A Look At The Funny Side Of Life, Through Poems And Cartoons

That I’m a Shakespeare or Shelly I never croon.
But courtesy Edward Lear I love to lampoon
For every rhyme there’s a reason
Whatever the weather or blessed season
Then with my pen and paint I light up my thoughts into a Limertoon

Limertoon’, the portmanteau of limerick (a five-line poem with rhyme scheme AABBA) and cartoon, was coined by the man who loves wordplay; his verse above elaborates this reasoning. Even his own pseudonym, Alexyz, was inspired by Anthony Quinn’s ebullient character Alexis Zorba in Zorba the Greek (1964), as an attempt to outshine competition with a common Christian name, Alex Fernandes. The Mumbai born-bred St Xavier’s College alumnus gave up on his football dreams after an injury, joined and quit advertising within a year because “I couldn’t keep telling lies”, moved to Siolim to start an NGO with friends, before switching to cartooning fulltime.

The 78-year-old started out as a sports cartoonist with O’Herald—as the paper’s first cartoonist—and launched two books: Sportoons, during the 1982 Asian Games, and Howzatt! Century of Cricket Cartoons—India’s first book of cartoons on the game. After a shift of interests to environmental degradation, mining and urban encroachment plaguing Goa, he authored three books, Goa Paradise Lost; Goa…Goaing…Goan…Gone…?; and Oh To Be in Goa.

While Alexyz’s cartoons can be mistaken for Mario Miranda’s—both have wide-eyed buxom women and potbellied men with diverse personality traits, hairdos, and someone in the crowd is almost always polka-dotted—he says the Padma Vibhushan awardee was incomparable with a different artistic bent. “He was not a political cartoonist, and more of an illustrator, but I use colour pencils.” Miranda’s cartoons have a jocular vibe, but Alexyz’s technique of delivering hardened truths with a melodic verse plus lively sketch, can make your skin crawl. Cartoons like his crucified Fr Stan Swamy—a reaction to the apathy and injustice that led to the tribal rights activist’s death—earned him the moniker ‘cartoon terrorist’ in the newsroom. Alexyz, however, always under a hat, flashing a toothy grin, is known as “a happy, young man” in Goa, who revived the San Jao boat parade. He wants to leave behind “a little legacy” by penning an autobiography “only after he finishes publishing a list of titles pending and puts in order some 15,000 sketches lying about the house. “I can be very disorganised,” he signs off with a chuckle.

(This appeared in the print edition as "Rhyme & Reason")