Quino

Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón (17 July 1932 – 30 September 2020), better known by his pen name Quino (Spanish: [ˈkino]), was an Argentine cartoonist. His comic strip Mafalda (which ran from 1964 to 1973) is popular in many parts of the Americas and Europe and has been praised for its use of social satire as a commentary on real-life issues.

Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón was born in Mendoza, Argentina, on 17 July 1932 to emigrant Andalusian parents from Fuengirola, Málaga. Following Spanish name tradition, "Lavado" is his first or paternal surname, and "Tejón" his maternal one. Because of his parents' limited social circle, he spoke with an Andalusian accent until the age of six. He retained an affection for his parents' Spanish culture and flamenco into his later years. He obtained Spanish citizenship in 1990 and remained a dual citizen of Spain and Argentina.

He was called "Quino" from his childhood on, to distinguish him from his uncle, the illustrator Joaquín, who helped to awaken his vocation of cartooning at an early age. In 1945, after the death of his mother, he enrolled and started his studies at Escuela de Bellas Artes de Mendoza. Shortly after, his father died in 1948 when Quino was 16 years old. A year later he abandoned his studies, with the intent to become a cartoonist. Soon he would sell his first illustration, an advertisement for a fabric store.

His first humor page was published in the weekly magazine, Esto Es, which led to the publication of other works in many other magazines: Leoplán, TV Guía, Vea y Lea, Damas y Damitas, Usted, Panorama, Adán, Atlántida, Che, the daily Democracia, etc. In 1954, his cartoons became regulars in Rico Tipo, Tía Vicenta, and Dr. Merengue.

His first compilation book, Mundo Quino, was published in 1963. At the same time he was developing pages for an advertising campaign for Mansfield, an electrical household appliance company, for which he created the character of Mafalda, basing her name on the same sounds as in the Mansfield brand name. The advertising campaign never was executed, which led to the publication of Mafalda's first story in Leoplán. Subsequently, it appeared regularly in the weekly magazine Primera Plana, since the director of the magazine was a friend of Quino. Between 1965 and 1967 it was published in the newspaper El Mundo; soon after the first compilation book was released, it began to be published in Italy, Spain (where, on account of Franco-era censorship, it was tagged as “for adults only”), Portugal, and many other countries. It was also translated to 12 languages.

Mafalda was created as an irreverent and non-conformist six-year-old who hated fascism, militarism and soup, and loved the Beatles. The character attempted to reflect the world of adults as seen through the eyes of a smart child. Her friends reflected different personalities like the insecure but studious Felipe, the gossip-girl Susanita, the sturdy but dim-witted Manolito, the naive Miguelito, the rebel and witty Libertad and Mafalda's baby brother Guille. The character and the series has been compared to Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts comic series.

Quino abandoned the story of Mafalda on 25 June 1973, claiming that he wanted to avoid repeating himself; in later years, however, he said that the changing political landscape in Latin America had also influenced his decision: "If I had continued drawing her, they would have shot me." Following the 1976 coup d'état in Argentina, he moved to Milan, Italy, where he continued to create humor pages. Although he never returned to Mafalda and her friends in a comic strip format, he did use the character at certain specific moments: to explain the Organic Law on the Right to Education (LODE) on a commission from the Spanish government in 1986, for a COVID-19 awareness campaign in 2020, and, in 1977, to illustrate the Declaration of the Rights of the Child for UNICEF. Argentine producer Daniel Mallo converted 260 Mafalda strips into a TV show in 1965.

In 2008, at the initiative of the Museo del Dibujo y la Ilustración, the company Subterráneos de Buenos Aires created a mural of Mafalda in the Perú metro station at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. In 2009, Quino participated with an original Mafalda work, created for El Mundo, in the Bicentennial: 200 years of Graphic Humor that the Museo del Dibujo y la Ilustración held at the Eduardo Sívori Museum of Buenos Aires.