance that helped ignite Brazilian readers' appetite for the American comic-book format. Because O Guri was already considered a precursor of the Brazilian comics medium, the debut of Capitão América in its pages planted a character who would remain a fixture of Brazilian publishing for more than a decade, through multiple successor publishers. The Diários Associados run of Captain America material that began here continued until 1956, establishing a thirteen-year unbroken presence that no subsequent Marvel character would match for generations.
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O Guri was launched in April 1940 by media magnate Assis Chateaubriand as 'O Gury — O Filhote do Diário da Noite,' a companion publication to his Diário da Noite newspaper and part of the sprawling Diários Associados communications empire. It was notable for being the first Brazilian comic magazine printed in four colors, made possible because Chateaubriand had imported modern American presses. By 1943 the book was a quinzena (fortnightly) publication in the American comic-book format — highly unusual for Brazil at the time — and its editorial team reached an arrangement to reprint Timely Comics material. The Captain America story translated for issue #73 was drawn by Al Avison (who had taken over penciling duties on Captain America Comics after Joe Simon and Jack Kirby departed for DC), with scripting attributed to a young Stan Lee, who served as Timely's editorial and art director during this period; Brazilian scholar and reviewer Universo HQ identifies the source story as 'O Horror dos Mares,' derived from Captain America Comics #16.
Trivia · 8 facts
- First Brazilian appearance of Captain America (Capitão América) and Bucky, published June 1943 in O Guri Cômico #73.
- Published by Diários Associados / Diário da Noite, the media group owned by Assis Chateaubriand; the imprint later transitioned to Editora O Cruzeiro around 1950.
- O Guri was the first Brazilian comic magazine printed in four colors, after Chateaubriand imported American printing presses.
- The Captain America story in this issue is identified as 'O Horror dos Mares,' in which Cap and Bucky battle a strange cult of undersea men — drawn by Al Avison with scripting attributed to Stan Lee.
- Critically, the Diário da Noite began its reprint run with the post-Simon/Kirby phase of Captain America Comics; it did not publish the original Joe Simon and Jack Kirby issues.
- After Simon and Kirby left Timely for DC Comics following issue #10 (January 1942), Al Avison and Syd Shores became the principal artists on the American series — the creative team whose work Brazilian readers first encountered here.
- The issue also contained Buck Rogers (art by Jack Calkins), Harold Knerr's The Captain's Kids (Os Sobrinhos do Capitão), and domestic Brazilian strip Oliveira o Trapalhão, making it a representative anthology of the era.
- Captain America continued in O Guri / Diários Associados publications through 1956, after which the character was absent from Brazilian newsstands until 1967 — a gap that mirrors the hero's dormancy in American comics after the end of World War II.