About Rico Tipo

Rico Tipo

Rico Tipo was a weekly Argentine humour and comic magazine founded and directed by Guillermo Divito. It was launched on 16 November 1944 and its original run continued until 1972, making it, with Patoruzú (launched in 1936) and later Satiricón (founded in 1972), one of the main comic magazines in Argentina. Divito was its founder, editor and a principal contributor. By the year after its launch it had a weekly print run of around 350,000 copies. Later publishing ventures relaunched the title in a second era in August 1978 under Cielosur Editora, and briefly in a third era in 1986, but the magazine's fame and influence belong to Divito's original run of 1944 to 1972.

The magazine's most famous creation was not a character but a look: the Chicas de Divito, the girls Divito drew for its covers, whose dress and figure were so identified with the magazine that they were said to have marked women's fashion in Buenos Aires at the time. Around those covers, Rico Tipo assembled what its reference history called the cream of Argentine humorous writing and graphics, published characters that became household names, and trained future generations of Argentine writers and artists who took their first steps in its pages.

Guillermo Divito and the break with Patoruzú

José Antonio Guillermo Divito joined the stable of artists at the Patoruzú weekly as a young man, where he began drawing his first illustrations of Chicas — girls. The magazine's director, Dante Quinterno, disapproved of the great sensuality of the Chicas, and suggested tweaks and longer skirts. Tired of this interference, and unable to get a raise in pay, Divito decided to create his own magazine: Rico Tipo, launched on 16 November 1944. By the next year it had a weekly print run of around 350,000 copies.

The founding story is a perfect miniature of Argentine magazine history. The dominant publisher of graphic humour tried to censor, on grounds of decency, the very feature readers loved; the artist walked out, founded a rival, and within a year was selling a third of a million copies a week. Divito's magazine was freer in tone than Quinterno's family empire by design — its title itself, an Argentine slang expression for a well-off, well-dressed fellow, announced a more worldly, adult, urban humour — and its success proved the market for that freedom was enormous.

The Chicas de Divito

The Chicas de Divito were the girls who appeared on the covers of Rico Tipo, drawn by Divito himself. Histories of Argentine comics noted that, unwittingly, they marked the women's fashion at that time in Buenos Aires. A magazine cover drawn weekly by a single artist became, in effect, a fashion plate: the short skirts, the silhouette and the attitude of Divito's girls were copied in the street, so that the magazine did not merely reflect how young porteñas dressed and carried themselves — it helped decide it.

The Chicas were also the magazine's declaration of identity. What Quinterno had tried to lengthen at Patoruzú became, at Rico Tipo, the unmistakable trademark on every kiosk in the country. Their sensuality was playful rather than explicit — this was the Argentina of the 1940s — but it was unmistakably modern, and it located the magazine's humour in the new urban world of offices, dance halls, beaches and courtship between independent young men and women, far from the gaucho and cacique mythology of its rival.

Characters of the common citizen

In addition to the Chicas, Divito included in Rico Tipo a whole series of characters that portrayed aspects recognisable to the average citizen. His own creations included Pochita Morfoni, an obese woman who only thinks about food; Fúlmine, an ugly man dressed in black who brings bad luck and misfortune wherever he goes; Fallutelli, the prototype sycophantic employee and traitor to his fellows; Bómbolo, a fat, good-natured and naive man who cannot understand figurative speech and always takes things literally; and Gracielita, a very modern, waspish girl.

The most important character was Dr. Merengue, whom Pablo de Santis, in his book Rico Tipo y las Chicas de Divito, called a sort of criollo Mr. Hyde. Dr. Merengue behaved as required by the more conservative social conventions: serious, formal, fair, accurate and dispassionate, never losing his composure. But in the last square of the strip, his alter ego revealed his true feelings or thoughts. The device was a weekly X-ray of Argentine respectability — the respectable exterior and the suppressed interior printed in the same strip — and it made Merengue the magazine's deepest piece of social satire.

The contributors: a school of Argentine humour

Besides Divito, Rico Tipo included the cream of Argentine humorous writing and graphics at the time, and trained future generations of writers and artists who took their first steps at the magazine. Its documented contributors included Oscar Conti, Oski, whose Versos y Noticias, written by Carlos Warnes under the name César Bruto — a weekly satire of current events — appeared in Rico Tipo from 1944, with Oski's drawings used instead of photographs; Alejandro del Prado, Calé; Rodolfo M. Taboada; Horacio S. Meyrialle; Miguel Ángel Bavio Esquiú; Abel Ianiro; Joaquín Lavado, Quino, the future creator of Mafalda; Tomás Elvino Blanco; Rafael Martínez; and Guillermo Guerrero, among many others.

Adolfo Mazzone's classic character Piantadino also appeared in the magazine. The roster explains the magazine's long influence: an astonishing share of the talent that defined Argentine graphic humour in the second half of the twentieth century passed through Rico Tipo, and Héctor Germán Oesterheld, later the towering scriptwriter of Argentine comics, was also associated with writing for the magazine in accounts of its readership history. A weekly that functioned simultaneously as market leader and as training school shaped the national style for decades after individual issues were forgotten.

Golden age setting

Rico Tipo was a central institution of the golden age of Argentine comics, the period between the mid-1940s and the 1960s when the Argentine historieta reached its greatest industrial and artistic development, enriched also by foreign artists, including many Italians, who arrived in Argentina following the Second World War. The magazine's 1944 launch date placed it at the golden age's very beginning; its print run of around 350,000 copies by 1945 showed how large the public for graphic humour already was.

Its peers map the era: Patoruzú, from which Divito had seceded; the adventure and romance magazines of Editorial Columba such as Intervalo, launched in 1945; Patoruzito, also launched in 1945 for younger readers. Within that crowded field, Rico Tipo held the urban, adult, satirical ground. Its Buenos Aires — offices, cafés, football, fashion, courtship, the petty humiliations of employees and the vanities of the well-dressed — was the golden age's most recognisably contemporary world, drawn from the life its readers were actually living.

Divito's Buenos Aires

Rico Tipo was edited and published in Buenos Aires, and no major Argentine magazine was more thoroughly of that city. Its very name was porteño slang. Its characters were porteño types: the sycophantic office employee Fallutelli, the respectable Dr. Merengue, the modern girl Gracielita, the ill-fated Fúlmine. Its covers set the fashion of Buenos Aires women. Even its founding grievance — an artist's quarrel over skirts and salary in a Buenos Aires publishing house — was a story of the city's magazine industry.

That urbanity was a deliberate contrast with the era's other great comic properties, rooted in the pampas, the frontier or childhood. Rico Tipo proposed that adult city life itself, with its offices and dance halls and small hypocrisies, was the richest comic material in the country. The 350,000 readers who bought it weekly in its first years ratified the proposal, and the magazine's mirror of the city became one of the principal ways mid-century Buenos Aires imagined and laughed at itself.

The end of the first era, 1972

Divito's Rico Tipo appeared from late 1944 until 1972. Its closure that year closed the classic period of Argentine graphic humour's first great rivalry: Patoruzú would continue five more years, but the Divito magazine that had challenged it from 1944 was finished, and in that same year, 1972, a new generation founded Satiricón, which Argentine comics histories name alongside Patoruzú and Rico Tipo as the country's main comic magazines — a changing of the guard within a single calendar year.

The name did not wholly disappear. The second era of Rico Tipo was launched in August 1978 by Cielosur Editora, and the same publishing house relaunched a third era in 1986, which was short-lived. Those revivals, produced without the founding generation, belong to the history of the title rather than to its achievement: the magazine that mattered — Divito's magazine of the Chicas, Dr. Merengue and the cream of Argentine humour — was the weekly of 1944 to 1972, and it is that run this profile describes, in the past tense.

Legacy

Rico Tipo's legacy operates at several levels. As a commercial fact, a launch in November 1944 reaching some 350,000 copies a week within a year remains one of the great magazine debuts in Argentine history. As a cultural fact, the Chicas de Divito entered the language, and the judgement of comics historians that they marked Buenos Aires fashion gives the magazine a documented influence well beyond publishing. As literature and art, Dr. Merengue and the gallery of porteño types earned the magazine its own scholarly monograph, Pablo de Santis's Rico Tipo y las Chicas de Divito.

As an institution, its roster of contributors — Oski, Calé, Quino, Mazzone and the rest — made it a founding school of modern Argentine humour. And as a story, its origin remains the classic Argentine parable of the form: a young artist, told to lengthen his girls' skirts and denied a raise, who walked out of the biggest comics house in the country and beat it at its own game for twenty-eight years. Few magazines anywhere were so completely the creation of one man's drawing hand and one city's way of laughing.

Present status

Rico Tipo is a closed magazine. Its original run ended in 1972, its 1978 second era and short-lived 1986 third era also ended, and it has no current print or official digital edition. Its issues survive in collectors' hands and in the archives of Argentine comics, its characters — above all Dr. Merengue and the Chicas — survive in the national visual memory, and its founder's name remains attached to the standard by which Argentine cover art and graphic humour of the 1940s and 1950s are judged.

For this directory, Rico Tipo stands as the urban counterpart to Patoruzú in the classic age of Argentine magazines: where Quinterno's weekly mythologised the nation's interior, Divito's magazine anatomised its capital. It was founded in Buenos Aires on 16 November 1944 by Guillermo Divito, it was published weekly until 1972, and in between it gave Argentina some of its best-loved comic characters and the most famous magazine covers in its history.