Images of Women in Mexican Comic Books*

Comic books are read on a regular basis by young and old, rich and poor, urban and rural Mexicans. Humor, adventure, police, fantastic and political comic books are but a few types of these popular publications found at newsstands on busy downtown street corners or laid out on sidewalks in quiet neighborhoods. Because of their immense popularity, their content merits serious attention. Harold Hinds and Charles Tatum study the images of women in four comic books—Kaliman, Lagrimas, risas y amor, La familia Burron and El Payo—and assess the degree to which these images conform to or deviate from traditional stereotypes of Mexican women. They find that in some cases these stereotypical images are not found: but in most, readers encounter submissive, passive and long-suffering females dependent upon males for their self-esteem; or at least woman as ideal fiancee-spouse, as mistress-sex-object and as witch. Two women—Borola of La familia Burron and Lupe of El Payo—are more assertive and not cast in the same mold as most other comic book women.     

MAFALDA: An Argentina Comic Strip

Mafalda, the acutely sensitive little girl well-known to both Argentinian and other Latin American readers, has been used by Quino, her creator, as the vehicle to comment on national foibles and pretentions. David Foster analyzes several strips to show how Mafalda's cleverness is based on literary strategems of what he calls “judicious inuerosimilitude.” While he asserts that Quino's work is a remarkably accurate representation of the details of Argentine bourgeois daily life, the dominant Buenos Aires sociodialect, and patterns of behavior that underlie social and ethic values, the strip is also singularly inverosimilar in its handling of sociological types. The object o f the strip thus is artful verbal and visual representation. Readers familiar with literary criticism will be interested in Foster's employment o f some general semiological principles to highlight the complex ironies which pervade Quino's work and to show how much of the strip's worth derives from contrasting Mafalda's unique perceptions and the stereotypic behavior of those around her.