There’s Something About Mario

This book makes you do the unthinkable: thank Vasco da Gama for setting foot on Indian soil. And his successor Albuquerque for shifting Portugal’s Asian capital from Kochi to Goa. Lisbon’s men gave Mario Miranda a great place to grow up and outgrow. They packed into the 16th century Konkan land every sign of a European conquest. Prelates and proctors to tailcoats and trousseaus. Seasoned by the West Coast sun through some 400 years, this was the landscape that greeted the six-year-old when dad, Daman’s administrador, retired and the family moved back to the ancestral home in Loutolim. The house itself, then over 250 years old with 30-odd rooms, was a world to explore. A Eurasian galaxy was waiting outside.  

The boy loved the wicked pencil. He began a diary of doodles that grew into sketches, portraits, caricatures and cartoons. A spread of visual parody the European Empire builder hadn’t bargained for. A spread that marks Mario out as our only outdoor cartoonist — a comic artist more than a cartoonist. One who learned firsthand from what he saw around him. Not from the printed cartoons of venerable seniors as is customary. An early influence of Ronald Searle the master himself talked him out of. The acolyte was told to go and find his signature tune. He did and how! Goa gave him enough to look at and a challenge few deadline-dreading cartoonists would touch. To include rather than exclude. Mario is so inclusive that when you step into a café with his wall-scale mural, the comic frame grabs you. Grin like Godbole and bear it. 

Meticulous detailing of architectural nuances, the irresistible impulse to ink in windswept clotheslines to that odd cat on a bar stool, the graphic wit to convert an accidental drop of black ink into a crow in flight. All of this goes into the Mario backdrop against which is set a carnival of comedy. Dogs jumping out of the frame, men up to no good and women in all shapes and sizes — unlike Don Martin’s, the maddest of Mad magazine’s madmen, whose overweight women, editors feared, would crash through the page.
This tropicalised Euro idiom travelled as easily as the Miranda couple. To every nook and naughty corner of the world....