Mafalda: 60 years of the girl who was going to be the face of an advertising campaign and became a brutal mirror of society

On March 15, 1962, the creation of the unforgettable Quino was born. Half a century later, the girl who hated soup and social injustice was eternalized as the childhood voice of adults. She will always be the bold, intelligent, thinking, sharp, tender, corrosive, timely and mischievous girl who marked generations of Argentines. His story and that of his urban band of small philosophers with their own ideas

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Now she would be sitting on her stool, in front of the globe bandaged like a badly injured patient and planted on a thin-legged lectern, to which she would say, with pious eyes: “Poor thing... Ukraine hurts, doesn't it? ”.

That was Mafalda. This is how he saw the world, the geographical world and that of the adults, both embellished by The Beatles and the Crazy Bird and encased by the horrifying soup, the boys' caudina gallows.

As it is already a myth, the date of his birth is lost on Olympus. They set it on March 15, today it would be birthday, 1962, or 1963. For its author, the unforgettable Quino, who was the talented cartoonist version of Mafalda, the girl was born the day she first appeared as a strip, on September 29, 1964. So today I should blow sixty candles, or fifty-nine, or fifty-eight, but in a few months. Who cares.

Mafalda will always be the daring, intelligent, thinking, sharp, tender, corrosive, timely and mischievous girl who marked several generations of Argentines who suffered violent, corrupt, palurid or stupid dictatorships, dictatorships and democratic governments. Quino did everything in the nine years that Mafalda lived, which is already eternal, and which was left as a future witness to the shaking that Argentina looked out at in the late 60s and early 70s.

The name of Mafalda's mascot was a real criticism of society: the turtle is called Bureaucracy (“Mafalda Universe”)

I didn't have that fate as a child's pythonist. It was going to be the emblem, or the visible face of an advertising campaign by Siam Di Tella, the appliance company that cooled our summer with those ball-handle refrigerators, or with the fans that, miraculously, turned back and forth, dumbfounded. A symbol of that country that sought industrialization, before any genius thought to theorize, and affirm, that the best way to end Peronism was to end the chimneys.

Those were Mafalda's years. That advertising campaign for Siam never came to light, and Quino crate the prehistoric Mafalda until another humorous genius of those years, Miguel Brascó, took it to the humorous supplement “Gregorio”, of the magazine “Leoplán” (Jurassic journalism, but not so distant), where only three were published “strips”. In 1964, Quino and Julián Delgado, director of the political magazine Primera Plana, agreed to give long life to the terrible girl who appeared, in new “strips”, with her parents on September 29, the date that Quino gave as the date of the birth of their daughter dilecta.

In March 1965, with new characters such as the toothy Felipe, Mafalda stopped being published on the Front Page and Quino left the magazine, embarking on a process of demolition of the government of the radical Arturo Illia. Brascó once again intervenes so that the strip continues in the legendary newspaper El Mundo, published by the Haynes Publishing House, where Mafalda returns to light just a week after leaving Primera Plana: he was already a character expected and sought after by thousands of readers delighted with his adventures. It was not a child character, which too, but the boy that each reader wore inside, which is no small thing.

Guille, Manolito, a doll and a critical analysis of the capitalist system

In that newspaper El Mundo, Mafalda won readers with her frank and shameless gaze: Quino began to write real political editorials in the pictures of the comic strip, which began to be published in the interior newspapers. The day after the military coup that struck Illia's government on June 28, 1966, a demanded Mafalda, only mouth, eyes and cheekbones that overflowed the height of the only painting of the day, wondered: “So what did they teach me at school?” He never had an answer.

Mafalda's “strips” were made books and when El Mundo closed in December 1967, its readers lost it for six months, until it reappeared in the weekly current affairs magazine Siete Días, published by the Abril Publishing House. He lived there until, on June 25, 1973, Quino decided not to draw it anymore. By then, Mafalda was already an international success and her strips, in books, appeared in Italy and Spain, where the Franco regime ordered to add on the cover that it was an adults-only reading.

That was the nine-year story of Mafalda and his urban band of little philosophers with their own ideas, which the Argentine political climate turned into “dangerous”. So much so that one of the typical games and debates for fans of the comic strip today consists of trying to unravel which of Quino's characters would have survived the violent 70s and the military dictatorship installed in March 1976.

An acid look at reality that crossed borders and generations

Mafalda's band consisted of Felipe, the loving and timid admirer of the Lone Ranger who, when he saw the girl of his eyes pass unchanged by his side, instead of reading the phrase: “I must get to Mulligan's ranch”, read it as: “I'm taking degar to the mulli of Ranchigan”. Felipe is the author of the shortest treatise on psychoanalysis, summarized in one sentence: “Did it just have to be me to be like me? ”. Manuel Goreiro was Manolito, the grocer's son, with the “beautiful dollar-green color” in his mind and with the dream of turning his father's warehouse into a supermarket chain; the one who when something smelled bad in the store thought: “It's time to put something on offer”.

Susanita (Susana Clotilde Chirusi), was Mafalda's foot to earth: she wanted to get married and have children, but she also tried, almost in vain, to make her friend understand that life was anything other than social unrest, political warnings, the world in crisis and the foolishness of fighting wars and hunger. Miguelito, Miguel Pitti, had a lettuce plant like hair, a bombproof naivete and an unshakable hope: he would sit on the curb of the sidewalk and when asked what he was doing, he would let go: “Here I am, waiting for something from life”. And he philosophized: “There is never a lack of someone left over.”

Guille was the brand-new brother of Mafalda, who talked to the zeta and pleaded, “Please...!” To his sister's desperation, he could love soup. And then there was Libertad. She was very small. And very logical. I was thinking, or sheltered, or foreseen, a social revolution. And he reasoned: “For me, what is wrong is that a few have a lot, many have little, and some have nothing. If those some who have nothing had something of the little that the many who have little have, and if the many who have little had a little of how much the few who have a lot have, there would be less trouble. But no one does much, to say nothing, to improve something so simple a little.” There's that. Libertad, the little girl, had a mother who translates from French and the girl remembered: “There is a writer... Jean Paul... Jean Paul Belmo... No, not that one... Jean Paul Sartre. That one! The last chicken we ate was written by him.”

Flowers and posters surround the sculptures of Mafalda, Susanita and Manolito, installed in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of San Telmo. On September 30, 2020, its creator, Joaquín Salvador Lavado (REUTERS/Agustin Marcarian), died in the City of Buenos Aires

That was the band, those the characters, that was the thought. Oh, Mafalda also had a turtle: Bureaucracy.

Everyone's father was Quino. Who was Quino? He was born in Mendoza on July 17, 1932 as Joaquín Salvador Lavado Badger. From Joaquín comes the Quino and from his uncle Joaquín the passion for drawing. He studied Fine Arts but at the age of seventeen he decided on comics and humor. He arrived in Buenos Aires in 1951, published his first comic in the magazine Esto Es, created his first characters traced from the real world, innocent beings, humanists, resigned, reflective, obsessive, suffering, extravagant, overwhelmed. That was the other Quino behind the Mafalda phenomenon, a fighter against authoritarianism, vulgarity, abuse, corruption. Quino's non-“ Mafaldian” heroes are transient, fleeting, perhaps illusory, who dare to face, or at least reflect, on those three or four things in which we often lose the pot: loneliness, love, madness, death, power. Those beings still wander, for whoever wants to find them, in their books “People in Their Place”, “Mundo Quino”, “Powerful, Powerful and Powerless”, “How Bad People Are”, “I Was Not”, “Human is Born”, among many others.

In 1977 he had to go into exile in Italy. Mafalda, the daring one, had dared to explain to her little brother that the cane worn by a policeman,. That he listened to her astonished, it was “the stick of denting ideologies”. The joke was made a poster and sold by the thousands on Florida Street, in the violent 70s. Today it has returned to being a classic of humor. But on July 4, 1976, three months after the establishment of the military dictatorship, three Palotine monks and two lay people were killed in the parish of San Patricio, in Belgrano. On the corpses, the murderers left a poster of Mafalda and the stick to dent ideologies.

Quino caresses Mafalda. The cartoonist began to write real political editorials in the pictures of the comic strip (Reuters/Eloy Alonso/File Photo)

Quino lived in Europe until the return of democracy in 1983. And he was distinguished by his native province, he received the Bicentennial Medal, the Legion of Honor of the French Republic, the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities awarded by King Felipe VI, the honorary mention “Senator Domingo Faustino Sarmiento” and the “Honoris Causa” doctorate from the University of Buenos Aires. He died on September 30, 2020, at the age of 88.

With such an artistic father, Mafalda could not have been any different than it was. And his little urban band of social revolts, either. You only live once. Yes, as Jorge Luis Borges promised, there are no paradises other than lost paradises; if today Mrs. Mafalda turns sixty, or fifty-eight, but we remember her with her round face, her Guillermina shoes and her bow in her hair, it is because she still mirrors us.

She and her band still tell us what we were like. And even how could we be.

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