When the Argentine cartoonist best known as Quino died in 2020 at age 88, he left behind a child who questioned authority, hated soup and belonged to the world.
Mafalda, the eponymous star of Joaquín Salvador Lavado’s beloved comic strip, is by any measure a global sensation: statues in Argentina and Spain; a handful of animated TV credits (including an upcoming Netflix series); calendars, coffee mugs and makeup bags adorned with her trademark bob and hair bow everywhere from Mexico City to Milan.
And yet Mafalda is a relative unknown in this country, with few translations in English and little to no distribution of the comic in the United States. A forthcoming five-volume collection from Elsewhere Editions is set to change that. For those who see in Quino’s work a road map for navigating a polarized political climate, the first volume, due June 10, can’t come soon enough.
“This is seriously the comic that the country needs in this moment,” said Ricardo Siri, who grew up reading “Mafalda” in Argentina and now lives in Vermont. (He is also the author of “Macanudo” and other work under the pen name Liniers.) “Mafalda has her point of view, but she always accepts as friends people who are very different from her.”
When wider American audiences do meet Mafalda, they’ll find a girl who resembles Ernie Bushmiller’s iconic character Nancy, but whose antics are entirely her own. Mafalda reaches for outer space on a seltzer-fueled jetpack, and is open to all kinds of experience. Even if she’s unlikely to help Democrats and Republicans get along, her brand of innocent but opinionated curiosity could show the so-called adults in the room how to do better by future generations.
“Mafalda is attempting to work out what the adult world means, and when she gets it wrong, the ways in which she gets it wrong actually better illuminate the inconsistencies, the incongruities and the ridiculousness,” said Frank Wynne, who translated the volumes from the Spanish.
First published in 1964 in the Argentine weekly “Primera Plana” — with material originally drawn for an unrealized ad campaign for home appliances — “Mafalda” blends cutting satire with playful humor, layered with meanings that appeal to readers young and old. Quino’s strip often exudes the same generosity of spirit as other comics told from children’s perspectives, but “Mafalda” is also more overtly political than “Peanuts” or “Calvin and Hobbes.”
“It’s Charlie Brown with socialism,” Siri said.
Mafalda’s friends and co-stars stand in for the social and ideological currents that roiled global politics, and especially Argentine society, in the 1960s and ’70s. The traditionalist Susanita has absorbed the aspirational elitism of her parents; Manolito helps run his dad’s grocery store and has faith only in economics; Mafalda’s slow-moving pet turtle is named Burocracia. A great strength of the strip is in depicting attempts at understanding that occur between characters representing right and left, liberal and conservative, grounded and idealistic.
Quino stopped writing “Mafalda” in 1973, one year before the divisive populist president Juan Perón died in office. Two years later his wife and successor Isabel Perón, was deposed by a military junta that would remain in power until 1983. Quino left Argentina for Italy shortly after the coup, but his later work, including books and single-panel cartoons for newspapers in Spain and elsewhere, further sharpened his social critique.
The immediate post-“Mafalda” years also coincided with an escalation of the junta’s campaign of morbid, almost surreal brutality against leftist guerrillas, Peronists, intellectuals, journalists and other supposed enemies. Years later, Quino told a Spanish magazine that if Mafalda had been a real girl, she “would have been one of the 30,000 disappeared” victims of the junta’s so-called Dirty War.
“What Mafalda teaches you when you’re little, if you start to read with these books, isn’t to behave yourself but rather to ask questions, to doubt the world that comes from on high,” Siri said.
Still, though the political commentary often comes head on (when Mafalda refuses to clean her room because she’s pretending to be president, her mother claims to be the International Monetary Fund), Quino’s sense of humor and the little girl’s perspective keep the tenor light. When Mafalda asks her father about the Vietnam War, she takes his euphemistic, mumbling response to mean that it must have something to do with “the birds and the bees.”
“Mafalda is a 6-year-old going on 60 who was attempting to take a philosophical view of the world, but is not devoid of childish wonder,” said Wynne.
That combination has made Mafalda a household name throughout Latin America and much of Europe and Asia, too, despite the comic’s relatively short nine-year run. (By comparison “Peanuts” ran for five decades.)
As to why “Mafalda” never caught on in the U.S., there are many possible explanations: the nature of newspaper syndication, which brings comic strips to culturally disparate cities across the country, making Quino’s brand of satire seem risky for publishers; historical timing (Siri points out that the Cold War presidencies of Nixon and Reagan may not have been ripe for the strip’s engagement with left-leaning political themes); or perhaps just the fact that the humor can’t easily be categorized as being for one age group or another.
Quino said he retired “Mafalda” to avoid becoming repetitive, though he later remarked that the rise of right-wing military governments in the region, such as that of Augusto Pinochet in neighboring Chile, meant that he “would have been shot” had he continued drawing her.
Argentina was no longer a place, even in comics, for people with different worldviews to learn about one another.
“That kind of interaction between different social sectors just wasn’t happening anymore,” Siri said, noting that he’s started to see similar division in the United States. “I look at that with a lot of concern, because in Argentina it didn’t end well. It ended in dictatorship.”