Banned Books
Memín Pinguín is a comic character from Mexico. Stories featuring him, a very poor Afro-Mexican boy, first appeared in the 1940s and have remained in print since. The character is known as Memín Pingüín by some Mexicans due to a publisher's change, when they found that the word pingo, whence pinguín, was a slang term for "penis" in some countries, but later it was restored to Pinguín.
Memín was a creation of the late and famed writer Yolanda Vargas Dulché, and currently, there are talks about making a motion picture based on the magazine and its characters.
Memín was first featured in the 1940s in a comic book called "Pepín" and was later given his own magazine. The character originally was created by Alberto Cabrera in 1943, and later was drawn by Sixto Valencia Burgos. Sixto exaggerated the character by the instruction of Yolanda Vargas Dulché. Sixto also cites Ebony White as an influence. The original series had 372 chapters printed in sepia, and it has been republished in 1952 and 1961. In 1988 it was re-edited colorized, and in 2004 was re-edited again. Sixto still works on the comic, updating the drawings (cloth styles, settings and backgrounds) for the reeditions. It contains comedy and soap opera elements.
What is perhaps most noticeable
about Pinguin from a casual visual inspection is that he has "exaggerated features, thick lips and wide open eyes," as one blogger described him (while nonetheless suggesting that the cultural distinctions between America and Mexico might serve to justify or exonerate the stereotype). While I was reading over some of these entries, including the Wikipedia entry on the character, my three year old daughter looked over my shoulder and said, "Daddy, who's the monkey on your computer?" That would arguably serve to suggest that that the depiction of the character is indeed, as another blogger put it, more "simian than sapien."
While the...
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