For ten years Mafalda appeared in newspapers in Argentina until the cartoonist, Quino, stopped the series. In those ten years she had gained only five years of age but a huge following in Latin America. Readers were drawn to her in a way that, in this region, had never been seen before with a cartoon. She spoke to a community that needed to question the state of the world but lived in a time when it was safest for a fictional child to do the questioning.
As you’ll see in these examples, Mafalda looked beyond the usual primary school problems of muesli bars, skipping ropes and boy germs. She tackled the Vietnam war, nuclear weapons and the meaning of life.