MAFALDA: An Argentina Comic Strip

Mafalda, the acutely sensitive little girl well‐known to both Argentinian and other Latin American readers, has been used by Quino, her creator, as the vehicle to comment on national foibles and pretentions. David Foster analyzes several strips to show how Mafalda's cleverness is based on literary strategems of what he calls “judicious inuerosimilitude.” While he asserts that Quino's work is a remarkably accurate representation of the details of Argentine bourgeois daily life, the dominant Buenos Aires sociodialect, and patterns of behavior that underlie social and ethic values, the strip is also singularly inverosimilar in its handling of sociological types. The object o f the strip thus is artful verbal and visual representation. Readers familiar with literary criticism will be interested in Foster's employment o f some general semiological principles to highlight the complex ironies which pervade Quino's work and to show how much of the strip's worth derives from contrasting Mafalda's unique perceptions and the stereotypic behavior of those around her.