© Monica Nogueiras, Barcelona
© Quino
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Mafalda and her
friends
In 1969, the Italian semiologist
Umberto Eco presented Mafalda to Europe with these words: “Since our children are
soon to become through our choice a multitude of Mafaldas, it would be rash not to
treat Mafalda with the respect a real person deserves.” But who is this six-year-old
girl whose name has been given to a square, who was on the verge of being named an
Illustrious Citizen of Buenos Aires and was chosen as one of the 10 most influential
Argentine women of the 20th century? “The important thing is not what I think of
Mafalda, but what Mafalda thinks of me,” said the writer Julio Cortazar about this
irreverent little girl who worships the Beatles, hates soup, and is concerned about
the Cold War and the health of Planet Earth. Mafalda shares her concerns with her
parents, who she never ceases to ply with impertinent questions (“Have you two planned
our education or are you just making it up as you go along?”), and with her brother
Guille, the personification of childish innocence. The gang is rounded off by the
materialistic Manolito (son of the local shopkeeper who dreams about owning a chain
of supermarkets), the timid romantic Felipe (who is always looking for excuses not
to got to school), the narcissistic Miguelito, Susanita (who hopes to be a housewife
and the mother of a large family), and Libertad, the smallest of them all. “I drew
her like that because freedom always seems small,” recalls Quino.
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[These fresh winds blowing are so healthy. Too bad they’re filled with this dreadful
smell of naphtaline.]
©
Quino
[I’ve
made up my mind to face reality. Just let me know when it turns beautiful again.]
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An Abridged
Bibliography
None of Quino’s books have
been published in English. But for Spanish speakers or those simply content to enjoy
the drawings, here is a selective bibliography:
A mí no me grite (1999)
Cuánta bondad (1999)
Mundo Quino (1998)
¡Qué mala es la gente! (1996)
Cuentecillos y otras alteraciones (text by Jorge Timossi and illustrations
by Quino, 1995)
Yo no fui (1994)
Humano se nace (1991)
Potentes, prepotentes e impotentes (1989)
Sí cariño (1987)
Gente en su sitio (1986)
Quinoterapia (1985)
Déjenme inventar (1983)
Ni arte ni parte (1981)
A la buena mesa (1980)
Bien gracias, ¿y usted? (1976)
All published by Ediciones La Flor in Argentina and by Lumen in Spain. For more information:
www.quino.com.ar
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© Quino |
How would you define
your brand of humour?
I don’t think my cartoons are the sort that make people laugh their heads off.
I tend to use a scalpel rather than tickle the ribs. I don’t go out of my way to
be humorous; it’s just something that comes out of me. I’d like to be funnier, but
as you get older you become less amusing and more incisive.
Your books have been published to great acclaim in France, Greece, Italy, China and
Portugal. Does this mean that humour is universal?
I think so. Local connotations vary of course, above all in political humour.
But a joke can be just as relevant to Franco’s Spain as to Fidel’s Cuba or the military
regimes of Latin America. As for jokes about food, the kind of things we say about
meat in Argentina can be transposed to rice in Japan. I’ve heard it said that a North
American actor became so enamoured of a certain form of Japanese humour that he decided
to learn Japanese and export it to the United States. When a Japanese joke mentions
cherry pie, he talks about pizza instead so that his audience can get the point.
But the humour works the same.
You have never managed to make a breakthrough in the English-speaking world. Aren’t
you interested in that particular market?
First of all, I’ve never thought in market terms. Things either happened or they
didn’t. Years ago a book of my cartoons without words, The World of Quino, came out
in the United States. It was very well received by my North American counterparts,
including Schulz1. Someone even said: “at last a cartoonist who doesn’t draw couples
reading the morning paper at the breakfast table.” But the book didn’t sell. I think
the English-speaking public is used to a much quicker visual humour than mine. I
focus on details, and a reader always has to ask why I included this or that particular
feature. If I draw a newspaper, I write things on it that form a sort of code for
the readers. A lot of people don’t notice these details. As for Mafalda, the British
thought she was “too Latin American.”
Would you say your humour is typically Argentine?
The Mafalda series is, certainly. The environment in which the characters live
is the Buenos Aires neighbourhood where I lived myself, and Mafalda’s way of talking
is also typically Argentine, even in the editions published in Spain and elsewhere
in Latin America. In the rest of my work featuring dialogue I try to use an idiom
that is a bit more neutral. As for my other cartoons I wouldn’t know how to answer
your question. My parents, my aunts and uncles and my grandparents were all Spanish.
I spent my childhood surrounded by immigrants: the butcher was Spanish, and so was
the shopkeeper who sold us lentils. The greengrocer was Italian, and my parents’
and my grandparents’ friends were from Andalusia. My first real contact with Argentines
was in primary school. When I started there I spoke with such a strong Andalusian
accent that my schoolmates couldn’t understand what I said. I found it hard to mix
with them.
Sometimes you use captions, sometimes you don’t. Do you think text is a crucial factor
in humour?
I would prefer to do without words. But some ideas would be incomprehensible
without text. Humour is like cinema in this respect. Chaplin, for instance, never
needed words. Neither did Jacques Tati. But Woody Allen, who doesn’t use visual gags,
stops being funny the moment he stops talking.
What are your favourite subjects?
I don’t think I have any, though over time I see certain themes crop up again
and again. What you find most often in my work is humour about the weak and the powerful,
about the relations between power and ordinary people. I grew up in a highly politicized
family. The Spanish civil war and the rise of fascism were the dramas that marked
my childhood. They gave me a political vision of life, one which I like to express
in all my drawings. I think power relationships exist in all situations, whether
a person is faced with a government official, who is always the powerful one, or
a waiter or a doctor. I’m fascinated by relationships based on dependence. Other
subjects I deal with include life and death, with death as the powerful figure and
the living as the weak. I worry about losing my freedom in old age—I’m terrified
by the idea of having to depend on other people for the most basic things. So I draw
cartoons of 84-year-olds who want a glass of wine against their grandchildren’s wishes.
Are there any taboo subjects?
When I started, I made jokes about prisoners. Prisoners and the shipwrecked are
the staples of world humour. But when people were imprisoned on political grounds
in Argentina, I stopped handling the subject, and I still couldn’t deal with it today.
I think it’s counterproductive to tackle issues as tragic as prisons and torture
through humour, and though I’ve been criticized for it, I couldn’t bring myself to
join in Amnesty International’s campaigns. I don’t like tragedies such as earthquakes
and natural catastrophes either, though I think this has more to do with a personal
phobia that is not shared, for example, by Brazilian cartoonists. Some years ago
a Uruguayan plane carrying a rugby team crashed in the Andes. Those who ultimately
survived had to eat the flesh of those who had died. A Brazilian humorous magazine
devoted an entire issue to this episode, which wasn’t in the least funny. But they
managed to make it funny, terribly dark but funny. And not so long ago I saw an issue
of a French weekly, Le Canard Enchaîné I think it was, which featured
a drawing about rape in prison, a subject I would be incapable of tackling.
Your most recent book, Cuanta Bondad, is full of drawings that poke fun at modern
technology: the fax, the computer, the mobile phone. Do you really dislike these
things?
I hate mobile phones, and the stupid way they are used gets on my nerves. I can
understand that a doctor, an electrician or a plumber might need a mobile phone.
Not long ago in Asturias a man saved himself from being mauled by wolves because
he called for help on his mobile. But I can’t stand being in a doctor’s waiting room
listening to people call to say that the doctor’s late with his appointments or to
ask if they need to stop by the grocer’s. I think the Internet is very useful in
some circumstances. In the field of medicine, for example, it’s wonderful that a
small- town doctor can consult a leading authority in the United States or Switzerland.
But it’s another thing entirely to get hooked to the Internet and look for a partner
or spouse by computer search. I know an old woman, an Italian psychologist, who communicates
with Tibetan monks via the Internet though I’m sure she never bothers to say hello
to her neighbours. A lot of communication means people isolate themselves from the
people around them.
Football also features in some of your pieces. Do you like the game?
I don’t know as much about football as I would like, but it interests me above
all from a social viewpoint. It’s the only sport that leads its spectators into crime.
I’ve seen violence between ice hockey teams, including the death of a player who
was hit in his sternum and left for dead. But in football it’s the public itself
that hits out, attacks and kills. An American author who studied the phenomenon of
hooliganism in England came to the conclusion that what makes football frustrating
is spending 90 minutes waiting for a goal to be scored. In basketball, or even in
hockey, the scoreline is changing continually, but in football 30 or 40 minutes can
go by without a goal. As a result frustration builds up among the spectators and
it has to express itself somehow. I’m more interested in football from that angle
than as a sport, though I admit there are players whom it’s a pleasure to watch.
When Johann Cruyff was on the field, it was like watching Rudolf Nureyev on a stage.
God often appears in your cartoons. Why is that?
I don’t believe in God, but I read the Bible a lot because it’s a fantastic source
of ideas. And if God doesn’t exist, he’s a very good subject. He’s a figure about
whom it’s impossible to be indifferent: everyone either loves him or hates him. And
he keeps on popping up in my cartoons because in a way he’s a character you can identify
with. When you draw you create things with a pencil, and you can construct on paper
all the different worlds that come to your mind. He may not exist, but as Borges
said, it’s enough to have a word that designates something for that thing to come
to life. Furthermore, religion is like sex or drugs: it always sparks reactions and
letters from readers, and I love that.
What is your worst professional memory?
What has most annoyed me, without a shadow of a doubt, has been the use of my
cartoons for purposes poles apart from those that inspired me to draw them. I get
particularly angry when my cartoons are used in right-wing political campaigns. Once
I was sent from Spain a sticker showing Guille, Mafalda’s brother, carrying a pro-Franco
flag. That was a terrible blow, since I was born in a family that had lost the Spanish
civil war, and films about that period still make me cry. My comic strips were also
used in a political campaign by an Argentine military officer who had been chief
of police in Buenos Aires province. I wonder if those people have read my work and
totally misunderstood it, or whether they understood it all too well and wanted to
twist its meaning. These are things that I simply can’t figure out. I gather that
Mafalda has been used in Venezuela in an election campaign, but I’m not going to
hire a lawyer in Caracas because if I did things would drag on for ever.
Have you always been totally free to draw as you please?
It seems paradoxical, but under the rule of Argentine military governments—which
is the same as saying almost all of them, since I’ve only known four democratically
elected presidents since I was born—there has never been any official censorship
bureau. In contrast to Brazil, where there was a body to which all cartoonists had
to submit their drawings before they could be published, in Argentina it was the
editors who tried to talk you round. The problem was that you never knew what or
who the problem was, so you started to censor your own work. When I arrived in Buenos
Aires with a file full of cartoons I realized straightaway that neither the Church
nor the military could be targets, that sex was a subject you had to handle with
kid gloves, and there was no question of talking about homosexuality. Since I was
young and wanted to be published, I buckled down to the approved subjects. But even
today, when anything goes, I still find it very hard to get out of the habit of self-censorship.
You lived in exile during the military dictatorship2. Were you forced to leave the
country?
I left when the situation was really bad. A lot of my friends had disappeared,
and when I went to deliver a cartoon to a magazine that published my work, I would
find that a bomb had just gone off there or that the building had been machine-gunned
the night before. With work like mine, which can be done on a hotel table in any
place you like, it would have been stupid to stay. Between 1976 and 1979 I lived
in Italy. Then I started to go back to see how things were, and today I live for
eight months of the year in Buenos Aires and the rest of the time in Milan, which
is my European base. I also spend a lot of time in Spain and France.
Outside Argentina, have you had to make any concessions to ensure your books get
published?
A few, yes, but usually for anecdotal not to say comic reasons. Some 15 years
ago I found out by chance that Mafalda was very well known in China. A little Chinese
girl told me this when she asked me to autograph an album at a Buenos Aires book
fair. Until then I had no idea that my books had been published in China, so I was
very intrigued. Through a friend I managed to find out that the pirated editions
had been produced in Taiwan, and that the editor, like all good pirates, was English.
My agent managed to get these pirate editions withdrawn, and regular editions have
recently started to be published in mainland China. I was there a few months ago,
and I asked how they had translated all the strips in which Mafalda talks about the
yellow peril. When I wrote those strips we had just found out that China had the
atomic bomb, a revelation that caused grave concern in the West. They told me that
everything about China had been cut, since they thought that I didn’t know enough
about China to give an opinion—a wonderful piece of reasoning, I thought. I also
found out that Susanita, Mafalda’s friend who dreams about having a big family, is
regarded as a virtual subversive due to China’s family planning policy.
Mafalda is anything but politically correct. Has this ever caused you any problems?
I still recall a case involving Cuba, a country I’ve visited seven or eight times
and where I have good friends. There’s a Cuban edition of Mafalda and an animated
film series based on the strip cartoon was made there. But whenever I go to Cuba,
someone asks me to explain the strip in which Mafalda is sitting in front of a plate
of soup—the dish she hates more than anything—and wonders why Fidel Castro doesn’t
sing the praises of soup so that it can be banned in Argentina. It’s certainly true
that back then anything to do with Cuba was suspect in Argentina. But what Mafalda
actually says is: “Why doesn’t ‘that idiot’ Fidel Castro. . . ?” The Spanish newspaper
El Pais has censored some of my drawings on the grounds that they are too “grim”,
to which I reply that I may be grim, but I’m never as grim as real life.
Your Mafalda series has been compared to Schulz’s Peanuts.
Naturally. I started the Mafalda strip after being commissioned to advertise
a brand of domestic appliances for which I was specifically asked to do something
of the same kind. I bought all the books by Schulz that I could find in Buenos Aires,
studied them and then tried to do something similar but adapted to our situation.
The campaign never got off the ground because the magazine that was going to publish
the cartoons realized it was closet advertising. So I put my drawings away until
a year later, in 1964, when I rescued them for the magazine Primera Plana.
Why do you think Mafalda is still being published and read almost 30 years after
you stopped producing it?
I suppose it’s because part of the message is still relevant. The human race
still has a lot of issues to address. The world of which Mafalda was so critical,
the world that existed in 1973 when I stopped producing the strip has not disappeared;
perhaps it’s even got worse. Though it flatters me to know that Mafalda is still
being read, it’s also sad to think that the social injustice she denounced remains
in place.
Why did you stop drawing Mafalda, against your readers’ wishes?
Humour and art in general wear themselves out. I admired Schulz a lot, and I
loved Peanuts. I read the strips with great enthusiasm for 10 or 15 years. But I
would have liked to have seen that special brand of humour reflected in other things.
I feel the same about the Colombian painter Fernando Botero: I just don’t think he
should keep on painting fat figures all his life. As for myself, after ten years
of Mafalda, I started to suffer each time I drew a new instalment, and I found it
extremely hard not to repeat myself. When I started drawing, I learnt that if you
conceal from someone the last drawing in a strip and that person still knows how
it’s going to end, then your story isn’t up to scratch. Even though the books continue
to sell very well and people ask me for more, I think that I made the right decision
when I stopped doing Mafalda, and I don’t miss her at all.
Nevertheless, you have drawn her again . . . .
Yes. UNICEF commissioned some drawings for the tenth anniversary of the Convention
on the Rights of the Child, and I was delighted to do them. I also drew her again
for the fifth anniversary of President Raul Alfonsín’s democratic government
in Argentina, and I’ve allowed her to be used in public health campaigns and on behalf
of causes that I think worthwhile. Now I use her when I want to protest against something—she’s
the spokeswoman for my rage. But I never have agreed and never will agree to her
being used in advertising campaigns, nor will I allow any adaptation for the theatre
or the cinema. The only concession I have made was for an animated film because drawings
were used in it.
What do you tell your readers, especially children, who ask you to draw Mafalda again?
It’s easy to answer children. I drew Mafalda for 10 years, so I always tell them
the same thing. I say: imagine having to do the same thing every morning from the
day you were born until today. Would you like that? They always say no. Fifteen-
or sixteen-year-olds are harder to convince, and I don’t think I manage to do so.
Certain pseudo-scientific studies circulate on the Internet arguing that Latin American
children who read Mafalda tend to hate soup. Some girls have actually been named
after her. A magazine even chose her as one of the 10 most influential Argentine
women of the 20th century. Isn’t this a heavy responsibility?
Absolutely. But the real responsibility for me is facing a blank page each week
on which I can say whatever I please. Someone once told me that hundreds of people
would love to have their own weekly page to say whatever they liked. Becoming aware
of that responsibility made me feel dizzy, but as for the rest, it’s none of my business.
Do you identify with any of your characters?
I identify to some extent with all of them. I believe that all the characters
who appear in my drawings are relevant. I learnt this from an interview with the
American film director Frank Capra, who was talking about the importance of extras.
When he filmed street scenes he would speak to each of the extras and carefully describe
their role. You, madam, are an anxious woman going to the pharmacy to buy medicine
because your husband is sick. You, sir, are a decorator going to paint an apartment
and you’re late. Every character who appeared in Capra’s films, even in the background,
had a story. Likewise, when I draw a restaurant, I imagine that the man seated at
the table behind works in a bank and has a brother-in-law who has gone to live in
Venezuela. I love doing that.
You once said that human beings are the cancer of the planet. Is there no hope?
I’ll give you just one example: it has always been said that the Amazon region
constitutes the lungs of our planet, but that doesn’t stop people from continuing
to destroy it. It’s as if someone with lung cancer did nothing to prevent it, still
less to cure it. Since so many people are worried about the destruction of the Amazon,
why doesn’t the United Nations, say, buy it and protect it? But no. Humans are like
that. They keep on smoking in spite of lung cancer. As I see it, hope lies in cultivating
a certain historical optimism. I strongly agree with the Portuguese Nobel literature
laureate José Saramago, who has always maintained that socialism and the left
will one day regain their lost prestige. I think he’s right. I always compare politics
to aviation. Over the centuries many people died while trying to fly. But before
they could fly in hang gliders or ultralight aircraft, they first had to invent the
internal combustion engine, which is extremely heavy. If Leonardo da Vinci had known
of the lightweight materials that we have today, people could have been flying since
the fifteenth century. It’s a bit like visiting the Christian catacombs in Rome.
What men! Three centuries in hiding! What political group today could stand three
centuries without being infiltrated? And 2000 years later, they are still around,
though it’s true that they’ve become the exact opposite of what they claimed to be.
Do you always draw in black and white?
Yes, with a few exceptions. The French edition of Mafalda is in colour because
the publisher thinks that if it’s not in colour, it won’t sell in France. I agreed
but I’m not very happy about it. Mafalda as I see it is in black and white, and in
general I prefer comics in black and white except when colour really adds something.
Of course when you see Akira Kurosawa’s films, you realize that colour does add something.
I use it very sparingly, only when there’s blood or when it’s justified. I once did
a drawing in which you see a child left alone at home paint a line running all through
the house, from the staircase to the hall to the bedrooms. When his parents come
home, he greets them by saying, “I bet you don’t know the colour of freedom.”
What colour was it?
Green.
1. Charles M. Schulz (1922-2000).
American cartoonist, creator of the Peanuts series, whose main hero is Charlie
Brown with his dog Snoopy.
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