Argentine comics

In the 1900s, comics continued to be largely political satire and commentary, but strips about normal life, called cuentos vivos (lively tales) began to appear.

Also during this time, translations of comics from the United States, such as Cocoliche (Happy Hooligan) by Frederick Burr Opper, showed up in Argentina.

In 1912, the first Argentine comic strip proper, with speech balloons and recurring characters, Las aventuras de Viruta y Chicharrón, by Manuel Redondo, began being published in Caras y Caretas.

Also during the late 1930s superheroes from the United States, such as Superman and Batman, began appearing in local magazines such as Pif Paf (1939), giving a place to action comics.

The Argentine comic had its golden age between the mid-1940s and the 1960s, the so-called Golden Age of Argentine Comics[3] (la "Epoca de Oro" de la historieta argentina), when a number of foreign artists, including many Italians, arrived in Argentina following World War II.

José Antonio Guillermo Divito's magazine Rico Tipo, launched on 16 November 1944, contained many comic strips and was published until 1972.

Prominently featuring his own political cartoons and those of colleagues such as Oski, Caloi, and Hermenegildo Sábat, its circulation grew to nearly half a million and became the most widely read magazine in Argentina before its banning order by the military government installed in 1966.

Nevertheless, the arrival of foreign publications, mainly from Mexico, with better paper and ink quality and lower prices, started a financial crisis in the Argentine comic industry, and several publishers, including Oesterheld's Ediciones Frontera, had to close or be sold, which forced several artists and writers to go abroad.

From their exile in Europe, Muñoz and Sampayo created Alack Sinner in 1974, which was later published in Argentine magazines such as Super Humor and Fierro.

In 1975 Trillo and Altuna started one of the longest lived newspaper strips, El loco Chávez, published in Clarín.

In 1976 while working on a politicized sequel of the Eternauta that was being published in Skorpio, Oesterheld was kidnapped and disappeared by military government forces.

Suffering a similar fate to many sectors of the Argentine media and industry in general, the comic magazines still working during the 1980s slowly decreased in quality and died off (e.g. Fierro, D'Artagnan, Nippur).

At first, self-published works remained in dark corners of the comic shops and (less so) news stands and most of them failed to survive past the 2nd or 3rd issue (i.e. Ultra).

[8] Costs are sometimes shared, as in the case of publishing house Ex Abrupto, which co-publishes Suda Mery K!, a biannual anthology, with Viñetas con Altura of Bolivia and Feroces Editores of Chile.