Mafalda: A Social and Political History of Latin America's Global Comic by Isabella Cosse

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mafalda: A Social and Political History of Latin America's Global Comic by Isabella Cosse David William Foster Mafalda: A Social and Political History of Latin America's Global Comic. By Isabella Cosse. Trans. Laura Pérez Carrara. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. xv + 265 pp. Cloth, $99.95; paper, $26.95. It is always a pleasure to return to Mafalda, a cultural product that has marked my life since my first residence in Argentina in 1967, when the first volume of the collected strips had just been reprinted and the creator, Joaquín Salvador Lavado (a.k.a. Quino), was on the cusp of launching a publishing empire and spin-offs associated with his cartoon figure, which he had originally conceived a few years earlier as part of an advertising campaign. But Lavado was onto something larger than just a convenient cartoon figure for selling products to the new Argentine middle class that had been created in the two previous decades by the Peronista experiment. Perón had been overthrown in 1955 and by 1966, when military authoritarianism affirmed itself with vigor, Argentina had gone through a whirlwind of social and economic fluctuations. But the middle class was firmly entrenched, and the consumerism for which Mafalda had first served generated an attitude of sociocritical analysis that the spunky and sassy little girl effectively channeled in her unfiltered and highly verbalized responses to contemporary urban Argentina and to the often extreme social and political violence that, while barely perceived directly, was part of the unmistakable backstory of the typically four-paneled strips. Suddenly Mafalda was all over the place, and there didn't seem to be any aspect of Argentine daily life that she did not eventually have something pithy to comment on. And if the genius of Quino's work was that he so succinctly captured the unique flavor and texture of Argentine urban life, what is truly astounding, sixty years after the original strips, is how Mafalda has spoken receptively to other Latin Americans and, indeed, to a global audience (English readers are [End Page 461] rather unique in not having the entire oeuvre disposable to them in translation). Quino is widely respected for very sophisticated cartoon art with other narrative threads, but he will always be identified first as the creator of Mafalda. While Mafalda has always been compared superficially to Little Lulu (for its young female protagonist) and to Peanuts (for its gallery of unconsciously "existential" children), a world separates them, beginning with the unambitious social critique of the American product and the mordant wit of Mafalda in the face of an extensively irrational and profoundly unjust world. It has been said that Quino's figure is only a mouthpiece, no matter how cutely portrayed, for adult concerns, but that sort of observation overlooks how quickly children have to mature in Latin America, even in relatively comfortable Buenos Aires, and how quickly children become uniquely independent sophisticates in that urban megalopolis. Isabella Cosse's sociohistorical study of Mafalda (which was originally published in Argentina in 2014) is an outstanding example of one important current of cultural studies in that country. Communications-based research flourished in particular in Argentina, where there was a perception of the urgency to analyze the failures of liberalism and the grip of authoritarian/neofascist governments. This meant a very close interpretive analysis of the content of cultural texts, testing them for the presuppositions they implied about the social contract, praising their ability to align with prioritized political values (that is, essentially those of the revolutionary left, but which meant often profoundly divergent principles and practices), and denouncing their "retrograde" deficiencies (which fundamentally meant traces of reformist liberalism and any defense of the status quo). It rarely meant any commitment to discourse analysis and little sense of the cultural text as fictive embodiment. The result is that Mafalda was wont to provoke critical stances that we are unused to in the world of American cartoon art. While most Argentines were delighted with Mafalda, it was denounced by the right (especially with the reactionary military coup of 1966) as "subversive," while the oppositional left saw it as pointless in its lack of...