The Argentine cartoonist Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón, better known as Quino, would have been 90 today: he was the inventor and designer of Mafalda, one of the most famous characters in comic history, whose strips appeared between the 1960s and 1970s and are still used today by be reprinted and read for several generations. Quino died on September 30, 2020 at the age of 88 after suffering a stroke, and Google commemorated his birthday in a Doodle showing him drawing.
Although Mafalda was his most famous creation, Quino is also known for his cartoons and satirical strips, which have been published in dozens of Argentine and international newspapers over several decades. In the 1970s, already after he had stopped writing new Mafalda comics, he left Argentina, where the military dictatorship of Jorge Videla had been established, and moved with his wife to Milan, where he lived until the 2000s.
Quino was born in Mendoza on July 17, 1932 and had attended the School of Fine Arts for two years, but he himself declared: “You taught me to make beautiful models: plaster casts, amphorae, stuffed ducks, a guitar… I wanted to become a cartoonist early and broke my balls. I stop: I have some regrets, along with my lack of discipline. In fact, I had to learn things myself that I would have learned with less effort there, such as perspective. If you don’t know it well, it will become a mess to draw certain pictures, e.g. B. a sports field ».
After the death of his mother and father, Quino left Mendoza for Buenos Aires in the 1950s, where he began to successfully publish his drawings in a few weekly newspapers. In 1963 his first book, Mundo Quino, was published, a collection of silent, humorous comics with a foreword by writer Miguel Brasco. Brasco introduced Quino to Agens Publicidad, who were looking for a designer to create a comic that was “a cross between Blondie and Peanuts” to promote the launch of a line of devices called the Mansfield, which featured an M and an A in its logo and for this reason, some characters’ names had to start with M. That’s how Mafalda was born: Agens didn’t go on his campaign then, but Quino still had some strips left that he used alone after a few months.
A woman walks past a Mafalda mural in Buenos Aires (AP Photo / Natacha Pisarenko)
Mafalda is a six-year-old girl, has indifferent parents, hates soup, listens to the Beatles and, with her friends (Felipe, Manolito, Susanita and Libertà), grapples with major events: from the Vietnam War to hunger, from racism to the feminist question. The strip first appeared on September 29, 1964 in what was then the most important Argentine weekly newspaper, Primera Plana, in Buenos Aires. On March 9, 1965, Quino broke off his relationship with Primera Plana and Mafalda joined the newspaper El Mundo.
From June 25, 1973, Quino decided to stop drawing Mafalda’s strips and to devote himself to drawings and strips with occasional characters, dedicated above all to history and satire of social and daily life: “I was tired of repeating over and over again that the world works badly, that there are wars and poverty. Nothing has changed since then and this is an infinite sadness ». However, he continued to create humorous tables, winning various awards and organizing various exhibitions around the world.