Laerte Coutinho

Laerte Coutinho is a Brazilian cartoonist, screenwriter, and humor writer born in São Paulo in 1951. Her drawings began reaching readers during the final years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, and she later became a central figure in the generation of artists associated with the alternative press and newspaper comic strips. Her work has appeared in major Brazilian outlets, including Folha de S.Paulo, where her strips and cartoons developed a large daily audience. In the 1970s, she helped create the magazine Balão, an important publication for São Paulo’s independent comics scene, and helped connect cartoonists experimenting beyond commercial formats at time.

Her best-known creations include Os Piratas do Tietê, a recurring group of pirates improbably navigating São Paulo’s heavily polluted Tietê River, and Hugo, a child character whose stories turn domestic situations into comedy. Another enduring figure is Suriá, an adolescent protagonist whose strips move among family life, school, and fantasy. Rather than sustaining one fixed universe, Laerte has repeatedly changed her strip formats, visual approaches, and casts. This flexibility is visible in work that combines wordplay, surreal interruptions, social observation, and jokes about comics themselves. Her newspaper-strip form has allowed continuing characters to age, disappear, and return in altered circumstances.

Laerte worked with Angeli and Glauco, two other influential Brazilian cartoonists, in the collaborative feature Los Três Amigos. Their association represented a highly visible strand of adult humor in Brazilian newspapers. In 2009, Laerte publicly began living as a woman, a development she has addressed in interviews and in her art. Her later strips have included observations on gender expression, clothing, desire, and the practical absurdities of public life, without abandoning the unpredictable humor for which she was known. Her transition also made her a prominent transgender public figure in Brazil, where she spoke against prejudice and defended transgender rights.

The 2017 documentary Laerte-se, directed by Lygia Barbosa da Silva and Eliane Brum, follows Laerte’s life and her reflections on identity, work, and visibility. Released by Netflix, it introduced her to viewers outside the regular readership of Brazilian newspapers. Laerte has also written for television, including TV Colosso, the children’s program produced by Rede Globo in the 1990s. Across cartoons, strips, scripts, and public interviews, her career documents changes in Brazilian humor while retaining a recognizable interest in contradiction: heroic pirates inhabit an urban river, everyday arguments open into fantasy, and a cartoonist’s life becomes material for searching, comic self-examination.