RSS The Hunt for Toda Mafalda
02 Nov 2007 @20:55Back in my high school days, I took a couple years of Spanish. One time in class, I read this hilarious comic.
Every once-in-a-while, I’ll remember the comic and think about finding it.
Well, about a month ago, I had another one of those hankerings and spent about a week looking on the Internet for it. I looked all over, but could not find it. So I emailed my Spanish teacher, Stephanie:
Stephanie,
I remember a comic that we read in your class (it might have been from one of the books) and I’m trying to find it. There’s a kid…
…[I described the story line here, but am redacting it to preserve the hilarity]…
I’ve searched for it high and low and can’t find it and was wondering if you a) know what the heck I’m talking about, and b) know where I might be able to find it?
-Andrew Ferguson
Stephanie was able to give me the lead I needed:
The comic strip you’re talking about is Argentinean and it’s called “Mafalda” I used to copy some strips onto the backs of tests.
Thus, the hunt began. I first did another check on the Internet to make sure that I still could not locate it with the additional information. While I found some Mafalda strips, I could not locate the one I was looking for.
So I turned to our library. Our school library is part of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries, a network of libraries throughout in Colorado and Wyoming. In short, I can jump on the Prospector search engine and search through everyones books and then have it sent to my library for free! It’s really quite spiffy.
So I did that. “10 años con Mafalda” and “Mafalda and Friends“, the latter which is in English interestingly enough.
After parsing (heh, “parsing” only a programmer would use that word) through those two books, I had not found my comic. So I hit up Prospector again. This time, I ordered “Mafalda 5“, and just to be on the safe side: “Toda Mafalda” (I like saying it in the movie announcers voice).
Well, needless to say, my search is over. There, lying at the top of page 61 in Toda Mafalda was what I have been searching for. It easily been four years, probably closer to five since I’ve seen this comic. And while I didn’t remember it word for word, I was pretty close. Enjoy one of my all time favorite comics:
Click to embiggen, side-scrollage might be needed if you use Internet Explorer.
Very nice story, I am so glad that you enjoyed Mafalda. Quino is one of the best, akin to Schultz, or Sempé.
Here is one of my favorites
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fabian17/2611632848/
Mafalda is great, at least used to be. I wonder if Quino is still alive and if so is he as good an analyst of society as he used to be. I’m an old timer. And if he is not around are his replacements as good. That sounds real old geezer talk. You know “everything has gone to hell, etc.” but Latinamerica has changed for the worse now that it is so gringified. Mafalda probably would be a Buenos Aires yuppie larva now.
I was just doing some random “googling” of Mafalda when I found this… It’s so cool that you like the comic, coming from a rather different culture. I’m sure your Spanish is excellent, but if you ever think you might need the help of an Argentinean who grew up on a daily dosis of Mafalda, let me know.
Quino is still alive (he’s 76), but I don’t think he’s still the analyst he used to be… He stopped drawing Mafalda when it became too hard not to repeat himself, when he felt the jokes had become too obvious. I always wondered myself what kind of person Mafalda would have turned into. Will we ever find out?