Biography

- Manohar Malgaonkar

Mario Miranda’s first ever offer of an all-expenses-paid foreign trip came when he was invited by the United States Information Service, the USIS, to confer with cartoonists of America. As he had to fly by a U S airliner which stopped in Tel Aviv, the Israeli Government asked Mario to stop by in Israel as their guest, to meet some of the country’s prominent cartoonists. For a Christian, this was like an invitation to do a pilgrimage of the Holy Land. True, Mario Miranda, even though a member of the Roman faith is not particularly devout, nonetheless he could not help being awed.
Professionally, this trip was rewarding. He met and exchanged views with some of Israel’s own practicing cartoonists, among whom he remembers Dosh Katz and somewhat to his surprise a female of the species, Friedel Sterm.

This first trip to the Holy Land was to prove an auspicious one, as a forerunner of similar bonanzas. He continued on his trip to the United States.

The issue of The Illustrated Weekly of India dated June 2, 1974 carries an article written by Mario Miranda which describes this trip. The article contains some cartoons too, both by Mario himself as well as a representative sampling of the cartoonists of America such as Ed Fisher of The New Yorker, Bud Blake and Gordon Bess plus a tiny one by Charles Schultz which bears the inscription: To Mario in Friendship!

He took in most of the major cities such as San Francisco, Denver, Washington, New Orleans, New York and an excursion to a remote village called Santa Rosa where Charles Schultz lives in splendour, almost like a Raja. “Even by American standards Schultz is fabulously rich,” comments Mario.

Over beers or doughnuts and coffee, Mario Miranda and the American cartoonists he saw exchanged ideas about their work and gave each other signed cartoons.

Mario says that he learned quite a lot about his business from his American colleagues. He even invaded the fortress in New York where a dozen or so of the sanest men in America work like crazy to produce a magazine called MAD, and was seen by the editor-in-chief in his office. Mario’s cartoon of this meeting shows a huge man who resembles an ageing Sumo wrestler, dressed in athletic T-shirt and brief shorts, bent over the handlebars of his tiny exercise-bike, pedaling away furiously as he talks about the business of cartooning to a visitor nattily turned out in a suit and wearing a tie, the creator of Miss Fonseca, Mario Miranda.