The mellow mood of being on holiday has made me decide to shift tack from the more theoretical stuff I’ve been on about and instead dig into my archives for a post about a comic I love, and which despite its great fame bafflingly still seems virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. The article is a slightly edited version of a review I wrote back in 2005 for my website rackham.dk. I apologize for some of the scruffy scans and hope you’ll enjoy the piece anyway!
“Quino exists and Mafalda is his Prophet.” Those are the words the Argentine cartoonist Fernando Sendra has his best-known character, Matías, speak in an homage to his older colleague and countryman. It fairly precisely encapsulates the status enjoyed by Joaquín Salvador Lavado, better known as Quino (b. 1932), not just in his own country, but throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Quino, who made his debut in the mid-50s is today regarded as one of Latin America’s greatest cartoonists and his sophisticated satirical and gag cartoons indeed count amongst the best in their genres, but it was his comic strip about the small, critically insightful girl Mafalda and her friends that made him a household name beyond the borders of Argentina.
After an innocuous start as a never-implemented advertising campaign for a home appliance company, the strip debuted in the weekly paper Primera Plana in 1964; it moved to the daily El Mundo the following year, and upon the closure of that paper in 1967 ended up in the weekly Siete días in 1968, where it stayed until Quino decided to end it without further explanation in 1973, when it was at the height of its popularity and had emigrated into television and merchandizing. Quino has since continued his work as an editorial- and gag cartoonist, but has never returned to the strip format. In spite of this, generations of Latin Americans have grown up with Mafalda, which has been endlessly rerun and reprinted.
In the Spanish-speaking world the strip is considered amongst the greatest classics of comics and, because their obvious similarities, is often compared with Charles M. Schulz’ Peanuts, frequently to the disadvantage of the latter. Regardless of one’s personal preference in this matter, it is an apt comparison and Mafalda quite obviously occupies a similar position in Latin America to Peanuts in the United States and parts of Europe. Unfortunately, only over the last few years has it been seeing full publication in English, in a shoddily produced book series released by its Argentine publisher, to deafening silence.
“Do you improvise or plan our upbringing?”
What kind of strip is Mafalda? It makes sense to start with its similarities with Peanuts. In its conception, it was obviously indebted to Schulz’ strip, conceived as it was along the same lines—small philosophical, poignant and funny incidents between a group of wise middleclass children—but the strip is clearly its own thing. Where Peanuts is a suburban strip, Mafalda takes place in the big city; where Peanuts exclusively focuses on its child characters, who stand-in for the adult world, the relationship between children and grownups is one of the central themes in Mafalda; Where Peanuts delivers its punchlines in an almost timeless environment, Mafalda continually comments on and critiques its time, although it does this without ever becoming acutely topical. At a more fundamental level, however, the strips are different in tone: Peanuts takes place in a sleepy no-mans land, where dreams and aspirations dissipate in the emptiness above the trimmed lawns and white picket fences, while Mafalda—though not without melancholy undertones—is warm, friendly and vibrantly immersed in life as lived.
“All cops are nice”
Mafalda is the child of a troubled moment of her homeland’s history. During the period Quino chronicled her daily doings, the country saw six changes of government, all variations on the military regime. Political violence was rampant and democratic overtures were few and far between. During this period, most of Latin America was plagued by political unrest and repressive governments, the war in Vietnam was escalating, the Chinese Cultural Revolution started, and the arms race between East and West was running at full bore. All of this is reflected in the strip, even if only occasionally mentioned directly, as is the spirit of 68, women’s liberation and the rise of youth culture, with the Beatles as an incontrovertible primary exponent. Quino is basically a disillusioned humanist, deeply skeptical of all kinds of authority, whether the brutal hegemony of capitalism or the crushing grip of communism.
“Just imagine how peaceful the world would be, if Marx hadn’t been served soup as a child”
And as mentioned, Mafalda is his prophet—she embodies her creator’s skepticism, his sense of justice and his indignation. She’s her “irrepressible heroine, who rejects the order of things… and demands her right as a child not merely to live as debris in the wreckage of the world of her fathers” as Umberto Eco—Quino’s first Italian editor—writes. But at the same time, she is human and therefore susceptible to the same weaknesses as everyone else. While the sweep of history provides subtext, her world is quietly quotidian—school, TV, play, holidays, etc. The big questions are reflected in daily reality by way of recurring motifs of conflict and cognition, such as her distaste for the soup insistently served by her mother; her naïve questions to her parents about the world at large, which invariably result in quiet embarrassment; the absurdities picked up from passersby when one sits on the curb in the sun, or from the radio; the multitude of ways a kid may confound a door-to-door salesman, etc.
How you drive a door-to-door salesman crazy
Mafalda is the closest we get in the strip to ideal human representation, but as is typical in comedies of type, she is made whole only by the characters that surround her, which provide the spectrum of distilled human traits and qualities that make the work resonate. One of Quino’s masterstrokes is the introduction, about halfway through the strip’s life, of a little brother to Mafalda, Guille, who is manifestly anarchic in character of towards whom she is forced to reproduce the friendly but firm authoritarian disposition she herself encounters in her parents.
Mafalda ends up reproducing her parents’ reaction to the mercilessly inquisitive Guille.
Around the same time, we meet the tiny tot Liberdad, whose analytical sharpness and ability to see the Big Picture and always align herself with the People suppresses somewhat these traits in Mafalda herself and gives her more natural social insights room to breathe on the page.
Liberdad corrects her friends: money isn’t everything, but perhaps it is, after all, for those who don’t have it?
In the circle of friends we also find buck-toothed Felipe, the perpetual dreamer and just as perpetual loser:
Characteristically, his greatest hero is the Lone Ranger, but when he plays cowboys and Indians with the other, more realistically disposed kids, things never work out as he had hoped. We do not know whether the attractive—attractive, we have no idea whether she is actually sweet—girl on whose blind side he suffers has red hair, but the relation to Charlie Brown is evident, even if Felipe—typically for the strip—is more actively engaged with life than his North American brother by another father.
Miguelito is a child of nature with a prodigious imagination—wherever he goes, he sees a magical, different world. He is fundamentally inquisitive and his thoughts on reality are original and unexpected:
“My mirror image evaporates and spreads a little of me all over the city”
Characteristically for Quino’s subtle approach, it is never spelled out just how devastating the presence of this little visionary must be for Felipe, whose imagination always comes up short:
Contrast: Miguelito and Felipe on their way to school.
And at the same time, without it ever being addressed, one sense that Miguelito’s rather loose grip on reality has its reasons: only a few times do we meet his neat freak mother—cleaning her way through life obsessedly—to whom visiting children feel like an invasion, and she remains off screen, but the contours of an unstable home are felt.
Another home of unarticulated tension is that of the slightly dense, overweight Manolito. He only rarely has time to play because he must help out in his dad’s grocery store. He works hard to imitate his hard-working immigrant father, and is clearly expected to do so. The result is a one-track preoccupation with business, which ultimately shuts out other aspects of life for him. Manolito is socially inept to a degree where he drives away his friends with his constant pitching for ’Almacén Don Manolo’ and the advertising he scrawls all over the city.
It makes sense that the character who has the hardest time with Manolito is the other socially awkward child in the group: Susanita, the prim, and rather dim, little bourgeoise. She represents the old order in the most square fashion, spending most of her time dreaming about her future husband and family life while avoiding anything that rocks the boat, whether it is the upstart capitalist Manolito or the Beatles.
Susanita addresses women’s lib.
By such description of the characters, Mafalda might come across as rather bleak social satire, but far from it. Despite all their differences, the kids are friends and always end up accommodating each other. Quino’s belief in human beings as fundamentally social and moral is manifest. Mafaldas world—the local—is a benign community in a chaotic world and it is the belief in such community that makes Mafalda the humanist and idealist vision of society that it is.
At times, it flirts with banality—a recurring and slightly forced motif has Mafalda sharing the stage with a globe, which triggers all kinds of “poignant” and frequently rather trite observations about the madness of the world:
The world is sick, it’s hurting in Asia
At other times, it veers into the bourgeois—this happens especially when it describes small, cute episodes of family life. But most of the time, Quino maintains a level head, a sharp pen, and is very, very funny. His masterful character work is augmented by a refined sense of comic timing and dialogue:
It makes sense when he describes the cartoonists Sempé and Saul Steinberg as two of his main sources of inspiration, because his line precisely synthesizes central aspects of their very different approaches into an organically animated, personal “handwriting.” Sempé’s sweetness and cheek animates the sensitively captured facial expressions of Mafalda and her friends; his Parisian elegance is apparent in such details as a fugaciously suggested lamppost in the background of a park scene:
…while his atmospheric liveliness comes out when Quino draws the family’s messy, lived-in bathroom:
Quino has not only adapted his angular line from Steinberg, but also its intelligent use in the delineation of graphic elements such as the dexterous doodles Mafalda draw on the floor to denote her life:
…or the hatching on a policeman’s pistol holster, or the scrawl of inventive, messy childish graffiti on the angular, ordered walls of the family home, with their banally decorative paintings. Quino is conscious that every line, if drawn with attention, has its own life:
It is this vitality that stays with you as a reader of Mafalda, which focuses on the rejection by childhood of all forms of predetermination, insisting on free agency as essential. When the strip ended, Argentina seemed on course to better times with the return of the long-exiled former president and dictator, Péron, but the military coup in 1976 put an end to any optimism engendered by the new government and instead led the country into its darkest period in modern history. This happened without the companionship of Mafalda and one can only guess at Quino’s motivations. Beyond the basic wisdom of quitting at the height of your powers, his decision might indeed reflect the strip’s insistence that the world can be a better place and that the choice is in our hands. An insistence that makes eminent sense amongst children and which is too important for us to let it weaken as we grow older, into disillusion.
“In thirty years, the world will be a much better place, because we, the children, will rule.”
Thanks for reprinting this, Matthias. It looks like a fascinating strip (though better than Peanuts? Never!)
It’s interesting that Quino represents some of the things deliberately left out of Peanuts (adults, the little red haired girl) and how that seems tied to the distance Schulz puts between Peanuts and reality (politics, family dynamics, etc.)
Yes, it’s very different from Peanuts in that sense — in fact, that’s the aspect I’ve most often heard advanced in its favor.
It made me think of something else: how many North American strips are urban? Offhand, I can’t really think of any.
That’s an interesting point. I’m no expert on North American strips, but I’m not thinking of any right off the bat…. Doonesbury takes part in Washington D.C. a good bit, doesn’t it?
Yeah, Doonesbury is interesting — and in its own right pretty unique — in that it covers such a diverse range of characters and milieus.
I think that _Peanuts_ is overrated, but maybe I’m reading it as prose while it is pure poetry. What I will say though is that two very important and recurring situations were ripped off by Schulz from Percy Crosby: the little red-haired girl and Charlie Brown alone on the baseball field while it rains.
Sorry I don’t have anything to say about _Mafalda_. I found it entertaining and witty ages ago, but none of these strips are my cup of tea.
That’s a really fine strip! Superbly drawn, too. Thanks for letting us know about it.
Took the liberty of translating a few of the strips, here:
http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/3033/mafaldatranslated.jpg
(And yes, I know some words aren’t literal translations…)
Thanks for those, Mike! Mafalda *is* entertaining and witty and not a little moving too.
Why, thanks! With that bit of encouragement, had just enough time for a few more translations:
http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/1708/mafaldatranslated2b.jpg
(That last one was a bit tricky. For those not in the know, in Spanish, objects have genders, so that the tree is easily established as a “he” and the vine as a “she” in the second panel. Then in the last panel, “aguanta” can mean to hold, or to [i]put up with[/i]; wanting to keep the wording neutrally ambiguous, went with “stays with,” which can describe either a physical placement, or a companionable relationship…)
Thanks so much for those translations, Mike. My spanish is pretty lame.
Domingos, I think of Peanuts like little koans, often. More poetry than prose, in any case.
You don’t even find Schulz’s art appealing…?
For those of us who grew up reading it, Quino´s Mafalda is of universal value. It´s as relevant today as it was in the 60´s: the world, and the human beings we live in it, hasn´t changed that much from Viet-Nam to Irak, from overpopulation to massive overpopulation, and from Perón to Hugo Chavez.Plus, it is really fun, the kind of fun that makes you laugh out loud.
Peanuts is gold in its own way, but it languishes exclusively on the american modus vivendi wich can be so self centered most of the time. I hope americans get as much fun, relevancy, humanisn and even more fun from Peanuts as latinamericans get from Mafalda.
Noah:
By “Schulz art” what do you mean: his drawing technique? If that’s what you mean, the answer is: yes.
With _Peanuts_ I may be suffering from the “golden age of reprints” syndrome. I liked _Peanuts_ after reading a few trade paperbacks, but I found only a few of his strips to be profound and melancholy (and better yet: profound, melancholy… and funny). When I began to read the whole opus I expected to see at lot more of that, but the ones that I already knew were the whole thing.
Daily strips have a rhythm of their own. If you read a whole decade you find them repetitive and predictable and boring after a while. (Unfortunately: even if you don’t read a whole decade: the characters are cardboard and predictable.)
The only one that I know of that stands the test of massive reading (it’s a Western and it lasted for two decades, not five decades like _Peanuts_ though) is _Matt Marriott_ by James Edgar and Tony Weare.
Domingos, your reluctance to see the qualities in any comic that doesn’t have naturalistic characterization is a sight to behold: Matt Mariott becomes a greater work than Peanuts on the basis of this dogma, neatly avoiding anything but superficial engagement with the work.
Hey Domingos. Yes, I meant the drawing technique — glad you can enjoy it!
Matt, I pretty much don’t think I could disagree with Domingos more about the daily rhythms/worth of Peanuts — had I money enough and time, I’d gladly buy every one of the Fanta reissues and read them through like five times. Having said that…I actually find Domingos’ line-in-the-sand approach really refreshing. Even if I don’t agree with him, I know where he’s coming from. I dunno; it’s just a pleasant point of departure for a conversation, for me at least.
Matthias:
Please read what I said above: “I think that _Peanuts_ is overrated, but maybe I’m reading it as prose while it is pure poetry.”
As prose those naturalistic qualities that you talk about are important. As poetry they aren’t (no one expects great characterization in an haiku). (I also said that I like a few _Peanuts_ strips and Charles Schulz’s drawing technique.)
But you miss the point completely. A naturalistic comic may be as repetitive as a cartoonish one. It’s very difficult to avoid recurring to the use of predictable characters and repetitive situations if you’re writing and drawing a series for decades. That’s called professionalism (not always a good thing, I must say).
To be fair James Edgar used the same plot devices twice, but, as far as I know that was it. As for one of the greatest draughtsmen who ever stained a drawing board with a brush, Tony Weare, don’t believe me, read what David Lloyd has to say:
http://www.cartooncounty.com/cartoonstripped.html
The general sense I get is that Mafalda falls somewhere between the art styles of Peanuts & Calvin. But it carries more of the pathos of Peanuts, and although it has the precociousness of Calvin, it doesn’t have the imagination that comes with the bratty kid.
That might be why Mafalda has such trouble finding an audience over here – there’s no escapism within the strip. The harsh realities of life (as portrayed through a childish lense) is there for everybody to see. Although I haven’t read much, my understanding is that Mafalda is one of the most HONEST strips out there.
Of course, that brings up Calvin’s little speech on popular art – “Originality & Truth? Life’s hard enough without it! Only an idiot would pay for it!”
I’m quite a fan of Quino’s (mostly) silent adult strips, and maybe those could be branched out here first? Those have the imagination of drawing that Mafalda lacks, and require great imagination to figure out the joke. Of course, the trick would be to figure out HOW to properly organize all of them. Foreign collections are notorious for having multiple versions of a reprinted strip in several books, which hampers the enjoyment somewhat. (Not much, since his stuff’s a joy to look at) but can be a pain for those who want a complete version.
Maybe Fantagraphics could branch out the English version of Mafalda, since their Peanuts reprints are doing so well?
BTW, thanks Mike for doing those translations. What we need are scanlators for European comics. Manga has exploded since previously unknown stuff got available on the web, but only a handful of BDs have been translated. Franquin’s Black Ideas, the first two volumes of Violine, Chninkel (drawn by the same artist who does Thorgal), and the small sampling shown on scans-daily.
http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/tag/medium:+bande+dessin%C3%A9e
Nezchan and Houbanaut should really do more translations of Spirou and Navis.
I’ll repeat what I said at the end of my blog post:
http://sundaycomicsdebt.blogspot.com/search/label/European%20Comics
Part of what made Manga so impentratable to American audiences for years was that so much of what was translated was adult in nature. It was only when they started bringing over Children’s Mangas that they started to gain a serious foothold that has yet to let go. That’s the basic corporation formula that American comics have long forgotten – attract the children first, and they’ll follow you down to the pits of hell.
Unfortunately, due to lack of publicity, and an atrocious animation system, very few of those comics will ever likely be as well-known over here as they are in their home countries. Not to mention that, personally, I feel that some of these books would work better as omnibuses, especially since 48 pages for $10 doesn’t feel like much, even if those pages are jam-packed with details.
I’ve long thought that if there was a scanlation site that had 1% of the energy that most Manga scanlations have, we would have more access to European stuff other than Asterix or Tintin. (In fact, a Manga site once DID scanlate a series, Lanfeust of Troy, but they quickly dropped it once they changed servers)
I’m sorry that there aren’t more translations. There’s literally TONS of untranslated stuff over there that’s in desperate need of wider recognization.
Hey Domingos, I’ve been meaning to ask you where you can find good reprint editions of Matt Marriott. A simple Google search doesn’t come up with anything.
Thanks Mike, for those further translations — you reminded me that I was rather hasty in my summation of one of them, so I’ve corrected that now.
Daniel, those are good points re: the qualities of Mafalda, though I wouldn’t agree in the implication that Peanuts is more escapist.
Domingos: sure, but why does prose need to be naturalistic? That would eliminate large parts of the canon. And in any case, why do comics have to be likened to prose/poetry for assessment of their qualities?
Hi Suat:
No such thing exists, I’m afraid. David Lloyd once told me that he suggested Titan Books (if I remember correctly) to do a series of reprints, but the answer was: there’s no audience out there for such an obscure comic strip (they preferred to launch the mediocre, but profitable, of course, _Modesty Blaise_).
Is it impossible to read a few _Matt Marriott_ stories, then? Not exactly: go here and find info about The All Devon Comic Collectors Club(scroll all the way down):
http://tinyurl.com/3y2a6nl
Ask Dave for a list of their reprints and you will find half a dozen or so Marriott stories.
Since I’m at it: these reprints aren’t pro publications, but they are only possible because Tony Weare did scrapbooks with all of his strips (he graded the stories with stars). After he died in bizarre circumstances http://tinyurl.com/347ttce the family sold all this “junk” and that’s how the Devon Club is able to do their reprints.
Matthias:
My prose / poetry dichotomy is just a metaphor (using the term loosely) to distinguish between narrative / long comics forms (e. g.: the graphic novel) and brief / non narrative (or scarcely narrative) comics forms (e. g.: the gag a day comic strip).
Rethinking the subject I no longer agree that a character in an haiku can’t be more than a sketch because of how complex human beings are and how brief the form is. There’s no briefer form, narratively speaking, than painting and I know of no better characterization than this one: http://tinyurl.com/2aw77ua
As for all prose needing to be naturalistic, of course not. Maybe I committed another mistake there. Good characterizations and inventive plots aren’t “naturalistic” (I can see why the former can be linked to naturalism or realism, but the latter?)they’re just criteria.
Fair enough, but you seem to suggest that “good” characterization is synonymous with psychological verisimilitude. This leaves out a lot of great literature, such as Greek drama, not to mention most of the tradition of epic poetry. Not to mention a lot of great comics.
And since you bring in painting, would you apply the same standards? Yes, I agree that Vélazquez is great and that he expertly captures something recognizably human, but lots of great painting — from antique sculpture to expressionism and beyond — doesn’t approach character in this way.
Matthias:
Are you sure that you want to include Greek drama in that sentence. The actors in Greek drama used inexpressive masks, but they were also talking and doing things. Good characterization comes in very different ways. Maybe it is easily recognizable in realism and naturalism, but highly stylized forms can also convey a complex vision of what means to be human.
I must add that this aspect doesn’t exhaust the problem of what constitutes a great work of art. Ultimately no topic does.
As for this sentence: “Not to mention a lot of great comics.” Maybe they’re not so great to yours truly?
I find the characterization in Peanuts both thoughtful and sublime. It’s certainly somewhat stylized (the children aren’t “real” children) but it’s some of my favorite in comics nonetheless.
The sequences where Linus pats birds on the head for example, and Lucy keeps trying to stop him. Linus is both a confused kid and a kind of saint, while Lucy is both a confused kid and an iconic scoffer. Linus is “persecuted” in some sense, but the Lucy/Linus relationship is also just about a bossy big sister…and Lucy’s uncertainty is as poignant as Linus’ in its way. The whole thing is bizarre and very funny, and totally in character for Linus and Lucy as they appear in other strips. I think it’s as acute about human nature as the Velazquez, certainly, and more poetic and surprising – though, you know, I like Velazquez too.
And I guess that’s my point: comics — like the other arts — have plenty to offer in the way of “highly stylized forms can also convey a complex vision of what means to be human.”
Noah and Matthias:
Agreed. This discussion about characterization started because of a blunt generalization about series that I did (which, I keep telling to myself, is not a very good idea).
Here’s another “Mafalda” translation; only time to do one strip this morning:
http://img715.imageshack.us/img715/7872/mafaldatranslated3.jpg
(If Argentinian Spanish is like the Cuban variety I grew up with, “silver” is slang for money as well.)
And quite a telling point Quino makes! They say that you can’t solve a problem working from the same attitude that [i]created[/i] the problem in the first place, and here Quino points out that political extremes of right and left have the same attitude about money…
Maybe I blinked and missed it; has no one here commented how much Mafalda’s hair and bow owes to Ernie Bushmiller’s creation? ( http://fujichia.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/nncy.jpg )
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DanielBT says:
…That might be why Mafalda has such trouble finding an audience over here – there’s no escapism within the strip. The harsh realities of life (as portrayed through a childish lens) is there for everybody to see…
——————
That panel which heads the “DWYCK: The Dreams of Children” article, of Mafalda looking at a shantytown from a train or bus window, is mind-bogglingly jarring compared to what we see in American comics.
“Calvin and Hobbes” and “Peanuts” had plenty of characters themselves engaged in escapism, in imaginary worlds.
What “Peanuts” particularly featured I’d call “avoidism”; the leaving out of countless real-life factors that are grist for Quino’s mill.
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DanielBT says:
…BTW, thanks Mike for doing those translations. What we need are scanlators for European comics…
—————–
You’re welcome! And that would indeed fit quite a need. Though I don’t know when – if ever – I’ll get around to it, I’d downloaded all the pages of the Oesterheld/Breccia “Che” comics bio a while back, meaning to translate (however inadequately) in into English.
Whatever one thinks of Guevara – and my opinion is not very high* – “Che” is a remarkable, dazzling achievent: http://www.scribd.com/doc/21155566/Vida-del-Che-Guevara-Comic-Oesterheld-A-Breccia-E-Breccia .
* Check out the TCJ message board thread where I tear into Spain’s hagiographic bio for its countless distortions of Che’s murderous, tyrannical career: http://archives.tcj.com/messboard/viewtopic.php?t=5786 . That the right-wing dictators he opposed were often even more vile doesn’t paste a halo above Guevara’s photogenic head…
There is a site for translated comics here: http://comixinflux.com/
The idea is you buy the original and site offers translations. Not quite as convenient as scanlations but much less ethically dubious.
Daniel, I share your enthusiasm for Quino’s mostly single-panel cartoons. Since most of them have no text, they are fairly easy to acquire and enjoy even for non-Spanish readers. This big compilation is a good place to start.
Mike, it’s true that Peanuts avoids politics and social issues, but it is unflinching in its treatment of personal ones, which is part of what makes it such a great work.
Matthias, somehow that link to the compilation didn’t come through.
I’d say Peanuts also focuses on spiritual and philosophical issues as well as personal ones….
Just fixed it.
And yes, I agree totally re: Peanuts and what it focuses on.
Matthias Wivel, you said that Peanuts didn’t have much escapism. You’re obviously forgetting about Snoopy’s imagination, wanting to be anything other than a dog, writing awful novels to publishers, and his constant fights against the Red Baron.
Also, I imagine European comics only WISHES they had the kind of overexposure problems Manga scanlations have. They certainly could use the publicity.
As for the Quino books, the silent ones are easy enough to understand, but it’s the wordier ones that require a dictionary to decipher. Those are the ones I have trouble with.
Oh, I wasn’t saying that the characters aren’t vying for escape, just that the strip doesn’t provide its *readers* much in the way of escapism.
What a great review, I really enjoyed that.