Mafalda
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Mafalda is a comic strip written and drawn by the Argentine cartoonist Joaquín Salvador Lavado (pen name Quino). The strip features a girl named Mafalda (5 years old at the time of the comic's creation)[citation needed] who is deeply concerned about humanity and world peace and rebels against the world as it is. The strip ran from 1964 to 1973 and was very popular in Latin America, Europe and in Asia, leading to two animated cartoon series and a movie.
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[edit] History
The character Mafalda — whose name was inspired by David Viñas's novel Dar la cara — and a few others, were created by Quino in 1962 for a promotional cartoon that was intended to be published in the daily Clarín. Ultimately, however, Clarín broke the contract, and the campaign was cancelled altogether.
Mafalda became a full-fledged cartoon strip on the advice of Quino's friend Julián Delgado, at the time senior editor of the weekly Primera Plana. Its run in that newspaper began on 29 September 1964. At first it only featured Mafalda and her parents. Felipe came on the scene in January 1965. A legal dispute arose in March 1965, which led to the end of Mafalda's Primera Plana run on 9 March 1965.
One week later, on 15 March 1965, Mafalda (the character at the age of five) started appearing daily in Buenos Aires' Mundo, allowing the author to follow current events more closely. The characters of Felipe, Manolito, Susanita and Miguelito were created in the following weeks, and Mafalda's mother was pregnant when the newspaper shut down on 22 December 1967.
Publication resumed six months later, on 2 June 1968, in the weekly Siete Días Ilustrados. Since the cartoons had to be delivered two weeks before publication, Quino was not able to comment on the news to the same extent. After creating the characters of Mafalda's little brother Guille and her new friend Libertad, he definitively ceased publication of the strip on 25 June 1973.
After 1973, Quino still drew Mafalda a few times, mostly to promote human rights. In 1976 he produced a poster for the UNICEF illustrating the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
[edit] Characters
- Mafalda: The main character, an approximately six-year-old Argentinian girl with a strong political view of the world and a proverbial hate for soup.
- Mamá ("Mom") (Raquel, 6 October 1964) and Papá ("Dad") (unnamed, 29 September 1964): Mafalda's parents are a very normal couple, without any particular distinguishing features.
- Felipe (19 January 1965): A dreamer who is deeply scared of school, even though he's the brightest member of the gang. He often wages intense internal battles with his conscience, innate sense of responsibility, and top school grades that he hates (*shows Mafalda a note where his teacher compliments on his grades* "That is the worst good news I've ever been given!"). He loves to play cowboys and read comics, especially the Lone Ranger.
- Manolito (Manuel Goreiro, Jr., 29 March 1965): The son of a Spanish (Galician) shopkeeper, more concerned with business and money than anything else.
- Susanita (Susana Beatriz Clotilde Chirusi, 6 June 1965): A frivolous girl with curly blond hair, and Mafalda's best female friend despite their bickering ("Well... you know... I'd rather freak out at you than at a complete stranger" *hug*).
- Miguelito (Miguel Pitti, 1966): About two years younger than Felipe and one year younger than Mafalda and the others, characterized by his lettuce-shaped hair. Somewhat of a rebel, most of the time he is a little too eager to get into philosophical debates.
- Guille (Guillermo, 1968): Mafalda's little brother. He loves soup (much to his sister's chagrin), has a pathologic dependence on his pacifier, and he and Mafalda have a pet tortoise called Burocracia ('Bureaucracy').
- Libertad (15 February 1970): A diminutive girl whose name means "Freedom", an actual name in Spanish. When everybody makes the obvious remark (about freedom being diminutive) she answers "reach your own stupid conclusions".
The characters aged at about half the real time-scale while the script ran, also going through minor changes mostly due to the evolution of Quino's drawing style.
[edit] Books and translations
Most strips that were not too closely tied to current, now forgotten events have chronologically been republished in twelve small books simply named Mafalda and numbered from one to twelve, with two strips on each page. This excludes the very first ones, published in Primera Plana, but never reprinted until 1989.
- Mafalda Inédita (Unpublished Mafalda) (1989)
- 10 Años con Mafalda (Ten years with Mafalda) (1991)
- Todo Mafalda (The Whole Mafalda) (1992)
Although most strips were translated into different European languages as well as into simplified and traditional Chinese, there were only a few publications in English. In the United States of America, his only published work is The World of Quino (1986). Beginning in 2004, however, Quino's publisher in Argentina, Ediciones de la Flor, started publishing English-language collections of Mafalda strips under the series title Mafalda & Friends.
[edit] Adaptations
Quino has opposed adapting Mafalda for cinema or theater; however, two series of animated shorts featuring Mafalda have been produced. The first, a series of 260 90-second films, was produced by Daniel Mallo for Argentine television starting in 1972. These were adapted into a full-length movie by Carlos Márquez in 1982. It remains relatively unknown. In 1993 Cuban filmmaker Juan Padrón, a close friend of Quino, directed 104 short animated Mafalda films, backed by Spanish producers.
[edit] Comparisons
Mafalda has occasionally been compared to Charles Schulz's Charlie Brown, most notably by Umberto Eco in 1968, for reasons Quino states he does not understand.[citation needed] While Eco thought of Mafalda and Charlie Brown as the voices unheard of children in the northern and southern hemispheres, Quino saw Mafalda as a socio-political strip, firmly rooted on family values. This is one of the reasons adults play a starring role in the strip, while they are never seen in the Charlie Brown universe. Quino does, however, acknowledge the influence of Schulz's work on his, in that Quino extensively studied Schulz's books in preparation for an advertising campaign he was working on in 1963. The advertising campaign was scrapped but he reused some of the material for the Mafalda series a year later.[1]
Some people think the appearance of Mafalda's character is dedicated to the main character in the U.S. comic strip Nancy- there is an extremely strong resemblance to the earlier U.S. strip — and there is a reference in the strip where Miguelito buys a magazine and it has Nancy on the cover, then he asks Mafalda who she looks like?. In the next panel is implied that Mafalda replied, "¡Tu abuelita!" ("Your granny!"), a phrase similar to "Your mama!" in English, as Miguelito stares at the magazine wondering, "My granny?".
[edit] References
- ^ Quino interview by Lucía Iglesias Kuntz, UNESCO Courier journalist
