With her childlike candor, Mafalda, the famous character created by Joaquin Salvador Lavado, better known by his pen name Quino, pointed a finger at social injustice and global conflict for nearly a decade in the 1960s. An entire generation grew up with Mafalda and her friends: Felipe, Manolito, Susanita, Guille, Miguelito and Libertad.

1. Mafalda was born in Argentina as part of a comic strip commissioned to Quino to serve as promotional support for an appliance factory. The drawings could not reveal the name of the factory (Mansfield), but characters were given names starting with the letter M. Quino had seen an Argentine movie (Dar La Cara) that included a small girl named Mafalda, so he decided to use the name for his central character.

2. When newspapers realized the commercial intention of the comic strip, they refused to publish it. Quino put it away for the time being. But then on September 29, 1964, Mafalda appeared for the first time in the Argentine magazine Primera Plana. It started as a weekly comic strip, but became so popular that in 1965 Quino had to draw a comic every 24 hours.

3. One of Mafalda’s primary characteristics was an amazing parallel to real life. “Mafalda was created as an adorable expression of Quino’s conscious, which, in turn, is a lucid expression of a certain generational anxiety,” says Daniel Samper Pizano. The hot topics of the Sixties (Vietnam, racism, Fidel Castro, nuclear war and the space race) appeared in the comic and were dissected with an acute sharpness in the reflections of this precocious girl who famously hated soup.

4. Felipe debuted in a Mafalda comic on January 19, 1965. On March 29 of that same year, Manolito Goreiro, the son of a shopkeeper who was based on the father of one of Quino’s friends, appears in the comic strip. On June 6, 1965, Susana Clotilde Chirusi, the highfaluting girl whose greatest aspiration was to form a typical bourgeois family, makes her first appearance.

5. Although it hasn’t been published since June 1973, Mafalda has made “occasional appearances for humanitarian reasons.” There have also been numerous compilations of the comic strip and presentations examining the girl with incisive observations and questions about mature and complex topics.