A self-baring strip

IN her fast-selling anthology “Curvas Peligrosas” (Dangerous Curves), the Argentine comic-strip artist Maitena lists a number of lies commonly told by women.

To their mothers: “I’m fine!”

To a girlfriend: “I swear to you, that was the only time.”

To a man: “Yeah, it was great for me too....”

But the most quietly devastating of the strip’s six cartoon panels depicts the Big Lie that many women (men too) tell themselves: “It’s what I dreamed of all my life.”

Smart, acerbic, convincingly blond (though it’s not her natural color), tanned head to toe and, make no mistake about it, loaded, Maitena, at 43, would appear to be one of those rare souls who have found a way to make good on their fondest fantasies. No one appears more surprised by this strange turn of events than Maitena (pronounced my-TAY-na) herself. This, after all, is a woman who at age 24 had split from her first husband and was struggling to raise two kids in a ramshackle Buenos Aires apartment.

But that was a lifetime ago. Since the early 1990s, Maitena’s spiky cartoon strips depicting the quotidian triumphs and tribulations of modern women have won hundreds of thousands of fans throughout Latin America, Europe and beyond.

Her characters, mostly middle-class people in their 30s and 40s, are drawn in a precise but energetic style that suggests a sexier, less polite version of the popular strip “For Better or for Worse” by Canadian artist Lynn Johnston. While a few strips are constructed as narratives, most are simply extended riffs on a theme: “Six things you can’t ask a man,” or “How to turn your son into a sexist male” or “Tell me your child’s age and I’ll tell you where not to go on vacation.”

Infused with mordant humor and ruthless honesty, her panels have a post-punk, post-feminist sensibility. U.S. and European readers may imagine they detect echoes of Germaine Greer, Lydia Lunch, Cindy Sherman and “Sex and the City’s” Carrie Bradshaw.

But the cartoons, like their author, have their own distinctive point of view. Neither excruciating sexual truths nor casual nudity is shunned in the unsqueamish art of Maitena, who once earned a living illustrating erotic magazines. In Maitena’s view of the many faces of Eve, the mystical pleasures of breast-feeding and the existential terrors of creeping cellulite tend to trump more abstract issues.

“I don’t do feminism; I don’t make war of the sexes,” she says. “I speak badly of women, I speak very badly of women, but that’s because that’s what I know. I can’t speak ill of men, I say little things about men, but I don’t speak badly fundamentally of men because I’m not a man, I’m a woman.”

And although her comic prototypes, presumably, are fellow Argentines, Maitena believes that women, at least Westernized urban women, aren’t so different the world over. “We aren’t all equal, but many of the same things happen to us on all levels, and we have a very similar scale of values in all the world,” she says. “In the Western and urban world, a 35-year-old woman is happy for the same reasons and unhappy for the same reasons.

“I speak a lot of what we women feel within ourselves, what a woman feels when she leaves her child in day care and goes to work, what a woman feels when she puts on her favorite jeans and they don’t fit, or a woman returns home from work tired and sees her husband reading the newspaper.”

Judging by her streaking overseas sales, Maitena’s convictions are correct. Several spinoff book collections of her work, including “Women on the Edge” and “Mujeres Alteradas” (“Altered Women”), have sold about a million copies combined around the globe and been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, German and English. In Argentina, her popularity has reached single-name stature, like the soccer star Maradona. (Full name: Maitena Burundarena.)

But perhaps the highest accolade came from another Argentine cartoonist with a well-known nom de plume, Quino, creator of Mafalda, a Peanuts-inspired little girl still hugely popular in the Spanish-speaking world. Maitena, he wrote in an introduction to one of her books, “doesn’t aspire to be a mirror reflecting reality.” Instead, she grabs reality, mirror and all, “and throws it at our heads.”

Success on this order brings rewards, and Maitena, whose name in Basque translates as “the most beloved,” is enjoying them.

Sipping coffee at her dining room table, she gazes out a floor-to-ceiling window in the rambling modern home that she shares with her husband-manager, Daniel Kon, who formerly managed Soda Stereo and other Argentine rock bands, and the couple’s 6-year-old daughter. On the other side of the glass stretches a long, nearly empty white-sand beach swept by Atlantic waves bronzed by the late-afternoon light -- a scene to induce envious shivers from Malibu all the way to Carmel.

The trio have lived permanently for the last five years in this remote but increasingly gentrified village, not far from the Brazilian border and about an hour plane ride plus a two-hour drive from Buenos Aires. By simplifying their life, the couple believes, they’ve improved it.

“We lived in a house in the middle of Buenos Aires, which is a very big city,” Maitena says in her husky voice, which always seems to be hovering on the edge of a wisecrack. “We began to come [here] in the spring, over long weekends, short breaks, and we began to discover a style of life that we liked, that went well with us. What’s more, for my work, I realized that it made no difference where I was. It was an advantage when the Internet came and everything was much more easy.”

In their new community, Maitena says, nobody much cares what anyone else does for a living. Carpenters, cooks and construction workers hang out at the same bars and send their kids to the same schools as sociologists and Web-page designers. It’s a great environment for her young daughter, she feels sure.

“She goes to Buenos Aires, she goes to McDonald’s, she goes to the theater, to the movies, shopping, but it’s an occasional outing, it’s not her life,” she says of her daughter. “Here there is nothing to buy, she doesn’t watch television.... All the kids ride their bicycles, they go to their friends on bicycles. In reality it’s how you live here, how all the kids live here.”

Though Maitena’s work has struck a chord with women from Mexico City to Barcelona, it particularly reflects the volcanic social change that has hit Argentina in the last few decades. Maitena lived much of that upheaval firsthand, and in hard-core fashion.

She grew up the sixth of seventh children in a conservative, upper-middle-class family in Bellavista, a privileged Buenos Aires enclave. Her Basque-born father was an education minister in the last military government that ran Argentina, until democracy was restored in the early 1980s. Her mother, of Polish extraction, was an architect, which may be where Maitena got her childhood talent, and passion, for drawing. (Maitena’s sister, also an architect, designed her beach house.)

Her family nicknamed her “Periquita,” the Spanish term for the mischievous, hair-helmeted U.S. comic-strip character “Nancy.” Maitena says she devoured Archie and superhero comics books and lots of illustrated magazines saturated with “drawings of girls with tears, broken hearts, suffering.” As the penultimate child in a big family, Maitena says, she had to be clever and funny to get her parents’ attention.

She really got it when she found herself pregnant at 17 and married a year later. In a few years, with no spouse, two infants and few marketable skills, she fell into a life of low-paying jobs and the countercultural craziness sweeping Argentina as the dictatorship slowly crumbled. “Many rock bands rose up, a lot of theater groups, a lot of magazines, a lot of comics. It was an epoch in Buenos Aires, culturally very effervescent and very rich.”

In such an atmosphere, excesses were inevitable, and Maitena participated to the hilt. “A lot of drugs, a lot of alcohol, a lot of craziness,” she continues. “But this is good, because young people have to do these things. The heavy thing is when you grapple with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll in your 50s, you’re like an idiot taking cocaine and going with 20-year-old babes when you’re in your 50s. When you’re in your 20s it’s OK.”

From erotica and underground zines, Maitena gradually worked her way into “the type of magazines there are in dentists’ offices, that nobody reads” and “all the women’s magazines that there are in Argentina, all of them.” Little by little, she began to find “a more personal way of expression,” until in 1993 she landed a weekly gig doing a strip, “Mujeres Alteradas,” for the national women’s magazine Para Ti. Suddenly her career (and bank account) was off and running.

Like their author, Maitena’s characters have continued to evolve. In keeping with her less-is-more personal life, Maitena has subtly simplified her work while also enriching it, using less text and making her images terser, pithier and more poetic. “My last two books are my least ingratiating books, less funny,” she acknowledges, “but it gave me freedom to make them, because I considered that I couldn’t continue to make the same jokes the rest of my life.”

Having traded in sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll for gourmet cooking and running on the beach with her dogs, Maitena says she typically puts in about three concentrated work hours per day, plus another to deal with e-mail. She believes that the purpose of work -- any work -- is simply to make money so you can spend more time enjoying life.

That’s easier to say when you’re thriving, of course. But in fact she shows little interest in her U.S. sales, for example, even now that her books have been translated into English. Though she has a sister living in Pennsylvania, she’s no fan of the United States “as a social model” and says she doesn’t even like traveling there. “I like big cities of the United States,” she says. “I don’t have a desire to know the small fascist towns.”

Though she’s constantly being offered television projects, movie proposals and the like, she declines, telling her suitors she’d rather walk on the beach with her dogs and cook for friends. The former schoolgirl rebel also plans to branch out into charity work.

“I don’t want more money, I don’t need it, I don’t need 600 pairs of shoes,” she says. “It’s going to make me more happy to contribute. In the bottom of my soul, I am an atheist, but in the bottom of my soul, I feel that the Catholic education of my parents has marked me profoundly. Because I always was sexually free, I didn’t have these Catholic things, the nuns. But yes, I have this Christian spirit that is to give and to share.”

In a way, you could say it’s what she dreamed of all her life.