Saturday, November 28, 2009

Mafalda

One of the things Mom did on her most recent trip to Spain was to task her local bookshop owner with what turned out to be a 2½ month project: Complete the 10-book collections of Mafalda for both of my sisters and me. Even though they're now out of print, she came through.

Now, if you've never heard of Mafalda, you probably speak English. The comic strip is best known in Europe and Latin America, and features a precocious, political 6-year-old named Mafalda, and her friends. Think Calvin and Hobbes without the tiger, set in Vietnam-era Argentina, with a bit of "Peanuts" mixed in. Mafalda was everywhere when I lived in Costa Rica, a ubiquity similar to Garfield in the U.S. in the 80s. The last book was published before I was even born, but it's a comforting link to the past, and a thorough workout for my Spanish, especially that rare, rusty vos conjugation.

It's a good thing we got several books at once, though... otherwise I might still be waiting to read them!


Look! It's the return of the two-headed gigglequilt!

2 comments:

Jonadab said...

I looked it up...

From reading the English Wikipedia article, one could be excused for coming away with the impression that it was fairly obscure, appearing over the course of its run in a grand total of three different newspapers, not concurrently. That, however, doesn't seem to jive with the fact that it was reprinted in a series of books. Was it syndicated, and the article simply neglected to mention this important fact?

Carolyn Kerr said...

Syndicated and ubiquitous for years.