{"id":2994,"date":"2020-12-19T12:39:01","date_gmt":"2020-12-19T19:39:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/?p=2994"},"modified":"2020-12-19T13:07:55","modified_gmt":"2020-12-19T20:07:55","slug":"meet-gury-the-oopy-of-brazil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/19\/meet-gury-the-oopy-of-brazil\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet Gury, the Oopy of Brazil"},"content":{"rendered":"

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We have long known that the French loved Scrappy–or at least grudgingly tolerated him as comic-book filler<\/a>. The pioneering cartoonists of Japan–maybe even including Tezuka himself<\/a>–may have been Scrappy fans, too.<\/p>\n

But I’ll bet you didn’t know that Oopy led a secret second life in Brazil. Or at least I didn’t until I stumbled across these examples on Facebook, right after I pressed Publish on my last post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

According to Luigi Rocco’s blog about the history of Brazilian comics<\/a>, the venerable newspaper Di\u00e1rio de Pernambuco<\/em>–now the world’s oldest Portuguese-language paper–began publishing a children’s supplement called O Gury<\/em> in January 1936. Among its features was As Aventuras do Gury<\/em>, a comic by a cartoonist named Corr\u00eaa. Despite its “Original de Corr\u00eaa” billing, the strip starred a character who looked uncannily like a slightly older Oopy–or, if you prefer, a hybrid of Scrappy and Oopy. He had a wiry little dog who could have served as an adequate substitute for Yippy in a pinch.<\/p>\n

(It just occurred to me, however, that Oopy’s cowlick is at least vaguely Tintin-esque, and Gury’s dog looks resembles Snowy almost as much as he does Yippy. Perhaps Corr\u00eaa drew artistic inspiration from both Charles Mintz and Herge.)<\/p>\n

Rocco’s post about As Aventuras do Gury<\/em> includes two examples of the strip, and I found another one online shown in a spread from a book of Di\u00e1rio de Pernambuco<\/em> cartoons.<\/em>\u00a0Here they are:<\/p>\n

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I’m not sure how long the Gury<\/em> strip ran. There was a later standalone Brazilian comic book<\/a>, also called O Gury<\/em>, which reprinted American strips such as Batman<\/em> and Mary Marvel.<\/em> It was revived on occasion, as recently as 1968. What its connection was to the O Gury<\/em> that featured Gury, I can’t say.<\/p>\n

In any event, Brazilian comics blogger Rocco caught As Aventuras do Gury<\/em>‘s\u00a0Scrappy influence–“Corr\u00eaa’s drawings showed a strong influence of the characters of the American animator Charles Mintz”–and included an example of the Scrappy comic strip<\/a>\u00a0produced by the Eisner-Iger shop<\/a>, translated into Portuguese recently enough that it uses digital lettering:<\/p>\n

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I don’t know if Corr\u00eaa was specifically influenced by the Scrappy<\/em> strip. For one thing, I’m not positive when the Scrappy<\/em> one first appeared anywhere: The earliest reference to it I know is its listing in the 1937 Editor & Publisher<\/em> yearbook. If O Gury<\/em> debuted in January 1936 and Corr\u00eaa had indeed seen the Scrappy<\/em> strip before creating his, that suggests that dead-tree Scrappy had made his way to Brazil by the end of 1935. Which is not inconceivable: We know that Eisner and Iger sold their strip to publishers in France and Australia.<\/p>\n

But wait: Gury looks even more like Oopy than he does like Scrappy, and Oopy never appeared in the Scrappy strip. That would seem to be evidence that Corr\u00eaa had seen Scrappy in animated form. So perhaps the Gury<\/em> strip’s stylistic similarity to printed Scrappy<\/em> is a coincidence. Unless the artist simply removed Scrappy’s hair coloring, resulting in a purely coincidental resemblance to Oopy.<\/p>\n

In any event, we can now properly honor Gury–like Shorty Shortcake<\/a>–as a proud resident of one of the many alternate-reality Mintzverses that are clearly out there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We have long known that the French loved Scrappy–or at least grudgingly tolerated him as comic-book filler. The pioneering cartoonists of Japan–maybe even including Tezuka himself–may have been Scrappy fans, too. But I’ll bet you didn’t know that Oopy led a secret second life in Brazil. Or at least I didn’t until I stumbled across … Continue reading Meet Gury, the Oopy of Brazil<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[17,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","category-shorty-shortcake"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2D9Zl-Mi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2994"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3013,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2994\/revisions\/3013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scrappyland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}