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The artist Joaquín Salvador Lavado, known worldwide for creating the cartoon character Mafalda, died this Wednesday in Argentina. The news of Quino’s death, as he was known as an artist, was confirmed by his editor, Daniel Divinsky, on the social network Twitter. He was 88 years old and in recent times he was in a wheelchair and had moved away from the center of attention. He lived in Mendoza, the city where he was born and settled in 2017 after the death of his wife, the Italian-born chemical engineer Alicia Colombo.
Quino died. All the good people in the country and in the world will mourn it.
– Daniel Divinsky (@ DanielDivi1) September 30, 2020
He was the “most international graphic humorist and most translated into the Spanish language,” wrote the The country. “There is no generation at this time, in dozens of countries, that does not mourn the loss of one of the most translated Argentine authors, along with Borges, Sabato and Cortázar,” added the Argentine newspaper. The nation. “That Mafalda was left orphaned inconsolably, is now the saddest commonplace in the world.”
Through the dissatisfied Mafalda, a six-year-old girl from the Argentine middle class, a fan of the Beatles and pancakes, always reluctant to eat soup, Quino conveyed her existential anxieties and criticism of social injustices, she recalled. Folha de S. Paulo. Mafalda was concerned about the direction of humanity and peace in the world. And the author too.
This and other Quino characters were guided by black and corrosive humor about social and political realities. The effects of the Spanish Civil War and World War II and the political debates he overheard at home between his Communist grandmother and his Republican parents had marked him. “Created between the duel and the wars, it seems to move between a burning sensitivity for the suffering of the weak and an open disgust for any kind of power,” a reporter from the The country, who visited him in 2014.
He has sold millions of books around the world and his cartoons are translated into more than thirty languages, including English, Portuguese, French and Japanese. Mafalda, A Contestatária It was Quino’s first album published in Portugal, under the Don Quijote Publications label, in 1972. This same book had a first Italian edition with a preface by the philosopher Umberto Eco, who was among the admirers of the character.
Joaquín Salvador Lavado was born on July 17, 1932 in Mendoza, next to the Andes. His parents, Cesário and Antonia, were Spanish and by 1919 they had emigrated from Fuengirola, in Malaga (Andalusia), to Argentina. As a child he decided that he wanted to be a cartoonist, when he saw how to draw a guy designer graphic who lived in the same house. The family was paid, the father worked as a waiter, there were two more brothers.
Quino didn’t like playing soccer or hanging out with the girls, and he didn’t watch television either. Reserved and alone, he spent his childhood days drawing on the kitchen table, literally on the table. Many Syrian-Lebanese, Italian and Spanish immigrants lived in the city. But he “never let real-world stimuli waste a lot of time,” he said. The nation.
He was interested in an imaginary and childish world, the place where everything is possible. “Every time I put my shoes on and felt them squeeze me, I was overcome with enormous despair. I didn’t want to be big. I thought it was terrible. When we are little, it is others who take care of us, ”he once said. “Old age sucks and is very scary. I give old age a political meaning. It is as if Pinochet fell on him and began to prohibit things: not this, not even that, ”he said in 2014.
In the first years of school, the obligation to draw maps, rivers or the human body corresponded to a moment of joy at the possibility of putting into practice what he liked the most. But between the ages of 10 and 18, she lost her mother (with cancer) and father (heart attack) and didn’t even finish high school. He attended a course in fine arts, but dropped out without finishing. He already had a vocation for genius, as if he had spent years being corrected and molded in formal instruction. The rigor of the filigree that would accompany it was also provided by the authors he most admired: Sempé, Jean-Maurice Bosc, Harvec, Faizant, Claude Serre or Chaval, wrote the Argentine press.
He left Mendoza at age 22 and went to Buenos Aires, after a first attempt that lasted a short time. “I lived in boarding houses, with three guys in a room, with a lot of prostitution. I was very impressed. It was very strange for me. Shortly after I met Alicia, who was friends with a cousin’s girlfriend. But for five or six years we were friends, it did not occur to us that we could be together, “he said in an interview. They got married in 1960 and spent their honeymoon in Rio de Janeiro.
The first drawings published in 1954 in the magazine This is. The character of Mafalda emerged in the early 60s, due to a publicity work. He had found work as a publicist and, in that capacity, he was commissioned to newspaper comic strips to show a family using Mandsfield appliances, a name that gave rise to “Mafalda” because of its phonetic proximity. The strips were rejected by the newspapers as an advertisement too similar to the comics they used to publish.
Quino would finally get Mafalda back a short time later, no longer with any publicity purpose. The first story came out in 1964 in the magazine. Front page, from Buenos Aires. He continued to publish strips of Mafalda until 1973: in the magazine Seven days, on June 25, 1973 the last one came out, exactly 1,928 strips later. He said he was out of stock because of tight deadlines in the newspapers. The character was already eternal.
In recent years, he reported Folha de S. Paulo, Mafalda was adopted by the Argentine feminist movements, with the support of the artist himself, and was even used in campaigns in favor of the legalization of abortion.
In interviews in the 90s, he even said that the end point of Mafalda’s stories was due not only to her own will, but to political pressure. “If I kept drawing, they could have shot me,” he said. At the beginning of the 1970s, with Isabelita Perón in the presidency, Argentina lived on iron and fire, with the persecution of artists and intellectuals and a deep economic and social crisis, which led to the dictatorship of 1976-83. During that same period, Quino and his wife went into exile in Milan.
Without Mafalda, Quino dedicated himself to other works, many times at the service of causes: UNICEF campaigns, the Red Cross and later the Argentine government itself. Between 1989 and 2006 he designed for the Sunday magazine of the Buenos Aires newspaper Clarion. He retired, ill, with glaucoma.
He received the official order of the French Legion of Honor, the La Catrina Caricature Award, from the Guadalajara Book Fair, in 2003; and the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, in 2014. Until 2017 he lived in Buenos Aires, in a small apartment in the Barrio Norte.
“The walls are full of drawings of friends – REP, Crist, Fontanarrosa -, diplomas and various awards. Behind his desk is a bookcase with art books, the glass doors covered with drawings and photos. His wrist trembles a little and he seems to have a somewhat stiff leg, but when he speaks his voice is firm and, behind the glasses, his eyes are clearly focused on the eyes of the interlocutor, ”he said. The country, who visited him six years ago.
Pablo Iglesias, deputy prime minister of Spain, reacted to the death of “the great Quino, Mafalda’s father and thousands of stories that made us smile and think.” Ireno Montero, Minister of Equality of Spain, echoed the words of Iglesias, saying: “The other creations of Mafalda and Quino have always accompanied us, helping us to laugh and think. And they will never stop doing it. “
For many, Mafalda and the rest of Quino’s creations have always accompanied us, helping us to laugh and reflect. And they will never stop. Thank you very much and goodbye, Quino. pic.twitter.com/b1ZxRWFr6M
– Irene Montero (@IreneMontero) September 30, 2020
In recognition of Quino’s work, the Royal Spanish Academy also published a message on Twitter this Wednesday afternoon, highlighting the fact that he was “one of the most international designers in the Spanish language”, whose “right words traveled between both sides of the Atlantic ”.
Quino, creator of the unforgettable Mafalda and one of the most international cartoonists in Spanish, has left us. His accurate words traveled to both sides of the Atlantic thanks to his cartoons and his peculiar sense of humor. pic.twitter.com/bh7tG1uw4Y
– RAE (@RAEinforma) September 30, 2020
The renowned Argentine designer Miguel Rep wrote this Wednesday on social networks that Quino was a second father for him. And vice president Cristina Kirchner paid tribute to the artist with an “always, teacher.” The Argentine philosopher José Pablo Feinmann wrote in the newspaper Page 12 that Mafalda was “drawn literature” and that the author’s drawings “are obsessively worked masterpieces.”
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