BENGALURU: Indian comics and Tinkle are almost synonymous with each other and Savio Mascarenhas has a huge role to play in it. The art director of Tinkle was at Bangalore Literature Festival where he conducted a workshop for children on how to create a superhero. “The whole idea was not to show your drawing skills. It was about playing around with their fertile imagination. One of the kids said the super weapon should be a frying pan. It’s amazing how children think.”
Mascarenhas feels Tinkle has changed over the years. The simplicity of the characters appealed to children earlier, but now they are exposed to so many super heroes and villains. He says art directors are always experimenting with characters.
“These days, even villains are quite popular with kids. They know that at the end, a hero always wins, but the villain is always the cooler one with more powers and gadgets. That’s why Tantri from Tinkle’s Tantri the Mantri gets the throne after 35 years of struggle. We got a lot of letters from children saying they were happy to see Tantri finally getting the throne. But we do have a twist which is going to come out by the end of this month,” says Mascarenhas, who completed 25 years with Tinkle this year.
Apart from bringing in new characters, Mascarenhas also mentions that they rejuvenate the characters according to day and age but some things are left unchanged.“Suppandi started off as a servant at people’s houses but now it’s a little odd for children to relate to that. So now we made Suppandi work at offices, who owns a house for himself and has his set of friends too. But if you see, we have never taken off (Shikari) Shambu’s hat. There have been instances where the writer tried to take the hat off Shambu’s head. I follow their script while sketching but I will cleverly do something to hide Shambu’s face,” says Mascarenhas, who has been illustrating iconic comic characters like Suppandi and Shikari Shambu since 1998.
Suppandi is turning 39 on November 14 this year, so are the characters ever going to grow old? “Children love the characters as they are. We had created little Shambu and little Suppandi to figure out their past. We have not gone to that stage where have thought about what they will do when they grow old, but that’s again an interesting concept.”
With no formal training, Mascarenhas started his career as a freelance illustrator. Unaccustomed to technicalities of being an illustrator, he got a lot of encouragement from Anand Pai, popularly known as Uncle Pai, the founder of Amar Chitra Katha and Tinkle, and Reena Puri, the then-editor of Tinkle, who advised him to start drawing his comics book.
Later, he decided to give it a shot and from there, he learnt different aspects of illustration. Mascarenhas officially joined Amar Chitra Katha on January 2, 1994, a job offer he calls a “New Year gift” from Uncle Pai.