Mafalda – the super sassy, soup-hating 6-year-old girl who uses rhetoric fit for an activist – turned 51 yesterday. The Mafalda cartoon first appeared on September 29, 1964 and was created by Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón, aka Quino.
The precocious child, who many Latin American and European children touted as a hero, was originally created for advertising purposes – she was dreamed up for a campaign for appliance brand Mansfield. Luckily, that ad never came to be, according to T13, and instead Quino made the comic series that we all came to know and love.
Quino stopped illustrating Mafalda on June 25, 1973, but she reappeared in 2009 to criticize Italian media tycoon and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. In a double-page feature inn Italian newspaper La Repubblica, Mafalda said, “I’m not a woman at your disposal,” after something like 10,000 women criticized him for being a chauvinist.
To celebrate her 51st and take you back to your childhood, here are eight times Mafalda spoke the truth:
1
Where is the lie?
2
Every day.
3
?
4
When a child teaches you how to prioritize….
5
Basically.
6
Cuz people need to do better.
7
Mafalda probably predicted the water on Mars too.
8
Don’t let the mom get you down.