The Argentinean Comic Strip That Galvanized a Generation

A uniformed police officer stands sideways, his head turned to face us. His eyes are unnaturally close together, rendered by the artist as two black dots floating in the very center of his face. He has a drooping nose, a thin mustache, and a glum look, staring as if he is aware of being watched. Behind him stands a little girl, less than half his size, wearing a red dress, a red bow poking from the thicket of her heavy black hair. Her eyes are big and sad, and her index finger touches the tip of the nightstick hanging from the policeman’s belt. “You see?” she says, with a worried expression. “This is the little stick for squashing ideologies.”

I probably first saw this image in the nineteen-eighties—taped to the wall of a cousin’s bedroom in Lima, perhaps, or hanging on the side of a newspaper kiosk—but I already knew who the little girl was. In fact, I can’t recall a time in my life when I didn’t know her. “Mafalda,” the comic strip in which she appeared, was published in Argentina from 1964 to 1973, and remained a cultural touchstone for Latin Americans of every generation thereafter. At one point, Mafalda and Eva Perón were the two most recognizable Argentinean women worldwide. “Mafalda” has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and tens of millions of books have been sold in Spanish alone, making it the best-selling Latin American comic of all time.

The strip—and, even more so, the eponymous character—stood for something. Though her family was solidly middle class, Mafalda didn’t let that fool her into thinking that everything was fine in her unequal society. She was too sharp for that, too observant. She was a little girl who read the newspaper and had opinions on current events. She cornered her parents with uncomfortable, often bewildering questions, and approached life with bemusement, pondering the mediocrity of the adults crafting the world she would inherit, people who, for the most part, disappointed her but whom she was still generous enough to love. Ricardo Liniers, an Argentinean cartoonist who has drawn several covers for this magazine, described “Mafalda” to me as “ ‘Peanuts’ plus socialism and ideology.” The Italian philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco put it another way, theorizing that if Charlie Brown reads Freud, Mafalda reads Che Guevara. In any given week, the comic strip might raise the subjects of nuclear annihilation, government inefficiency, the “brain drain,” military coups, labor strikes, or the pressures of inflation. And it did so without being didactic or abandoning the perspective of a precocious and unrelentingly curious six-year-old girl. “Mafalda” “doesn’t teach you to behave,” Liniers told me. “It doesn’t teach you to respect your elders or not to fight with your brother. ‘Mafalda’ teaches you to question the world.”

And though fifty-two years have passed since the last “Mafalda” comic strip was published, the ensuing decades have done little to dim its popularity. In 2009, I witnessed a near-riot at the Lima International Book Fair, as more than a thousand fans waited hours for Quino, “Mafalda” ’s beloved creator, to sign their memorabilia. Last year, Netflix announced that it was developing a new series based on the strip, co-written and directed by the Oscar winner Juan José Campanella. There are statues of Mafalda around the world; the sixteenth, on Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, was unveiled at the end of June. Also in June, the first of five volumes that will reproduce the complete “Mafalda” run in an English translation, by Frank Wynne, was released by Elsewhere Editions—the strip’s first publication in the United States.

Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón, better known as Quino, was born in 1932 into a family of politically engaged Spanish immigrants living in Mendoza, Argentina. His parents were Republicans, his grandmother a Communist. Quino was a timid, quiet boy, traits that would follow him into adulthood. (For years, he hung a sign in his studio warning journalists to stay away: “Due to Shyness, No Reporting of Any Kind Will Be Accepted.”) He never really wanted to grow up. “Every time I put on my shoes and noticed they were too tight, I felt an enormous despair,” he once said. He first became enamored of drawing on a night when his parents went out, leaving him and his two brothers in the care of his uncle Joaquín, who entertained the children by sketching. “It was a revelation that, so long as you had the skill, whatever you wanted—human forms, landscapes, animals, plants—could emerge from a pencil,” Quino said, at the Lima International Book Fair in 2009. He was twelve when his mother died. He enrolled in an art school soon after that, but dropped out before completing the program, a decision he would later regret.

In 1950, when Quino was in his late teens, a local silk shop commissioned him to draw an advertisement. After that, he never stopped working, and eventually he outgrew Mendoza. By the end of the decade, he’d settled in Buenos Aires, one of the cultural capitals of the Spanish-speaking world at the time, where bookstores stayed open late into the night, audiences lined up at movie theatres to see the new Ingmar Bergman film, and magazines and newspapers competed for the attention and money of the growing Argentinean middle class. It was here that Quino came of age professionally, part of a generation of writers and artists who would help shape the country in an era of immense political and cultural change. Illustration and comics played an important role, and every outlet, it seemed, was looking for graphic humor. In this context, Quino was able to cobble together a living by placing his work in many different publications, covering everything from fashion to sports.

His big break came in 1963, when an advertising agency asked him to create a comic strip for a local manufacturer that was planning to launch a new brand of domestic appliances called Mansfield. Quino’s assignment was to portray a typical middle-class family—a married couple with kids—in which each character’s name began with the letter “M.” (This was supposed to be subliminal marketing, though it seems unlikely that such a subtle ploy would really have been effective.) In the end, it came to nothing—the campaign and the line of appliances were cancelled—but no matter, because Quino had found his protagonist. The following year, “Mafalda,” now liberated from the task of selling washing machines and ovens, was published for the first time, in a Buenos Aires weekly called Primera Plana.

Isabella Cosse, a history professor at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín, in Buenos Aires, who wrote a book about “Mafalda” and its legacy, told me that although the strip was originally written for grownups, it wasn’t long before kids were reading it, too. “Those kids were sneaking into the adult world, guided by a little girl who made fun of the adults,” she said. “Mafalda” ’s combination of humor and social critique made it an immediate hit, and soon it was running daily in the newspaper El Mundo. Within four years of its début, the strip was syndicated in newspapers around Argentina, read by an estimated two million people each day. The first book-length collection of “Mafalda” was published in 1966, and sold more than forty thousand copies in its first three months—in Buenos Aires alone.

“Mafalda” wasn’t the only political cartoon of its day, but it was arguably the most specifically Argentinean, which was central to its appeal. The dialects, the concerns, the neighborhoods the characters lived in—it was all utterly recognizable to the middle-class Argentineans who made up “Mafalda” ’s most loyal audience. Mafalda’s father is quiet and unassuming, trudging to his job as a clerk at an insurance company and returning home to wage war on the ants that threaten his houseplants. Her mother is a homemaker, often overwhelmed by chores, whom Mafalda scolds for not having studied to become something more. But the adults are secondary characters. Mafalda’s universe is inhabited, primarily, by her friends: Manolito—the son of a Spanish immigrant who runs the neighborhood grocery store—who’s always scheming to make a buck; Felipe, an absent-minded romantic who hates school and loves cowboy movies; Susanita, a traditionalist who, to Mafalda’s horror, dreams, even at her young age, of one day becoming a wife and mother. Other characters later filled out Mafalda’s circle, including a little brother, Guille, and a short but mighty friend called Libertad, each new voice deepening Quino’s lucid portrait of the community.

But Mafalda, of course, was the star, and what set her apart was her engagement with the world. More than any of the others, she worries about the kinds of things that many parents want to protect their children from even noticing—poverty and war and repression—concerns that confuse her friends, often to comic effect. Quino’s political stance was general, a non-prescriptive discontent that his middle-class readership could get behind—or, at least, whose absurdity they could appreciate. In Mafalda’s universe, being forced to eat soup was a cruel imposition, a form of domestic authoritarianism. “Argentineans of my generation and younger tend to hate soup,” Liniers told me. “ ‘Mafalda’ put that little virus in our heads.” In one strip, Mafalda explains to Felipe that the war in Vietnam must be about sex—why else would her father get so tongue-tied when she asks him to explain it? Another sequence is drawn upside down, after Mafalda finds a globe and discovers that Argentina is in the Southern Hemisphere. Our ideas are falling out of our heads, she reasons, which must explain why Argentina is underdeveloped. In another set of panels, the kids announce that they’re playing a game called Government. “But don’t worry,” they reassure Mafalda’s mother. “We don’t actually do anything!” Later, when Mafalda is named President, the boys lead a coup against her—which she repels by throwing a chair and a book at them. The would-be usurpers are caught off guard. “Madame President!” Felipe complains. “That’s not how we do things in Argentina!”

Felipe—or, rather, Quino—was right. In the Argentina of “Mafalda” ’s time, coups were hardly uncommon, and were virtually always successful. There were five heads of state during the strip’s nine-year run and three military coups. The country’s most popular politician, Juan Domingo Perón, was exiled in Spain, his party banned. In 1966, when armed officers arrived to depose the democratically elected President Arturo Umberto Illia, he simply caught a ride outside the Presidential palace and rode across the city to his brother’s house. It was all so banal, Argentina’s democracy so fragile. The new general in charge, Juan Carlos Onganía, was different from previous military dictators in that he paid no lip service to an eventual return to democracy. Onganía promised nothing less than a new social order: a project of economic modernization marked by austerity, and a cultural policy that included censoring artists, attacking the autonomy of universities, banning miniskirts, and prohibiting long hair for men. Quino responded to the coup with a strip that eschewed the convention of a story broken into panels, drawing instead a single horizontal image: a closeup of Mafalda, her eyes downcast and fearful. “So,” she says, “those things they taught me in school . . .” The sentence trails off, but everyone who read “Mafalda” knew precisely what Quino was getting at.

Onganía’s rule lasted only a few years before he was deposed and replaced by another general, and soon the political chaos was matched by economic disruption. In 1971, a Buenos Aires magazine named Mafalda’s father “person of the year,” a symbol of a struggling middle class worn down by inflation, which that year surpassed thirty per cent. The economic malaise and the political and cultural repression made for a combustible mix; urban guerrilla movements, such as the Montoneros, were formed, further destabilizing the country through kidnappings, executions, bombings, and industrial vandalism. By 1972, Argentina was besieged by unprecedented political violence.

Quino was no radical, and Mafalda’s politics are simple enough—she’s a child, after all, and wants the sorts of things most children demand as a matter of course. Peace. Justice. Equality. But, as the country unravelled, her cutesy jokes came to feel almost antiquated, out of touch. Isabella Cosse writes that Quino was attacked both by the left (for being too bourgeois to offer a real critique of the political repression) and by the right (for being too friendly to subversive groups). The idyllic universe that Mafalda had lived in was falling apart; the fissures in Argentinean society had become too severe, too dangerous, and the time for making sarcastic cracks at those in power had passed. The last “Mafalda” strip was published on June 25, 1973, just days after Perón’s final return from eighteen years of exile. An estimated two million supporters gathered to welcome him near the Buenos Aires airport. A confrontation between warring factions left at least thirteen people dead and more than three hundred injured.

Quino, the creator of “Mafalda,” at his home in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2012.Photograph by Ricardo Ceppi / Getty

Perón died the following year, from complications of heart disease, at the age of seventy-eight, and his widow, Isabel Perón, was left in charge. When one of her ministers asked to use “Mafalda” in a publicity campaign, Quino refused. A few days later, armed men tried to enter his home. Quino wasn’t there, but the incident served as a warning. In 1976, a new military junta ousted the government, and soon the nightmare so many had dreaded was a reality. Quino left the country, living in a self-imposed exile for the better part of the next decade.

For much of the world, the deranged ferocity of Argentina’s state-sponsored terror in those years would be understood only when it was all over. In the mid-eighties, a detailed report of the horrors of the military rule estimated that about nine thousand people had been “disappeared” by the junta between 1976 and 1983, though it noted that the number was likely greater. (Current estimates are as high as thirty thousand.) Hundreds of clandestine detention centers were operating across the country. The human-rights organization Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo calculate that some five hundred children who were either born in detention or taken from their parents at the time of their arrest were then illegally adopted.