We were, like her, Beatles fans, soup haters, We were worried about the Vietnam War and the atomic bombs with which the powers of that bipolar world were threatened.
We slept with Felipe, with Brigitte Bardot, with being famous astronauts; we played western cowboys, we got angry with Susanita and Manolitowe were filled with tenderness with Miguelito and Guille and we rebelled with Libertad, so explicitly small.
Who does not remember the stick of denting ideologies, the turtle “bureaucracy”, the country “In The pending” and so many geniuses of Don Joaquín Lavado, who confessed to the comedians and cartoonists Rep and Tute in separate reports that The soup rejected with disgust by Mafalda was nothing more than an allegory of the dictatorship pompously called “Argentine Revolution”, which devastated the country between 1966 and 1973?
It all had started in 1963 when a creative from the Agnes advertising agency, Norman Briski – yes, the great actor – called Quino at the suggestion of his friend Miguel Brascó, to create a comic that reflected the life of a middle class family Argentina for the Mansfield line of appliances.
But the campaign did not materialize and the cartoonist from Mendoza kept the idea and the eight strips he had made.
A few months passed and he received another call, this time from Julián Delgado, who at that time was the editorial secretary of the successful weekly. Front pagewho coincidentally I asked him for a comic book and there the idea of family was resurrected. and the strip began to be published.
The name Mafalda had sounded good to Quino, which he had heard in the film version of the novel. To faceby David Viñas, directed by Jose Martinez Suarez.
A princess name
In a scene in the film, a baby cries and the character played by Pablo Moret asks what her name is.
Nuria Torray responds: “Mafalda, princess name.”
A clear reference to the famous ocean liner Principessa Mafalda, which sank on October 27, 1927 off the coast of Bahia, in Brazil, leaving more than 300 dead.
And finally Mafalda showed her unmistakable face on September 29, 1964in the famous magazine Front page, one of the most influential political weeklies of the time. Then it would appear on the back cover of the newspaper The world.
From that stage is the strip of a single frame in which Mafalda is seen worried saying “So? “That thing they taught me in school?”
It was June 29, 1966 and The girl wondered about her future and that of her compatriots who had just suffered, the day before, a new civic-military coup.this time headed by General Juan Carlos Onganía.
Then I would turn to the last page of one of the most read weeklies of the late 60s and early 70s, Seven days.
The strips became part of annual books published initially by the Jorge Álvarez publishing house and then by Ediciones de La Flor, which We were all looking forward to the end of the year with the Patoruzú’s gold album and that of El Tony to accompany us on our vacations.
The ideas of this Argentinian woman who is as ingenious as she is irreverent, as thoughtful as she is rebellious, They toured the world translated into 26 languagesfrom Japanese, Italian and Portuguese, to Greek, French and Dutch.
Mafalda’s message continues to maintain the same dose of genius and, above all, topicality today.
The beloved writer Julio Cortázar responded to a journalist: “It is not important what I think of Mafalda. “The important thing is what Mafalda thinks of me.”
