Joaquín Salvador Lavado, better known by his pen name Quino (Spanish: [ˈkino]; born 17 July 1932), is an Argentine cartoonist. His comic strip Mafalda (which ran from 1964 to 1973) is very popular in Latin America and many parts of Europe.
His first compilation book, Mundo Quino, was published in 1963, while he was developing pages for a covert advertising campaign for Mansfield, an electrical household appliance company, for which he created the character of Mafalda. Between 1965 and 1967 it was published in the newspaper El Mundo; soon after the first compilation book is published, it starts to be edited in Italy, Spain (due to the censorship, it is tagged as “only for adults”), Portugal and many others.
After abandoning the story of Mafalda on 25 June 1973, due to a lack of new ideas – according to him – Quino moved to Milan, Italy, from where he continued to create humor pages. In 1976, the character Mafalda was chosen by UNICEF to be a spokesperson for the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Mafalda is still translated in book collections.
While Mafalda continued to be used for human rights campaigns in Argentina and abroad, Quino dedicated himself to writing other editorial-style comics. The comics were published in Argentina and abroad. Since 1982, the Argentine newspaper Clarín has published his cartoons weekly.
After visiting Cuban cartoon director Juan Padrón, the two produced a series of cartoons. Between 1986 and 1988, they made six Quinoscopio cartoons through the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos, none of which were longer than six minutes. In addition, the pair worked on 104 short Mafalda cartoons in 1994. While Mafalda concentrated on children and their innocent, realistic view of the world, his later comics featured ordinary people with ordinary feelings.