MAFALDA

An acerbic 6-year-old skewers societal foibles.

Mafalda, an Argentinian comic strip star from the 1960s, is a veteran of the cartoon scene, but she may not be entirely familiar to an English-language audience. Thankfully, this first entry in a planned five-volume series is poised to correct that. With its forthright, articulate, and frequently bickering cast of children, comparisons to Charles Schulz’s Peanuts are inevitable—though Mafalda’s quips and crises usually veer more toward the sociopolitical than the existential. Mafalda rails against Argentinian leadership, decries wars and social crises abroad, and stands as a staunch advocate for women’s rights, played in humorous contrast to her frequent antagonist, Susanita, a girl who carries around a baby doll and swoons over her unexamined dreams of being “a mommy.” Mafalda and her friends are depicted as distinctive, recognizably broad comic-strip personalities, with outsize heads, simplified expressions, and paper-white skin. Though the times and locale are obviously quite different, Mafalda’s English-language translation and reissue feels similar to that of Lat’s Kampung Boy. This cultural text provides a window into a specific milieu in a particular country’s history while also speaking to universal experiences and ever-pertinent questions of societal change and unrest.

A historical comic strip with ongoing relevance and plenty to laugh about.