Marcelo Cassaro

• 1. Introduction

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  Marcelo Cassaro was born on the 15th of August 1970, and by age fifteen he was already drawing frames for animated cartoons at the Maurício de Sousa studios. That early start set the pattern for a career that would eventually produce Brazil's longest-running non-child-oriented comic book, its first national RPG magazine, and the first Brazilian comic published in the United States by a major American label. How does a teenage in-between artist become the defining figure of Brazilian genre fiction? The answers reach from the manga tradition of Japan to the role-playing tables of São Paulo, and they all run through one collaborator whose name appears again and again: artist Erica Awano. What Cassaro built with her, and what he built on his own, changed what Brazilian readers expected from home-grown stories.

• 2. From Cartoons to Comics

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  Abril Jovem hired Cassaro in 1989 as both artist and screenwriter, and he went to work on television shows including Joe Carioca, Os Trapalhões, and Jaspion. Those years of scripting for screen gave him a fluency with serialized narrative that would serve him far beyond television. His time at Maurício de Sousa's studio, beginning when he was fifteen, had already trained his eye for sequential imagery. By the time he moved into comics in earnest, he carried both disciplines at once: the visual instincts of an animator and the structural habits of a television writer. That combination would prove decisive when he sat down with Erica Awano to plan what became Holy Avenger.

• 3. Holy Avenger and Manga

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  Cassaro and Awano launched Holy Avenger in 1999, and it ran for forty issues before concluding in 2004. Each chapter opened with three pages printed in color, while the rest of the pages were black and white, following the format of Japanese manga. Every issue also carried a two-page map tracing the characters' journey, a recap of earlier events, and profiles of the principal cast. Where Holy Avenger broke sharply from Japanese convention was in its reading direction: instead of right-to-left, the book was printed left-to-right for Brazilian readers. It became the first Brazilian manga title to sell thirty thousand copies a month, and it holds the record as the longest published non-child-oriented comic in Brazil. In 2007, Cassaro and Awano were finalists in the First International Manga Contest held in Japan for their work on the series.

• 4. Dragão Brasil and RPG

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  In 1995, Cassaro launched Dragão Brasil, the first Brazilian monthly magazine dedicated entirely to role-playing games. It became the only RPG magazine in the country to surpass one hundred published editions. After leaving that editorial role, he turned to writing RPG rulebooks built around licensed video game properties: Street Fighter, Final Fight, Darkstalkers, and Megaman all received treatments under his authorship. He also became one of the architects of Tormenta, which the source identifies as the most successful RPG in Brazil, and of 3D&T, a system designed around manga and anime aesthetics. That combination of a founding magazine and multiple authored systems placed him at the center of the Brazilian tabletop gaming world for more than a decade.

• 5. American Debut and Other Work

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  Among Cassaro's comics credits is Victory, which Image Comics published in the United States as the first comic book with both Brazilian script and Brazilian art to appear in an American market. He also worked on Dungeon Crawlers and wrote Lua dos Dragões, known in English as Moon of Dragons, which became one of the most decorated miniseries in Brazilian comics history. The Dragon Bride, again produced with Erica Awano, extended their creative partnership beyond Holy Avenger. In 2009, Cassaro began writing for Turma da Mônica Jovem, which the source describes as the best-selling comic book in South America. The Ângelo Agostini Award named him "Mestre do Quadrinho Nacional" in 2018, recognizing a body of work that had crossed national borders and shaped multiple corners of Brazilian popular culture.