She was drawn to sell washing machines. An agency wanted a family strip to advertise Mansfield appliances, so the names had to start with M — that's where Mafalda got hers — and then the campaign never ran and the drawings sat in a drawer until a weekly in Buenos Aires, Primera Plana, printed her in 1964. Advertising's loss; nine years of Sunday-table arguments for everyone else.
And the soup. She won't eat it, ever, and somehow that refusal became the strip's whole grammar: soup as whatever you're told to swallow because it's good for you. A six-year-old with her heels dug in at the kitchen table, and readers from Quebec to Japan understood exactly what was being served. I have two Mafalda collections behind the counter; one has a cracked spine and pencil in the margins, which is the one I'd hand you.
I'll speak for soup, badly and briefly: it's cheap, it stretches, it forgives a cook who's been up since four. Mafalda's still right though — anything held over a child's head as good for them tastes like a lecture with a spoon in it.
There's a bench for her in San Telmo, put there in 2009, and she's sitting at one end with room beside her, so people keep sitting down and putting an arm round her for a photograph. The paint wears off her nose and her knees faster than anywhere else, and somebody keeps touching it up. Jun, a bronze that needs repainting because it's been petted is a nice problem for a city to have.