Río de Janeiro (Brasil), 1924 – 2012

By Gilberto Maringoni

Cartoonist, graphic artist, playwright, translator, writer, and journalist, Millôr Fernandes influenced all generations of Brazilian humorists from the 1940s onward. He also renewed graphic language, drawing inspiration from European artists such as the Romanian Saul Steinberg and André François—whose style moved away from the prevailing figurativism and approached the fine arts, creating images marked by distortion and abstractionism.

However, it was as a writer that Millôr revealed the full extent of his talent. For eighteen years (1945-1963), he maintained a highly successful double-page section in the magazine O Cruzeiro, which reached a circulation of 720,000 copies per week in simultaneous Portuguese and Spanish editions. The section was called Pif-Paf (“Each copy is an issue, each issue is exemplary”) and blended texts, phrases, illustrations, cartoons, poems, and theatrical sketches, forming, amid the apparent editorial anarchy, the style of someone who self-proclaimed the epithet, “Finally, a writer with no style.”

After publishing The True Story of Paradise in 1963, a narrative that spanned several pages of the magazine, Millôr was summarily dismissed. The short story, a free interpretation of the creation myth, ended in a way deemed intolerable by religious sectors of society and the company’s management:

“This reckless haste
Reveals incompetence?
Why create the world in six days
If he had eternity ahead?”

Unemployed in 1964—the year of the coup d’état in Brazil—Millôr sought to turn his internal section into an independent magazine, with the collaboration of other artists. The biweekly Pif-Paf lasted only eight issues, too few for a viable publication, but enough to leave a lasting mark on Brazilian journalism.

When Editora Abril launched Veja magazine in 1968, there was Supermercado Millôr, a double-page feature showcasing the sharp wit and pen of the self-styled “Guru of Méier.”

The following year, in 1969, Millôr was one of the founders—alongside humorists and journalists such as Ziraldo, Jaguar, Fortuna, Tarso de Castro, Ivan Lessa, and Paulo Francis—of the weekly Pasquim, which defined the alternative press.

At the same time, he developed an intense career as a translator, playwright, and screenwriter. His career, spanning over six decades, materialized in more than fifty books, among other works. Few Brazilian professionals spread their talents across so many fields with such competence. About all this, he joked with elegance:

“There are those
Who know nothing of anthropology
And those who ignore trigonometry
But of me, no one can say anything
My ignorance
Is not specialized.”

He passed away on March 27, 2012, at the age of 88, due to cardiac arrest.