Laerte - A Brazilian cartoonist

02 May, 2026

I don’t know how to title it in a clickbait way :/

I just really like Laerte. She is a great cartoon know for comic strip highly used in newspapers and portuguese text books and exams.

I saw the cartoon below today and thought of sharing her work. I know a lot of the people who read my blog are not Brazilian, so I wanted to show something new to you guys.

A comic strip by Laerte, in 4 panels.

1. A woman is sitting in an armchair in her library, sipping a glass of wine. A young man, standing, looks at the shelves full of books and says: "So many books... have you read them all?" - the woman replies: "Practically all of them."

2. The young man holds a book in one hand and another in the other. He asks: "Have you read this one?" - the woman replies: "No." - he asks about the other book: "And this one?" - she replies: "No."

3. The young man looks at the shelves again and asks: "Name one you've read." - the woman says: "Practically any one."

4. The young man shows another book and asks: "This one?" - the woman says: "Not this one."

Both the image and the alternative text¹ came from this post in Bsky, she is very kind and puts descriptions in every single comic.

Also, something I only discovered too late in life. She's a trans woman!

She is an inspiration for many in the trans community in Brasil, is difficult to find stories about old trans folks, especially one as well-known and successful in her craft. She is an example of “it is never too late to be yourself,” since she only started to transition in the 2000s, when she was around her 50s, without announcing it, only coming out as a woman in the early 2010s. She also didn't change her name because she thought it sounded gender neutral, which she liked.

Her cartoons are very famous, and her work is very consistent, so she is very popular. A famous meme was started because of her work. In it a werewolf is tearing his clothing apart with the text “I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND LAERTE”

However, Laerte didn’t quite like it. The poor lady is 74 years old, she didn’t understand the meme. I think she got sad because most of the comments in her posts were from kids saying they didn't understand. Even if it was mostly a joke because her comics were very common in the reading comprehension part of portuguese exams when we were growing up. So people started to use more memes like:

Her humor is quite intelligent, sometimes it goes over people heads. I'll admit, many times I read her comics and felt the meaning but didn't understood it.

Here is photo of her!

I will leave some of her socials here. I even discovered she has a blog with the archive of her comics!

#Writing