MyBadThoughts.com

Today I’d like to present my all time favorite cartoonist and main influence: Henrique de Souza Filho, better known as Henfil.

In 1973, Henfil went to New York, for a medical treatment of his hemophilia. After living there for almost two years, he tried to sell his strips to a syndicate, and finally signed contract with Universal Press Syndicate (UPS). The name of his strip was The Mad Monks, and the main characters were two silly monks, a tall one, called King Size, and a short one, named Runt. Garry Trudeau was the top name of the syndicate by those days, and Henfil was predicted to be the new Trudeau. However, somehow, the readers didn’t like his acid humor and sent a lot of letters to the papers that published the strip. The most usual reasons were: anti God, anti-American and… sick. Some two months later the strip was canceled.

Henfil also worked in theater, film, television and literature, but political activism was his hallmark, creating fictional characters that made acerbic criticisms of the Brazilian political institutions of the time. Henfil contracted AIDS in a blood transfusion and died as a result of the disease in Rio de Janeiro, in 1988, when he was 43 years old.

Here some of his work:

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