COMICS-ARGENTINA: Quino’s Successor Targets Women, With Humour

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Mar 28 2000 (IPS) - Argentine comic strip artist Maitena Burundarena now occupies the space in Spain’s ‘El Pais’ newspaper once held by Quino, creator of the ‘Mafalda’ strip, and from this pedestal she speaks to women by making light of their daily lives.

Burundarena, 38, has made a living drawing and scripting cartoons since age 20, but said it is still rare for women to have their work published in a newspaper’s comic pages. The space is still occupied mostly by men, and often they do not have as much talent as many women artists who are left out, she commented.

Maitena, as she signs her work, won access in 1999 to the hundred-year-old Buenos Aires daily, ‘La Nacion,’ and soon after received a call from Madrid’s ‘El País’ Sunday magazine, which has been printing her cartoons for the last six months.

She is now negotiating with newpapers in Italy and India, where, she is told, her sarcastic wit would find an enthusiastic audience.

She began her career creating erotic comics, and only in 1993 did the Argentine women’s magazine ‘Para Tí’ regularly publish her work, which had become a comic strip focussing on different scenarios of women’s daily lives. Her work also appears in ‘Paula,’ a women’s supplement to Uruguay’s ‘El País.’

“My stories weren’t originally meant for women, but women began to read them. I’m not interested in being funny. I’m interested in working with certain themes, but not to entertain, because my style functions through identification – and that takes time,” explained the cartoonist.

In her strips, the mother-in-law interferes, the children doubt the mental balance of their parents, and women bemoan their loss of muscle tone, being alone, their ignorance of technology, and they suffer anxiety, jealousy, lack of self-esteem, feelings of failure and guilt.

In Maitena’s hands, classic “woman-to-woman” advice becomes side-splitting comic frames in which, for example, she recommends where “not to go” with children on vacation. If they are babies, it is best to avoid the beach – but the author gives such instructions with her personal twist.

“You go on ahead,” says an exhausted cartoon mother with babe in arms. “I’ll feed him, change his diaper, put him to sleep, and after a nap, when the sun goes down – if there isn’t too much wind – we’ll join you for awhile,” she says to her husband, who stands there, confused and compliant.

Vignettes of family fights over the dog or the cat – which everyone except the woman wanted, but now nobody wants to feed, take to the veterinarian, bathe or take for a walk – are another classic demonstration of how the weight of domestic issues tends to fall on women’s shoulders.

Divorce, sex, rejection due to the imprints of time on one’s body, or new romantic partners with children from previous marriages are issues well within the realm of Burundarena’s own experience, as she had two children before the age of 20, and a third at age 38.

“In my life there have been three things that directed me, and without them I would not have been able to do anything: my children, my career and my maid,” admits this woman who, like Quino, has not had an easy life.

“Where do I have to sign to avoid returning to my childhood?” laughs Burundarena, who prefers not to discuss her private life because she says it “runs like a Venezuelan soap opera.”

When the artist uses her comic strip to advise mothers “how to turn your son into a sexist man,” it forces the audience to think about the attitudes of many women who, despite suffering discrimination and overwork themselves, are responsible for reproducing the same problems.

But all this is treated with such irony that it tends to elicit a guffaw of recognition. The drawings and gestures of the women, the disconcerted faces of the men and the concern of the children who seem to bear the weight of their parents all seem so real.

The weekly comics from ‘Para Tí’ became four successive books titled “Mujeres Alteradas” (Altered Women), each selling more than 100,000 copies. It was because of these collections, distributed in Spain’s bookstores, that Madrid’s El País editors decided it was time for a change.

Quino’s Mafalda, that non-conformist girl of the 1970s whose view of the adult world made her a global ambassador, seems to be present in Maitena’s women, even when they seem to be in a state of permanent crisis.

“Mujeres Alteradas” reproduces “some grown-up Mafaldas with weighty problems and who are given to hysterics, spitting out their neuroses through their words,” said an El País review.

To adapt her work for Spain’s audience, Maitena had to take into account the limited role of psychoanalysis in that society, given that it is an integral part of the daily lives and discourse of middle-class women and men in Buenos Aires.

In addition, women in Spain who are over 30 and are separated from their spouses generally do not have children, unlike their Argentine counterparts.

But the Spanish and Argentine feminine worlds share the stress and anxiety suffered by women who learn that an “ex” is involved with a younger woman, who see their bodies deteriorating and hair turning grey, and who are caught up in reckless consumerism, especially of clothes that are never used “but were a bargain.”

Maitena, who knows she has won success in a space normally dominated by men, has also won over many women readers. “Women do not usually read comics because we always tend to read things that speak to us about our worlds,” she observed.

Perhaps it is this space, which she happened upon by chance the day she went looking for a way to earn a living, that is the secret to her success.