The English language has long been against the character of the comics tapes Mafalda, who is very popular in the atmosphere of Hispanic-Latin culture, loved by millions of readers, old and young, who re-read her works around the world from 1964 until today. The comic tape of which she is the star is considered the best-selling and most translated film in Latin American history. Some of her collage drawings waited until 2005 to appear in Shakespeare (translated by Andrew Graham Jolle), although much earlier they had been translated into 25 living languages, including several dialects of Chinese. When asked about the reason for this, the Argentine publisher of Mafalda replied that his agent in the United States had always complained that Mafalda was “too complex for children in North America to understand.”
In fact, this cartoon character created by the Andalusian-Argentinian artist Joaquin Salvador Lavado Tijuan (1932-2020) famous by his literary name Quino, as a 6-year-old riot with her innocent black hair, innocent round eyes and a broad smile, is already posing – as the little girls in each Makan – Very embarrassing questions for adults. “What would you be like if you had a life?” She says to her mother, who is overwhelmed by the washing process, and to her father: “How is it possible in the father’s family that children want to become parents too?” But this cynical critique of the logic of middle-class social life, condensed into short biting questions by the little boy close to the heart, was only one of the many spaces of flogging coup militaries, capitalist consumerism, male patriarchs, and institutions of the official religion. Quino excelled in including short comic strips. Mafalda is a character, crossing ages, cultures, classes, and times.
Mafalda at the time of her appearance in the daily newspapers (1964-1973) was ahead of her time, a left-wing thinker, feminist and environmental activist, through which Quino captured the spirit of an entire generation that was ravaged by the waves of political and economic turmoil during the American right-wing military coups in the 1960s and 1970s. Other characters have followed her to appear in the same tapes, each carrying extremely complex symbolism. Quino excels in presenting a simple innocence close to his famous star. Take, for example, Liberated (meaning freedom, which is Mafalda’s short friend’s name). Quinoo also painted it because “people often forget freedom and think it is simple,” while her pet is a turtle called “bureaucracy.” When they asked her why this particular name, she said she needed some time to come up with an answer, but that she did not know exactly how much time. So we just have to wait. Mafalda has a reputation for being intolerant to eating soup, which was a metaphor for the daily rubbish that the ruling elite’s media mouthful of the citizens.
The day after the military coup in Argentina in 1966, Mafalda appeared in the comic strip of “El Mundo”, with a few words scattered from her mouth as she said: “… But…, what they taught me about in school…” Then she was silent. Fortunately for Quino, that famous and incomplete sentence that later became Mafalda’s way of expressing contempt and disapproval of what is happening around her was picked up by honest readers alone, without the coup generals realizing its significance or else they would have shot him in the head as they did to thousands of intellectuals and students Or, hide it forever.
Quino’s talent started to show early. He was greatly influenced by his uncle, who was a painter who adopted him as a teenager after the death of his parents, who were from Andalusia, and who were Republicans who emigrated to a forgotten town on the outskirts of the state of Mendoza in Argentina. He moved to Buenos Aires in the 1950’s with a dream of becoming a cartoonist and enrolled in a fine arts school. There is a religious law to draw caricatures full of irony and humor for local newspapers and magazines. Mafalda was the beginning of a character he created in 1963 to advertise home appliances that he was commissioned and not approved by the advertiser at the time. However, he reintroduced it in a 1964 comic strip to become an instant hit. Those tapes that were created by the American press and became essential for daily newspapers in all the Americas – including Argentina – were the inspiration for Quino, who was influenced by Charles Schultz’s famous comic strip featuring the scathing character of Peanuts. However, Mafalda was distinguished by its carrying the concerns and preoccupations of ordinary middle-class people, its oppressive political content, its bias against capitalism and corrupt elites, and always with a few words but burdened with metaphors. Quino has had a deep culture, tremendous cash potential and unparalleled ability to capture people’s moods with much kindness and tenderness. As if he is “a wise man of 10 years and a child at the same time.” Many of the ironic jokes that Mafalda made about the economic and political conditions in Argentina are still as if they were drawn yesterday, just as we read in the Arab world the cartoons of the great artist Naji Al-Ali these days, and we are renewed by surprise every time about how this man who has been absent for decades painted a handful – a character His famous drawings – as if he lives with us today and tells an angry irony about our bitter current reality.
Mafalda at the time she appeared in the newspapers (1964-1973) was ahead of her time, a left-wing thinker, feminist and environmental activist.
Sadly, Mafalda’s great hope for world peace – as she dreamed of becoming a UN interpreter – has never been fulfilled. Quino stopped drawing her comic strip in 1973, after it was no longer possible for him to pass more of the vaulted messages without risking his personal safety. He fled Argentina in 1976 with his wife (and business manager) after his publisher, Daniel Devinsky and Coco Miller – for publishing books that compiled Mafalda tapes – were arrested by the new junta. He settled in Milan (Italy), and stayed there until the fall of the fascist military rule in 1983. He said in a press interview once, “If Mafalda had stayed after the 1976 coup, I would have been hidden as tens of thousands of young men who were tortured and killed, and their traces were concealed by the intelligence-backed regime. American Central ». It seems that he felt that the Argentinians never forgave him for leaving Mafalda and her friends, but he stood by his decision, and painted Mafalda exceptional only to support UNICEF, and to protest the assassination of the cartoonists of the satirical French magazine “Charlie Hebdo”.
After Quino’s return to Argentina, he continued his satirical drawing, introducing new characters, including a bewildered little man trying in vain to understand the meaning of an increasingly hostile world. But Mafalda opposed him and remained the most important and famous, and turned into an animation tape (of which two seasons were released), and for its translated editions it was presented by giants of thought such as Umberto Eco, Julio Cortasar and Eric Hobsbawm. Edison de la Fleur, a small Argentine publishing house whose directors were arrested in 1976, and Quino remained loyal to them, rejecting fictional offers from major international publishing houses. On his death, a new edition of Mafalda’s complete works was released. It was exhausted within two days, while the Argentine Republic declared mourning. The public flags were flown at half-mast. After officially retiring in 2006, Quino was awarded the prestigious “Prince of Asturias Prize” for his entirety, and thus he is perhaps the only cartoonist to have an asteroid officially registered in his name in his honor (since 1999, asteroid number 27178). With the exception of his (technical) daughter Mafalda, he did not give birth and stayed with his wife Alicia for 57 years, during which they never separated until she died before him in 2017.
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