Quino, creator of Mafalda, dies: 6 surprising things about the character and the Argentine cartoonist

But do you really know Mafalda? You probably know that she hates soup and that she loves the Beatles and the woodpecker. And what else?

BBC News Mundo (the BBC’s Spanish service) lists other less known information from readers of the most challenging girl in Latin American comics.

The girl who reflected so much on capitalism, the economy and the world order is the result of that same consumer society.

Immediately after the publication of the book Quino World In 1963, his first book of graphic humor, Joaquín Lavado was asked to design a family of characters to promote Siam Di Tella’s Mansfield appliances in a newspaper strip. All with names beginning with M.

The girl was called Mafalda, in honor of one of the characters in the novel To faceby David Viñas.

The idea was to create a story about a family that used the brand’s products to offer them free to newspapers and magazines.

But the advertising campaign never saw the light and Quino left her baby in the drawer.

A few months later, however, when Quino was asked to publish a comic strip about Primera Plana. Mafalda finally made it to the paper newspaper, beginning her “career”.

Little was known about Mafalda’s family home, except that he lived with his younger brother Guille and his parents in department E, in a building where his friend Felipe also lived.

But not everyone outside of Buenos Aires knows that this building existed, and still exists, in the San Telmo neighborhood, on Calle Chile 371, very close to Quino’s house.

“Mafalda lived here,” says a sign honoring the building.

Quino was also inspired by a friend’s father’s bakery to design Don Manolo’s warehouse.

Today, at the corner of Chile and Defensa streets, a life-size sculpture of Mafalda awaits the arrival of tourists sitting on a bench. The work has become one of the main tourist attractions in the city.

– I’ll explain it to you: millibars are a measure of pressure. Depending on the atmosphere, it can be said that there is pressure of so many milli….

– I’m sorry dad, I asked you about the millibars, not about the military – Mafalda answers.

The always critical Mafalda never went down well for some sectors.

In Spain, the censorship of the Franco dictatorship (1936-75) forced publishers to put a notice on the cover of Mafalda’s first book saying that it was a work “for adults.”

Mafalda also had problems with censorship in other countries, such as Brazil, Chile and Bolivia.

“I had it from the beginning,” says Quino of censoring his early work as a graphic comedian.

“They told me, ‘Boy, no jokes against the family, no military, no nudity. I was born with self-censorship. ‘

Mafalda’s best friend, Felipe, loves fantasies, assuming the identity of the Lone Knight and putting off homework as long as possible.

But perhaps what defines Felipe the most are his physical characteristics: rabbit teeth, long face and wild hair.

These features are the same as those of the Argentine journalist Jorge Timossi, who worked for the Cuban agency Prensa Latina and was a friend of Quino.

“When I was in Algeria, Mafalda’s first notebook fell on me,” Timossi told Peru21 in an interview before he died in 2011.

“I saw him and I thought. This seems familiar to me. Shortly after, in Chile, I got his address and sent him a card on which I put: Quino, confess, son of a bitch … And I received an answer by mail. Poster with Felipito that said: “I just have to be who I am.”

Quino’s character is everywhere. And not just in books translated into more than 30 languages, including English, Italian, French, Hebrew, German, Guarani, and Korean.

In the neighborhood of Colegiales, in Buenos Aires, there is a Mafalda square. In San Telmo, as mentioned above, there is a sculpture of the girl made by the artist Pablo Irrgang.

In the subway station of Peru, in the Argentine capital, there is a mural “The world according to Mafalda.” Thousands of kilometers away, in another metro station, Argentina, in Paris, Mafalda carefully observes a mural of Argentine personalities from science, politics and the arts, such as Jorge Luis Borges.

Despite the enormous success he had with the character, Quino resisted fame.

For years he hung a sign in his office that read: “For reasons of shyness, reports of any kind are not accepted.”

“I chose the drawing because it is difficult for me to speak,” he admitted in an interview.

In another, she said she had decided that her protagonist should be a woman because of the influence of the women’s emancipation movement of the 1960s and because “women are smarter.”

For almost a decade, Quino published a total of 1,928 strips starring Mafalda.

His popular drawings of the girl with forward thinking have also been collected into books, and these have been equally successful.

On June 25, 1973, Quino decided enough was enough and published his latest story about Mafalda, her parents, her younger brother Guille, and her close friends Felipe, Susanita, Miguelito, and Manolito, among others.

Years later, he would say that making a character strip “is a very big slavery” and he portrayed himself dressed as a prisoner with drawings instead of stripes.

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