Friday, May 18, 2007

Booknote: 10 Años con Mafalda

Quino. 10 Años con Mafalda. Mexico, D.F.: Tusquets Editores, 1998. ISBN: 9687723521.

Genre: Comic strips
Subgenre: Humor, Spanish language

The book is a ten year retrospective of Mafalda, the comic strip drawn in the 60s by Argentinian cartoonist Quino. To this day, it is still very popular. Even though some of the humor is based on historical references of the time, actually, the cartoon has universal appeal. This particular collection organizes strips by topic, then by characters. One of my favorite strips has Mafalda opening the door to a door-to-door salesman (keep in mind, this was before e-mail and spam). When the man asks, "can I speak to the head of the house." She replies, "there are no heads of family here. We are a co-op." She then closes the door, leaving the man wondering how come they did not have all the answers in that sales training. Fans will definitely enjoy this one. New readers will be delighted as well. Personally, Mafalda is one of my favorite comic strips, and her books are ones that I can always read over and over. Unfortunately, English translations have been a bit limited.

2 comments:

Lisa said...

Huh. I was inspired to snoop around for this guy's stuff on WorldCat and there's a couple libraries in rural Kansas that have "The World of Quino." That's awesome ... I may have to ILL?

A. Rivera said...

That would be the edition I saw when I was doing the snooping to see if there was something in English. Yes, do ILL it. If you read it, I would love to hear how you like it.

Best, and keep on blogging.