THE MAGIC OF “MAFALDA”

How an Argentinean comic strip became an international phenomenon.

- BY DANIEL ALARCÓN

A uniformed police officer stands sideways, his head turned to face us. His eyes are unnaturally close together, rendered by the artist as two black dots floating in the very center of his face. He has a drooping nose, a thin mustache, and a glum look, staring as if he is aware of being watched. Behind him stands a little girl, less than half his size, wearing a red dress, a red bow poking from the thicket of her heavy black hair. Her eyes are big and sad, and her index finger touches the tip of the nightstick hanging from the policeman’s belt. “You see?” she says, with a worried expression. “This is the little stick for squashing ideologies.”

I probably first saw this image in the nineteen-eighties—taped to the wall of a cousin’s bedroom in Lima, perhaps, or hanging on the side of a newspaper kiosk—but I already knew who the little girl was. In fact, I can’t recall a time in my life when I didn't know her. “Mafalda,” the comic strip in which she appeared, was published in Argentina from 1964 to 1973, and remained a cultural touchstone for Latin Americans of every generation thereafter. At one point, Mafalda and Eva Perón were the two most recognizable Argentinean women worldwide. “Mafalda” has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and tens of millions of books have been sold in Spanish alone, making it the best-selling Latin American comic of all time.