The Six-Year-Old Who Explained the World
Mafalda, the Argentine comic strip heroine, took on war, dictatorship and her parents.
MAY 20, 2025
In 1964, Argentina’s left-wing weekly Primera Plana introduced its readers to somebody who would become a national icon. She would question social norms and slyly challenge the government, even in times of great repression. She’d survive General Juan Carlos Onganía’s coup in 1966 and the four-year civil-military dictatorship that followed, though in 1973, as political unrest and violence rose again, she’d go silent. Nevertheless, her fame spread and she garnered admiration and love throughout the world. Her name was Mafalda, and she was — and remains — six years old.
Quino drew Mafalda as a quintessential ’60s child in Mary Janes and bobby socks, a bow perched on her enormous head, but he jammed that head full of grown-up concerns: hyperinflation, the global ripple effects of North American consumerism and the Vietnam War.
Mafalda is the eponymous heroine of a comic strip by the cartoonist and illustrator Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón, who published as Quino. She lives in Buenos Aires with her parents, whom she torments when she’s not occupied with her friends or the news. Mafalda’s central conceit is its protagonist’s obsession with the state of Argentina and the world. She’s constantly listening to the radio and studying her surroundings, trying to understand what’s going on and why it’s so disappointing. In one early strip, she and her friend Felipe turn on the news, hoping to hear about the NASA Mariner that’s just landed on Mars. “Isn’t it amazing to think there’s life on other planets?” Felipe asks. But instead of talking about Mars, the news reports, “Carpet bombing North Vietnam. Geneva: No progress on treaty for nuclear disarmament. Jordan: Ongoing gun battles with Israeli…” Mafalda says dispiritedly to Felipe, “What’s amazing would be finding intelligent life on this planet!”
What she means, really, is intelligent adult life. Grown-ups let Mafalda down at every turn — not an unusual experience for a cartoon character, of course, but what sets Mafalda apart is that Quino didn’t write it for children, though many have read and loved it over the years. Quino drew Mafalda as a quintessential ’60s child in Mary Janes and bobby socks, a bow perched on her enormous head, but he jammed that head full of grown-up concerns: hyperinflation, the global ripple effects of North American consumerism and the Vietnam War. Crucially, he didn’t give Mafalda a sophisticated understanding of these issues, but let her interpret them more or less like a real six-year-old would. As a result, Mafalda is at its core a conversation between Quino and his adult readers, a discussion of how we got so unsatisfactory and whether we can change. Some of Mafalda’s worries, like Argentine brain drain in the 1960s, may belong to her place and time. Likewise, a child in 2025, confronted with a plate of unwelcome spinach, wouldn’t imagine how peaceful the world would have been if Karl Marx hadn’t eaten his greens to grow up big and strong. But Mafalda’s wish for intelligent life remains more than relevant today, as she makes her debut in the English-speaking world, courtesy of translation-focused publisher Archipelago Books.
The strip’s running gag is that its heroine is too political. She knows far more than any six-year-old should, and she uses that knowledge to skewer grown-up cowardice and complacency.
Though Mafalda has been translated into some 25 languages, including Chinese, Hebrew and Guaraní, it has until now had almost no presence in the Anglosphere. Rumor has it that the comic was never translated into English during the Cold War because Mafalda (or Quino) was too opposed to American intervention in Vietnam. In the 2000s, an Argentine indie press released a partial translation that didn’t have global distribution. Jill Schoolman, who runs Archipelago, discovered Mafalda on a trip to Buenos Aires in 2011 and began trying to get English-language rights to the comic — a labor of love that took until late 2022. Once she had succeeded, she commissioned Frank Wynne, a translator with a background in comics and graphic novels, to render all of Mafalda into English. (He’d done a little bit of it decades ago for fun, even lettering his translation into Quino’s drawings himself.) Wynne’s complete Mafalda will appear in five volumes, the first of which comes out this June.
Unfortunately, the timing is great for American readers. Mafalda’s character-defining question to her father — “Can you explain why humanity is a disaster?” — is one I ask myself every day as I read the news. If Quino, who died in 2020, were still alive and drawing Mafalda, it seems fair to say Mafalda would be incensed. The strip’s running gag is that its heroine is too political. She knows far more than any six-year-old should, and she uses that knowledge to skewer grown-up cowardice and complacency. In the strips that make up the inaugural Archipelago Mafalda, Quino’s heroine demands, over and over, that adults do a better job both explaining and occupying the world. Her questions, funny and often unsettling, are endless — and they push her adult readers to contemplate the equally endless, terrifying and vital job of answering.
Mafalda wasn’t born to be political. She was supposed to be an ad. Quino began drawing her, or a character much like her, in 1963 at the request of a home appliance company that was hoping to sell its products using a cartoon about a typical Argentine family. The project didn’t work out, but it got Quino, then 31, thinking about what he could do with a comic set in a middle-class home.
Mafalda was a catch for Primera Plana, then a new magazine. In a note that its editors wrote to accompany the comic’s debut, they call Quino “the most brilliant cartoonist of his generation” and explain that they’d been courting him for over a year, since before the magazine’s launch. In Mafalda: A Social and Political History of Latin America’s Global Comic, the Uruguayan social historian Isabella Cosse explains that Quino resisted Primera Plana’s overtures until “he was sure he could deliver something different from his usual work: a comic strip almost mirroring real life, peopled by an intellectually precocious little girl — Mafalda — and her unique universe of family and friends.”
Many things offend Mafalda, and when she’s upset her mouth takes over her entire face, becoming a gaping, bean-shaped void wailing about war, or adult uselessness, or the fact that she was born on Earth when there might be “more advanced worlds out there.”
The first Archipelago Mafalda volume contains the strips published in Primera Plana, where the comic remained for a year and a half. The magazine was a unique universe in itself: Politically sophisticated without espousing a party line, it published a range of celebrated writers and targeted a highly informed readership. Jacobo Timerman, its founding editor, was a committed advocate for human rights and democratic institutions whose family had come to Argentina fleeing pogroms in Ukraine in the late 1920s. If Primera Plana had an agenda beyond Timerman’s anti-fascism, it was an impulse toward progress and modernity, which applied not only to its writers’ politics but to their craft — and which made it a perfect place for Quino to launch Mafalda.
These early strips introduce Mafalda’s central characters: Mafalda and her parents, of course, as well as Felipe, a dreamy, chess-playing leftist; Manolito, the son of a Catalonian immigrant, who is the strip’s voice of capitalism and dreams of growing up to own “a chain of supermarkets that will take your breath away”; and the unreconstructed Susanita, who clutches her baby doll constantly and can’t wait to become “Doña Susanita, the mother of Doña Susanita’s doctor son.” In 2025, she’d want to be a tradwife.
The Primera Plana strips are also the ones in which Quino teaches his readers what to expect from Mafalda: a sui generis mix of slapstick (Mafalda switching out her dad’s toothpaste for paint or building a cardboard-box rocket powered by his soda siphon), sincerity and protest. Many things offend Mafalda, and when she’s upset her mouth takes over her entire face, becoming a gaping, bean-shaped void wailing about war, or adult uselessness, or the fact that she was born on Earth when there might be “more advanced worlds out there.” On first seeing Argentina on a globe with the North Pole on top, she gets upset that “in the Northern Hemisphere they live right way up [and] we live upside down.” She decides that this must be why the nation is underdeveloped: If you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, “gravity makes your ideas fall out of your head.” Quino draws this strip, and several ensuing ones, upside down, only reversing Mafalda and company to their usual positions after Mafalda nails her dad’s globe to the wall with the South Pole pointing up. This artistic decision is both a joke and a reference geared toward adult audiences: It invokes the Uruguayan Constructivist painter Joaquín Torres-García’s famous 1943 drawing América invertida, which shows South America with the Equator on the bottom and Patagonia on top.
Expatriated Argentines taught their children about Mafalda as a connection to home, so that it acquired more and more importance as part of Argentine national identity. Today, it’s impossible to imagine a Buenos Aires souvenir shop without racks of Mafalda postcards, magnets and shirts.
Wynne’s translation is also subtly intended for adults, as demonstrated by a sequence in which Mafalda calls Manolito an egotist for playing with a yoyo. In Spanish, the joke is that yo means I, so the toy’s name, translated literally, reflects his all-about-me capitalist ideology. Getting this into English would be clunky and far too wordy to fit into Quino’s word bubbles. (In general, a challenge of translating graphic novels and comics is that the translation has to work with, and around, the art.) Rather than trying, Wynne simply lets the joke exist bilingually, counting on his audience to know that yo is Spanish for I. It’s a quiet show of confidence in his readers — and in Mafalda. His translation recognizes, here and throughout, that the original is funny and compelling enough not to need elaborate explanation, even 60 years after its debut.
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In 1965, Mafalda moved from Primera Plana to the daily newspaper El Mundo and then the weekly Siete Días, where it ran until 1973. That year, the exiled former president Juan Perón returned to Argentina and, some months later, to the presidency. Also in 1973, the Chilean military, with the C.I.A.’s help, deposed Chile’s president, Salvador Allende, and inaugurated what became a 17-year dictatorship. Quino knew that if he kept writing Mafalda, his heroine would have to talk about the Chilean coup, as well as the rising violence triggered by Perón’s return. He also knew, as he said in 2014, that if she did so, her outspokenness could cost him his life if the anti-Peronist Argentine military took the same path as their Chilean counterparts. Instead, he chose to end the strip.
Three years later, Argentina did have a military coup. It was followed by seven more years of dictatorship and the brutal repression of dissent now known as the Dirty War. In her history of Mafalda, Cosse writes that as Argentines fled into exile, some brought old Mafalda strips with them. The comic became especially popular in Mexico and Spain, both full of exiles from Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, all of which had ultra-right-wing regimes at the time. It gained a significant following in Italy, where the celebrity philosopher Umberto Eco became a fan. (He called Mafalda a “dialectical confrontation with the adult world,” a point he rightly made to shut down comparisons to Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. Aside from Mafalda’s huge head and huge following, she and Charlie Brown don’t have much in common.) As the strip’s popularity grew, it started reaching audiences in more languages and of more ages. Expatriated Argentines taught their children about Mafalda as a connection to home, so that it acquired more and more importance as part of Argentine national identity. Today, it’s impossible to imagine a Buenos Aires souvenir shop without racks of Mafalda postcards, magnets and shirts.
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In the strips collected in this first Archipelago Mafalda, the thing Mafalda is most often angry about is soup. It’s her mortal enemy. In a panel that spans a space usually taken up by four, she laments, “Soup is to childhood what communism is to democracy!” Elsewhere, she declares soup a curse word, a status it retains throughout the strip. When she catches her mom clipping a recipe for a “delicious fish soup” out of the paper, she shouts, mouth in full kidney-bean mode, “Down with freedom of the press!” It’s one of the few moments in which Mafalda behaves like an adult, betraying her democratic ideals in pursuit of her anti-soup agenda.
Mafalda is fully aware of adult abdication of responsibility, and it makes her furious. In one sequence, she grumbles to Felipe that adults are “far too happy … about the prospect of offloading the burden [of the world’s problems] onto the younger generation.” Her father walks through their conversation singing to one of his houseplants, making clear that Quino intends the critique to ring true.
At the time, readers would have understood why Mafalda’s mom is making so much soup: It’s cheap, and life in economically troubled Argentina was expensive. But Mafalda’s mother never says so, though Mafalda does once overhear her lamenting that “with prices going up all the time it’s impossible to make ends meet.” Still, her lack of transparency about her soup-cooking is an omission that contains its own comedy: The child she’s trying to shelter is fundamentally un-shelterable.
Quino makes Mafalda’s parents loving but desperately ill-equipped to deal with their daughter’s questions. In one early strip, Mafalda’s father comes home from a long day at work to be greeted by Mafalda saying, “I’ve been waiting for you Papa! I need you to explain the war in Vietnam”; in the following panel, we see his wife at the pharmacy, getting him something called “Nervo-Calm.” In the strip after that, he promises to explain Vietnam to Mafalda, but quickly reneges, claiming it’s “not an appropriate subject for kids.” Of course, this just sends her back to her constant companion, the radio.
Mafalda — and Quino — gets the difference between her parents and world leaders; she doesn’t expect her dad to stop the Vietnam War, just explain it. Still, it’s a failure on her parents’ part that neither of them is quite willing to face either the reality of their precocious daughter or that of the society in which they’re raising her. This aspect of the comic hits home today, when many of the world’s pressing problems, climate crisis chief among them, are ones that prior generations have kicked down the line rather than addressing. Mafalda is fully aware of adult abdication of responsibility, and it makes her furious. In one sequence, she grumbles to Felipe that adults are “far too happy … about the prospect of offloading the burden [of the world’s problems] onto the younger generation.” Her father walks through their conversation singing to one of his houseplants, making clear that Quino intends the critique to ring true.
Archipelago’s first volume of Mafalda contains only the Primera Plana strips, which means it ends over a year before the 1966 Onganía coup that radically changed the comic and its world. After the takeover, Quino drew a strip in which his heroine looked straight at the reader, her big eyes worried, and asked what had happened to what she was taught in school, by which she meant Argentina’s democratic values. Isabella Cosse, the social historian, writes of interviewing political activists and revolutionaries who were teenagers in 1966; many of them, she says, remembered reading the strip and “feeling the same way as Mafalda.” In the years that followed, Quino transformed Mafalda into a powerful source of dissent. Even her nemesis, soup, changed its meaning, coming, as Quino later said to the Mexican magazine Gatopardo, to represent the “governments we were forced to swallow day after day.” Mafalda, suddenly, was explaining the world to adults. It was a job at once too big for her and to which she was perfectly suited.
✺ Published in “Issue 28: Spectacle” of The Dial
