"Mafalda" inventor Quino is dead: Too smart for this world

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"Mafalda": the curious child who wants to know everything

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ANDRES LARROVERE / AFP

In 1964, a girl character entered the world of global comic culture who was so progressive that it was not until decades later that he would find an equal successor in Lisa Simpson.

Mafalda lived in Buenos Aires with her parents, was of elementary school age and almost always wore a thick bow in her hair.

Above all, however, she was far too clever for this world: Mafalda, who dreamed of later working for the UN and who had a crush on the Beatles, was preoccupied with the women's movement, nuclear wars and hunger in the third world.

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Quino comic strip in which Mafalda calls for world peace

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Joaquín S. Lavado (Quino) / Caminito Literary Agency

That's why she regularly bombarded her parents with questions that sounded simple, but had big implications.

Mafalda presented it with the attitude of the curious child who wants to know everything, not with a pre-made moral judgment in mind.

Mom and Dad, turned towards, but also annoyed and hopelessly overwhelmed, knew that they didn't even have a good answer for their daughter, they simply had no answer at all.

One of the best Mafalda moments is when she asks her father to explain the Vietnam War to her;

he says in a sense: "I could do that, but you wouldn't understand it. It's not a problem for children."

She ponders.

And then asks: "What if you leave out the pornographic parts?"

"Life is beautiful. The bad thing is that many people confuse 'beautiful' with 'simple'."

Mafalda

The Argentine cartoonist Quino, who has now died at the age of 88, drew the short Mafalda comic strips for only nine years.

Because they so successfully mixed humor, philosophy and world politics and Quino was also a skilled draftsman, they made him known around the world.

The short comic strips have been translated into more than 30 languages.

Umberto Eco once said that Mafalda was "a heroine of our time", the "Peanuts" inventor Charles M. Schulz, with whom Quino has often been compared, called the Argentine draftsman "a giant".

In Germany today many people know Mafalda, but in the Spanish-speaking part of the world everyone knows.

Mafalda drawings have become memes, their precocious sayings into everyday wisdom that have timeless validity: "Life is beautiful. The bad thing is that many mistake 'beautiful' for 'simple'."

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Quino in 2014: He only resurrected Mafalda for individual occasions

Photo: David Fernandez / picture alliance / dpa

The fact that Mafalda broke politics down to everyday situations so smartly, that she never let go of world affairs, was probably also due to the biography of the illustrator Quino.

Quino - real Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón - was born to Andalusian parents in Mendoza, Argentina, a few years before the Spanish Civil War.

His parents died early, Quino studied at the art academy and began his career with comic strips.

The big breakthrough came in 1964 with the Mafalda drawings, which first appeared in an Argentine magazine.

In 1973 Mafalda fell silent again.

Quino later said: "After the coup in Chile, the situation in Latin America became very bloody."

And further, about the pressure and the purges of the new military dictatorships: "If I had drawn them on, they would have shot me once, or four times."

In 1976, when the military put on a coup in Argentina and President Isabel Perón was removed from office, Quino went to Italy and later to Spain.

He continued to draw, but Mafalda and her friends - the merchant's son Manolito, a child-friendly parody of a cliché capitalist, or the blonde Susanita, who preferred to play with dolls, dreamed of a husband and stood as an alternative to Mafalda's girl type - he only allowed Resurrect on individual occasions.

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Quino comic characters on a wall in Buenos Aires: Mafalda's friends also always acted as personifications of currently debated ideologies

Photo: Martin Zabala / picture alliance / dpa

Mafalda turned 50 in 2014. Quino, who suffered from glaucoma, had already largely withdrawn as a draftsman because his eyesight had deteriorated.

In an interview he said at the time, a man in a wheelchair and with glasses who exuded the mixture of seriousness and humor that his comic strips also made: "The day on which people notice that my drawings do not feature any of the new technologies are something unknown to me, (...) this is the day when interest in my characters will fade. " 

The interviewer objects that Mafalda and her friends are still very popular, so not much has changed.

Quino replies with a fateful sentence that could also come from a Mafalda strip: "We just keep making the same mistakes."

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