Mafalda, the rebellious and curious girl who loves democracy and world peace and hates soup, arrived on Thursday at 56 years old. On March 15, 1962, the Argentine graphic humorist Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón (Quino) created the character that would dazzle with more than one generation of admirers from Latin America and Europe.
That year of 1962 the first book of compilation of graphic jokes titled Mundo Quino was published and the Mafalda cartoon was created. Two years later, the little girl appeared in the weekly Primera Plana and in 1965 in the newspaper El Mundo de España. In 1966 Mafalda appeared as a book and the edition sold out in two days.
In 1968 it was published for the first time in Italy. A year later the writer and semiologist Umberto Eco made the presentation of the book Mafalda the contestataria. Eco even said that he "loved the character" very much.
In 1971 the cartoon began to circulate as an animated series. Quino tried to leave but the story had already taken hold. It was in 1973 when he stopped drawing it. With the insightful questions and sharp comments of this eternally six-year-old feminist babe with entrenched values of equality, you can take a walk through Latin American and world history.
Mafalda is very popular in Latin America in general, as well as in some European countries: Spain, France, Greece and Italy. It has been translated into more than thirty languages. The name was taken from the film Dar la cara (1962), based on David Viñas's novel of the same name, where there is a baby named so, which seemed cheerful
to Quino
"I have no idea what it would be like now, because for me it's a little drawing. There are people who get angry: how a little doll ?, if it accompanied me all my life. "
Quino