Mafalda (cartoon character)
Mafalda is a cartoon character by the Argentine cartoonist Quino .
Creation and publication
In 1963 Quino was commissioned by his publisher to invent a comic figure that was a mixture of the Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz and Blondie by the American illustrator Chic Young . Quino then created the little girl Mafalda. Mafalda first appeared on September 29, 1964 as a comic strip in the weekly Primera Plana . From then on, Mafalda's stories were published regularly, starting March 9, 1965, daily in the Argentine newspaper El Mundo . When El Mundo was discontinued on December 22, 1967, Mafalda moved to the weekly Siete Días in 1968 . 1973 the Mafalda episodes were discontinued. The stories were later published again in comic books.
In 1974, one year after the end of the Mafalda magazine series and after 11 volumes were published (the original series starts with Volume 0, so Volume 10 is the 11th), the last Mafalda volume was published. In 1977 Quino drew Mafalda and her friends again: At the request of the UNICEF children's aid organization , an edition was created for the Children's Rights Campaign . In 1978 Quino received a prize for this at the Festival of International Humor in Bordighera / Italy . In 1988 he was awarded the Max and Moritz Prize of the International Comics Salon Erlangen for the Mafalda series as the best foreign comic strip. In 2009, in the presence of Quino, a life-size Mafalda statue was inaugurated in front of his former home in Buenos Aires, which the artist Pablo Irrgang had created for the city of Buenos Aires. At the same time, a plaque was placed on the house with the words “Aquí vivió Mafalda” (Mafalda lived here).
Mafalda has been translated into at least 26 languages, including Spanish Spanish, which differs slightly from Argentine Spanish in terms of vocabulary as well as pronunciation and spelling. Also in Chinese , Finnish , French , Greek , Italian , Japanese , Catalan , Dutch , Norwegian , Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese , Taiwanese , Swedish and German .
content
Mafalda is a middle- class girl from Argentina who is very precocious (in the first volume she has not yet started school, so around 5 years old, in the last around 8 years). She stands up for world peace, justice, democracy and the women's movement and is always a bit smarter than her parents in terms of ideology. Mafalda loves the Beatles and hates soup . Her little brother Guille [ gi'ʃe̞ ] (abbreviation of Guillermo = Wilhelm ) is the only one who embodies the passage of time by growing up and learning to walk and speak. Judging by the urban atmosphere, Mafalda lives in Buenos Aires and attends a state school (recognizable by the typical school smock). At the beginning she befriends Felipe, Manolito and Susanita, later Miguelito and Libertad join them. Mafalda shares most interests with Felipe, who plays chess, but later develops into a self-doubting pessimist . The somewhat simple Manolito has to constantly help out in his father's grocery store (an immigrant from Spain) and is therefore only good at arithmetic at school. He dreams of one day being the owner of a large retail chain . The chatty Susanita, on the other hand, sees her happiness in marrying rich and becoming a mother; she embodies a bourgeois immigrant family who cultivates unreflective prejudices against poverty and against "blacks" ( Negros , as members of the lower class are called in Argentina).