Quino, On The Funny Side Of Freedom

UNESCO Courier, July, 2000 by Lucia lglesias Kuntz

"I don't believe humour can alter anything, but sometimes it can be the little grain of sand that acts as a catalyst to change," says Argentine cartoonist Joaquin Salvador Lavado, better known as Quino, who has been hailed as "the greatest Latin American cartoonist of the century." Born in Mendoza in 1932, he never wanted to be anything but a cartoonist and has spent a lifetime at the drawing board. He won an international reputation with his Mafalda series (see box), which shows the adult world as seen through the eyes of children. Its main character, an inquisitive girl who is always asking awkward questions and worries about world peace, has featured in ten books, which have been translated into over 20 languages and published in newspapers and magazines in many parts of the world. Burnt out by the pressure of having to come up with new ideas every week, Quino decided to stop drawing Mafalda in 1973, and spend more time on other projects that give free rein to the caustic humour that has always been his ha llmark. Meticulously executed in black and white and packed with telling details, his drawings focus on power relationships, social inequalities and environmental degradation. In short, on all kinds of issues that, as he readily admits, "have nothing funny about them."

How would you define your brand of humour?

I don't think my cartoons are the sort that make people laugh their heads off. I tend to use a scalpel rather than tickle the ribs. I don't go out of my way to be humorous; it's just something that comes out of me. I'd like to be funnier, but as you get older you become less amusing and more incisive.

Your books have been published to great acclaim in France, Greece, Italy, China and Portugal. Does this mean that humour is universal?

I think so. Local connotations vary of course, above all in political humour. But a joke can be just as relevant to Franco 's Spain as to Fidel's Cuba or the military regimes of Latin America. As for jokes about food, the kind of things we say about meat in Argentina can be transposed to rice in Japan. I've heard it said that a North American actor became so enamoured of a certain form of Japanese humour that he decided to learn Japanese and export it to the United States. When a Japanese joke mentions cherry pie, he talks about pizza instead so that his audience can get the point. But the humour works the same.

You have never managed to make a breakthrough in the English-speaking world. Aren't you interested in that particular market?

First of all, I've never thought in market terms. Things either happened or they didn't. Years ago a book of my cartoons without words, The World of Quino, came out in the United States. It was very well received by my North American counterparts, including Schulz. [1] Someone even said: "at last a cartoonist who doesn't draw couples reading many people are worried about the destruction of the Amazon, why doesn't the United Nations, say, buy it and protect it? But no. Humans are like that. They keep on smoking in spite of lung cancer. As I see it, hope lies in cultivating a certain historical optimism. I strongly agree with the Portuguese Nobel literature laureate Jos[acute{e}] Saramago, who has always maintained that socialism and the left will one day regain their lost prestige. I think he's right. I always compare politics to aviation. Over the centuries many people died while trying to fly. But before they could fly in hang gliders or ultralight aircraft, they first had to invent the internal combustion engine, which is extremely heavy. If Leonardo da Vinci had known of the lightweight materials that we have today, people could have been flying since the fifteenth century. It's a bit like visiting the Christian catacombs in Rome. What men! Three centuries in hiding! What political group today could stand three centuries without being infiltrated? And 2000 years later, they are still around, though it's true that they've become the exact opposite of what they claimed to be.

Do you always draw in black and white?

Yes, with a few exceptions. The French edition of Mafalda is in colour because the publisher thinks that if it's not in colour, it won't sell in France. I agreed but I'm not very happy about it. Mafalda as I see it is in black and white, and in general I prefer comics in black and white except when colour really adds something. Of course when you see Akira Kurosawa's films, you realize that colour does add something. I use it very sparingly, only when there's blood or when it's justified. I once did a drawing in which you see a child left alone at home paint a line running all through the house, from the staircase to the hall to the bedrooms. When his parents come home, he greets them by saying, "I bet you don't know the colour of freedom."

What colour was it?

Green.

(1.) Charles M. Schulz (1922-2000). American cartoonist, creator of the Peanuts series, whose main hero is Charlie Brown with his dog Snoopy.