Remember how Chico Bento was raised

This Monday, the 1st, Turma da Mônica celebrates the birthday of Francisco Antônio Bento, Chico Bento, a beloved character created by Mauricio de Sousawho lives a simple life on the farm and has a huge heart, and is considered by his creator as the “representation of popular wisdom in the interior of Brazil”.

Chico Bento emerged in 1960, when the Cotia Agricultural Cooperative (CAC) sent a request to the cartoonist asking him to create a comic book that showed what life is like in the countryside, as explained by the portal O POVO.

The first characters created from this request were Hiroshi and Zezinho, however, Mauricio I still felt that I needed more people. “I created a very different character, perhaps somewhat inspired by Jeca Tatu from Monteiro Lobato. The new character’s features were very different from the current Chico. It took me a while to soften and round out the shapes until I got to the Chico Bento you know,” said the creator in an interview with O POVO.

Like other characters in the gang, Chico also drew inspiration from his personal life. Mauricio. Its name was a tribute to the cartoonist’s great-uncle, whom he never got to meet. In an interview in 1998, he explained:

“Chico Bento is the name of a great-uncle of mine whom I never got to meet. He lived in the stories my grandmother told about her time living on the family farm, in the current neighborhood of Taboão. According to Grandma Dita, Chico Bento was a super fun, joking man, along with his twin brother, Zé Bento.”

On the other hand, the stories were already based on the adventures of Mauricio. He told Globo Rural: “I liked to step on the mud, on the grass, climb trees to pick fruit from the tree. Especially guava. And I would skip school to swim in the river, and I would do it naked, so as not to get my uniform wet. I had a very fun and free childhood. With healthy games, some of them a little dangerous and others that I didn’t confess to my mother. But of course, from that I learned everything I needed to write Chico’s stories.”

With the end of the corporate magazine of the Cotia Agricultural Cooperative in 1963, Chico Bento made his official debut as a secondary character in the Hiroshi and Zezinho comic strips, published in the Diário da Noite newspaper in São Paulo. His first comic strip as the protagonist would only come years later, being published in 1982.

Over the years, in addition to presenting extremely entertaining stories to children, Chico Bento’s plots also began to address extremely important issues, such as environmental preservation. For this reason, in 2014, the Brazilian organization WWF Brazil named him the Ambassador of the Pantanal, with the aim of helping in the fight against deforestation in the biome and in the preservation and recovery of the springs.

Just like the rest of the gang, who grew up in the “Turma da Mônica Jovem” franchise, Chico Bento also got his own comic book as an older boy. “Chico Bento Moço” hit the shelves in 2013, and shows the character as a boy from the countryside, but who now thinks about his future and studies Agronomy at college, to be able to apply what he learned on his own plantation.

Now, Chico will also have a live-action version. Played by the influencer Isaac Peanut“Chico Bento and the Wonderful Goiabeira”, which is scheduled to premiere on January 9, 2025, will present the character alongside his friends Zé Lelé (Pedro Dantas), Tabata (Lorena de Oliveira), Hiro (David Okabe) and Zé da Roça (Guilherme Tavares), after the “wonderful” guava tree of Nhô Lau (Luis Lobianco) be put at risk by Colonel Dotô Agripino (Augusto Madeira) and his son Genesinho (Enzo Henry). Check out the teaser!