One of the great things about AHOY Comics’ series, Project: Cryptid, is that the various writers and artists love doing unexpected riffs on the monsters they tackle. They also put their paneled spotlight on monsters that don’t get a lot of written exposure in the English-speaking world. Case in point, issue #11’s story “I Think My Capelobo is Broken,” by writer Bryce Ingman and artist Mauricet, which gives a good overview of this unusual Brazilian folklore monster.
The story is from the perspective of a sentient and disillusioned capelobo, which can appear as tapirs, or as humanoids with a variant animal head. The capelobo ends up running into a fictional instance of that dreaded real world monster, the manipulative and exploitative entertainment manager. Our poor protagonist just wants to make music for his animal friends, but a series of unfortunate events leads to the capelobo signing a very disadvantageous contract, and being legally obligated to perform in unhappy ways and in depressing places. It’s a sad, old story played to vaudevillian, tongue-in-cheek excess.
AHOY Comics
As the story unfolds, we discover that a capelobo is sort of a were-tapir (or perhaps were-anteater), whose dining habits are quite odious. It eats brains through its anteater-like snout, or — and I can’t quite fathom why this is its secondary dietary choice — puppies and kittens. It’s like the monster was designed from the beginning to piss everyone off. Either it’s murdering you for your delicious brains, or it’s horrifying the Internet by eating the most popular pets in their cutest forms.
The capelobo isn’t something you’ll read about in a lot of cryptid compendiums. Its existence is testified to in writing from the 1920s by a botanical researcher named Silivo Froes Abreu. Details about the capelobo are wildly divergent, with some accounts claiming it had only one eye. Other stories describe it with perfectly round footprints, or with only one leg. These elements might make the capelobo sound like another popular monster from the Amazon, the Mapinguari, but while some authors (or possibly just one) have tried to tie the Mapinguari to some relict population of giant sloths, features like its single eye and backwards feet peg it as a creature of myth and folklore, not of biology.
The funny thing is that we’re even seeing this the capelobo talked about at all outside of its context in the rural folklore of Brazil. It seems the world is never going to stop being hungry for monster stories, and even a creature barely written about, and mostly in Portuguese, can make it to the mainstream of English-speaking monster culture.
I’m not positive about this, but I believe that the capelobo may have gotten this far because of sites like DeviantArt, Instagram, and others that allow artists to create and share their colorful imaginations of wild-looking beasts from lots of different lore. This is a fascinating vector of memetic spread, because the artists may not even be prompted with the details of the legends and dangers associated with the creatures, so much as prompts like “it’s a humanoid with an anteater head that sucks human brains and eats kittens and puppies.” The road from there to here doesn’t seem to come from specific cases, as much as broad impressions.
AHOY Comics
I’d like to read more original research on the legendary capelobo, but for an English-speaking monster researcher, this story somehow manages to cover all the basics, while also giving us an amusing trope-driven narrative about the heart’s longing for expression, and the conflict that results when it runs into the mediating influence of greed and contract law.
Project: Cryptid isn’t written for bookish monster nerds, but it seems to be written by monster nerds who appreciate the lore, but want to have fun with it. You need look no further than a capelobo Elvis-impersonator for proof. This story has me wanting to find more details on what people were actually reporting back in the 1920s, and I’m also curious as to whether the rise of Internet art sites will spin up more appearances of the humanoid, anteater-headed capelobo, or will they simply … tapir off?
AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login