ARGENTINA’S SUPERHEROES

This weekend’s escapist, light-hearted superhero post here at Balladeer’s Blog looks at several home-grown characters from Argentina. 

CABALLERO ROJO (Red Cavalier)

Secret Identity: Rafael Reinoso

Debuted: 1996

Origin: Rafael Reinoso is the 34th member of his family line to become the costumed Caballero Rojo. Like the Walker family in the Phantom series or the Black Panther and Red Wolf characters in Marvel Comics, the role has been passed down from generation to generation for centuries. 

Powers: This hero is in peak physical condition, excels at unarmed combat and is more agile than an acrobat. Caballero Rojo also uses a high-tech grappling line to swing around the city like Spider-Man. He also wields throwing blades and red smoke bombs. His headquarters is in an abandoned church in Buenos Aires. 

CYBERSIX

Secret Identity: Adrian Seidelman 

Debuted: 1991

Origin: Dr. Joseph Von Reichter, one of the many Nazis to flee to Argentina after the end of World War 2, has used his genius at bioengineering and cybernetics to keep himself reasonably young for decades.

He also created several humanoid & animal figures who were part biochemical and part cybernetic.

Von Reichter’s creations developed free will, including Cybersix and the pantheroid Data 7, and they rebelled. Von Reichter exterminated all of them except our heroine Cybersix and Data 7, who escaped and have opposed their insane creator, his new creations and other forces of evil ever since.

Cybersix disguises herself as the male teacher Adrian Seidelman at Meridiana High School, with Meridiana being the city in which she resides. Dr. Von Reichter frequently targets that city. 

Powers: This heroine possesses super-strength, greater than human speed & agility, and can see in the dark. Like her panther Data 7, Cybersix can make spectacular leaps due to her incredible strength.

SONOMAN

Secret Identity: Leon Hamilton

Debuted: 1966

Origin: This hero is from the scientifically advanced planet Sono, whose scientists granted him superpowers. He came to Earth to protect us technologically backward schlubs and poses as a music professor when he is not in action.

Powers: Sonoman can absorb all sound around him and metabolize it as sonic energy which gives him “the strength of three rhinoceroses” and lets him shoot sonic blasts from his hands plus conjure up a force field.  He can fly on soundwaves at 1,100 feet per second and use sonic energy to transform from his civilian clothes into his costume.  

ETERNAUTA

Secret Identity: Juan Salvo 

Debuted: 1957

Origin: An alien race kicked off their invasion of Earth by attacking Argentina. They softened up the country with a seeming snowfall which was actually toxic poison, killing everyone who came into contact with it and driving everyone else into hiding. Electrical transformer manufacturer Juan Salvo devised a power suit and thwarted the invasion. After that he protected the world from other menaces and even traveled in time and space.   

Powers: El Eternauta’s power suit protected him from the toxic “snow” and other weapons. It also granted him a degree of superstrength, the power to teleport and time travel. His genius let him devise other high-tech weapons as needed.

CEIBALIA (Apothecary)

Secret Identity: Veronica Sarolini

Debuted: 2023

Origin: As a college student, Veronica Sarolini was drifting from major to major. Discovering the use of phyto-sorcery in the ancient tome the Auricanima, she gained superpowers from the concoctions she made via the book’s instructions. Under the tutelage of reina maga (queen mage) Madam A she took on the forces of evil.

Powers: Ceibalia has the power of telekinesis and is capable of remote viewing. Sometimes she can whip up special brews for an emergency situation.   

FLY MAN

Secret Identity: Professor Lyn Norton

Debuted: 1960

Origin: Scientist Lyn Norton devised a helmet and other technology that granted him superpowers. He donned a costume and battled crime as Fly Man.

Powers: Fly Man could shrink down to a mere inch or smaller (or larger) and one time even shrank to microscopic size. This hero retained the strength of a full-grown man and grew wings upon shrinking to a certain size.

CAZADOR (Hunter)

Secret Identity: Roberto Howard

Debuted: 1990

Origin: Cazador has been given two origin stories. In 1990 he was scientist Roberto Howard who was called in to study a cylinder recovered from a downed UFO. Upon realizing that the government wanted to use the cylinder as a weapon he refused to cooperate. The government killed his family in an explosion, but Roberto gained superpowers from the cylinder and set out for revenge. As Cazador he went on to combat other forms of evil, too. 

In 1992, however, Cazador was retconned as the ruthless son of a Conquistador during the age of the Spanish Conquest of Argentina. Cazador pillaged and plundered and burned the sign of the cross into the heads of his indigenous victims. Tricked into thinking he was being led to El Dorado, the City of Gold, he was ambushed and cursed with the sign of an inverted crucifix. The “curse” also granted him superpowers and near immortality. He is still alive in the modern day, trying to redeem his evil past by fighting supernatural and natural villainy.

Powers: Part Wolverine, part Lobo, Cazador has incredible superstrength and can heal from seemingly any injuries, albeit in pain. At one point over the centuries, he regenerated after being reduced to just a head and a torso. This figure is also a master of weaponry. 

CHICA ALIEN (Alien Girl)

Secret Identity: Unknown

Debuted: 2015

Origin: Having grown up amid poverty, oppression and societal injustice, this woman adopted a costume and the nom de guerre Alien Girl.

She became a self-described “agent of chaos” against institutionalized villainy in Argentina and elsewhere.

Powers: Chica Alien is in peak physical condition, possesses extraordinary agility and excels at armed and unarmed combat.

She has skills equal to special forces soldiers and commandos. This antiheroine is a mistress of weaponry, explosives and improvised instruments of sabotage.

NOTE: Chica Alien has become one of the most popular subjects for tattoos in Argentina.

Her anti-establishment attitude and open use of marijuana put her comic books in the adult category. Lighting a stick of dynamite off the joint she is smoking is one of her signature moves. “Free the beast” is Chica Alien’s motto.

SUPERVOLADOR (Superflyer)

Secret Identity: Jet Carson

Debuted: 1960

Origin: A group of aliens deemed Jet Carson worthy of becoming Earth’s Protector. They gave him a high-tech belt which granted him superpowers. He donned a costume and battled the forces of evil as Supervolador.

Powers: This hero could fly and possessed a degree of super-strength. If anyone but Jet Carson tried to use the alien belt it would obliterate that person.

LA HIJA DEL VERDUGO (The Executioner’s Daughter)

Secret Identity: Anita Petrone

Debuted: 1999

Origin: This series has the violent, transgressive air of the bloody supernatural hero Faust or Brazil’s Penitente in the way it combines worldly evil with afterlife implications. The dead Don Petrarch Petrone, called the Executioner for his enormous total of slain, mutated enemies, is tried and found by the forces of Hell to be guilty of cannibalizing the decapitated heads of those enemies.

The forces of Purgatory intervene and decree that such guilt is so monumental it will even be passed along to his daughter Anita when she dies. To avoid Hell herself she must kill and decapitate enough superpowered evildoers to equal the weight of her late father’s guilt.

Powers: Anita Petrone has mystically enhanced strength, agility, speed and durability. She is incredibly skilled with her executioner’s axe and can handle multiple mutated foes at once. La Hija del Verdugo rides an android horse capable of detecting the scent of evildoers.

HOMBRE DE POTENCIA (Power Man)

Secret Identity: Unknown

Debuted: 1990

Origin: One of the human guinea pig survivors of a heinous government project to genetically engineer superpowered operatives, ostensibly to defend against extraterrestrial threats or other menaces to our planet. In practice that team – called Los Universales – is just as often used to preserve the corrupt government against insurgents and the like.

Hombre de Potencia led Los Universales – Fantasia, Vengador, Jaguar, Titania, Atalanta and Escarlata. Their archenemy is their former leader, Supremo, who went rogue in disgust over governmental corruption. 

Powers: This hero has Hulk or Superman levels of strength and invulnerability. He can also fly and shoot energy beams from his eyes. 

BABETOOL

Secret Identity: None

Debuted: 1990s

Origin: In a bleak post-apocalyptic future humanity is nearly extinct. The few human beings still alive are caught between large monsters mutated by pollution, nuclear war & ecological disasters and an emerging feudal society of rival warlords. Those warlords seek to rule over the ashes. 

Plastoid fembots called Babetools are a decadent leftover from the depraved world that was. They had perfectly formed bodies but no free will and no individual faces, just a variety of masks.

A few of these surviving pleasure-bots have become self-aware and reject their former role. Most of them adopt new names for themselves but our heroine, defiantly unashamed of the past, bluntly goes by the name Babetool.

Powers: This android heroine, like others of her kind, possesses greater than human strength, speed and recuperative programming. She wields swords and firearms with incredible skill and is adept at slaying warlords, mutated monsters and even other Babetools. With her part-cyborg female friend Noriko she struggles to survive as a bounty hunter in the grim future. 

YORGA, EL HOMBRE LAGARTO (Yorga, the Lizard Man)

Secret Identity: Marcelo Labanca

Debuted: Early 1970s

Origin: Due to a supernatural curse, police detective Marcelo Labanca undergoes nightly transformations into a humanoid lizard called Yorga. Because he retains his human intelligence, he uses his superpowers as Yorga to battle the forces of evil.

Powers: Yorga has a degree of superstrength and his reptilian form absorbs bullets or knives without feeling any pain. However, if he doesn’t remove them before he changes back to human form at dawn they could kill him. His claws secrete toxic poison which can kill people at his touch if he desires. Yorga’s occasional ally is the superheroine Arana Negra (Black Spider).

LA NINA RELAMPAGO (Lightning Girl)

Secret Identity: Malina Ragusek

Debuted: 2023

Origin: Eating unusual plants growing on her father’s land granted this young woman superpowers. She donned a costume and, as La Nina Relampago, fought crime.

Powers: This heroine can run at great speed and has almost rubbery limbs and joints which grant her incredible agility plus greater than human strength. She excels at unarmed combat.   

CABO SAVINO (Corporal Savino)

Secret Identity: None

Debuted: 1954 but set in the 1800s

Origin: In his teens, an Argentine man named Carlos Savino enrolled in the cavalry in 1865 to fight in the ongoing War of the Triple Alliance in South America. That conflict saw Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay against Paraguay and ended in 1870 but Savino, now a corporal, stayed in the Cavalry.

In April 1874 he refused to kill real-life outlaw Juan Moreira from behind in the heat of battle, so another soldier did the deed. Having disobeyed orders to kill Moreira, Cabo (corporal) Savino was stagnated at the rank of corporal but allowed to remain in the army due to his combat skill.

In 1876 and then on a larger scale in 1878 Argentina began its Conquest of the Patagonian Desert, moving or exterminating the indigenous tribes to make land available for Argentinians. Our cavalryman Cabo Savino was in the thick of it.

Powers: Savino was a battle-hardened veteran, a marksman with pistols & rifles and an expert horseman. He was physically fit and survival savvy.

NOTE: The Cabo Savino stories were like gritty, edgy Spaghetti Westerns a decade before Spaghetti Westerns came along. Heavy on violence, the series presented its hero as the definitive “enlightened gaucho,” disillusioned with what his nation is doing to the native tribes but sensing no future for himself outside the army.

These melancholy, tragic stories were ahead of their time and paralleled American sagas of military men sympathetic to the plight of Native Americans as well as French Foreign Legion tales set in the North African desert. The Conquest of the Desert ended in 1885 but the Cabo Savino series was so popular it ran for decades, inspiring movies and television shows.     

ALI-CE

Secret Identity: Alibarun Cendravina

Debuted: 2023

Origin: This superheroine was a genetically engineered hybrid of a human and a plant from outer space. She grew quickly, adopted the alias Ali-Ce and began using her powers to fight crime and other villainy.

Powers: Ali-Ce can mentally control all plant life. In addition, she possesses the power of phytokinesis and can make those plants move about as she wishes. Another of her powers is chloropeia, the ability to transform non-plant matter into plant matter at her touch. She can make plant matter grow at an incredibly rapid rate, too.

HOMBRE PAJARO (Bird-Man)

Secret Identity: Flash Dexter

Debut: 1964

Origin: Lawyer Destello “Flash” Dexter obtained a Power Dagger which granted him a variety of superpowers. He donned a costume and fought evildoers as Hombre Pajaro.

Powers: This hero’s Power Dagger enabled him to fly, to shoot energy beams and erect a force field around himself. It also detected situations that required his intervention and could biologically analyze other living organisms. Hombre Pajaro also piloted his personal gyrocopter.

ARANA NEGRA (Black Spider)

Secret Identity: Linda Perez

Debuted: Early 1970s. Got her own series in 1975.

Origin: Unknown. This superheroine appeared on the scene as an already established crimefighter and adventurer.

After a few guest appearances in Yorga, El Hombre Lagarto’s series she got her own spinoff series which ran for 13 issues.

Powers: Arana Negra is in peak physical condition, excels at unarmed combat and is more agile than an acrobat. She wields a gun that lets her knock out and/or kill her opponents.

In some stories she has a male sidekick called Tarantula, who wears a black bodysuit.    

FOR SPAIN’S SUPERHEROES CLICK HERE.

FOR BRAZIL’S SUPERHEROES CLICK HERE.

FOR INDIA’S SUPERHEROES CLICK HERE.

FOR SUPERHEROES FROM THE PHILIPPINES CLICK HERE.