Mafalda, the ‘heroine of our time’ turns 60 wonderful years

International Editorial Staff, Sep 28 (EFE).- Mafalda, the ‘heroine of our time’ as Umberto Eco, her discoverer for Europe, called her, turns 60 wonderful years this Sunday without having lost any of its freshness or its validitywith a humor that remains as incisive today as when its first strip was published, on September 29, 1964.

Mafalda first saw the light of day in the weekly magazine ‘Primera Plana’. From the leftover strips of a frustrated advertising campaign emerged an intelligent, feminist and rebellious young woman in a time that, as its author, Joaquín Salvador Lavado ‘Quino’, pointed out in 2014, continues to be very similar to the current one “because of the disasters that continue to be committed.” the human being.

Six months after its first appearance, a daily strip began to be published in the newspaper ‘El Mundo’ and the first album was released on Christmas 1966. The copies were sold out in two days.

To the characters of Mafalda and her father, who were the protagonists of the first strips, Quino added the absurd Felipe, the brute Manolito, the old woman Susanita, the good Miguelito or the funny Guille, who formed with the girl who hated soup, a group with wisdom much greater than that of adults.

Because, as Gabriel García Márquez said, Quino showed us with each of his books “that children are the repositories of wisdom.”

«The bad thing for the world is that as they grow up they lose the use of reason, they forget in school what they knew at birth, they marry without love, they work for money, they brush their teeth, they cut their nails , and in the end, turned into miserable adults, they drown not in a glass of water but in a bowl of soup. Verifying this in each of Quino’s books is what is most similar to happiness: quinotherapy,” added the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The peculiar sense of humor of the rebellious Argentine girl jumped across the pond in 1969 and arrived in Italy with the help of Umberto Eco, editor of a book in whose presentation she said: “Since our children are preparing to be – by our choice – a multitude of Mafaldas, it will not be imprudent to treat Mafalda with the respect that a royal character deserves.

It would arrive in Spain in 1970, through the efforts of Esther Tusquets, to the Lumen publishing house, which this year published the eleven compilation volumes of Mafalda’s cartoons, both in Spanish territory and in a large part of Latin America, while in Argentina it was in charge Flower Editions.

In the almost ten years that Quino kept the character alive, he published 2,000 strips, which were translated into more than 20 languages. Until 1973 he thought it was beginning to repeat itself and closed the Mafalda stage.

Despite this, the character has remained alive among children and adults of subsequent generations, as demonstrated by the jury that awarded the cartoonist the 2014 Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities.

In its minutes, the jury highlighted Quino’s work as the creation of the universe of Mafalda, “a girl who perceives the complexity of the world from the simplicity of childish eyes.”

Mafalda, he said, «is intelligent, ironic, nonconformist, rebellious and sensitive. He dreams of a more dignified, fair and respectful world with human rights” and his lucid messages “are still valid for having wisely combined the simplicity of the drawing with the depth of his thought.”

A clear example are some of his phrases: “Stop the world, I want to get off!!!”; «The problem is that there are more interested people than interesting people»; «Mom, when you met Dad, did you feel like you were being devoured by the flames of passion or were you just beginning to feel something?»; «Soup is to childhood what communism is to democracy!» or “What have some poor southerners done to deserve certain northerners?”

A philosophy that has gained millions of followers around the world, who have read and reread all the occurrences of this little girl from Buenos Aires. The best summary was given by Julio Cortázar: «It is not important what I think about Mafalda. “The important thing is what Mafalda thinks of me.”

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