Born in Trieste on May 7th 1965 Mario created his first comic character; Polip king of the seas at a very young age. In fact he was so young that he put letters randomly in balloons because he couldn’t yet write.
During his days at university Mario is blown away by Master Miyazaki’s “Castle in the sky Laputa” and it was then that he decided that he wanted to pursue a career as a storyteller and an artist. Consequently, he set aside his studies in marketing (though he still graduated in Economics with a thesis on the distribution of comics) to focus on becoming a professional comic creator. In 1990 he got his first short story Holly Connick published in the magazine Fumo di China.
In ’91 Mario began collaborating with writer Michelangelo La Neve illustrating some episodes of the series Dipetimento ESP for the magazine Intrepido.
Mario joined the staff at Sergio Bonelli Editore in 1991 working on the series Nathan Never and 3 years later won the premio Albertarelli with issue 31 titled “Il Canto della Balena”. The following year he started working on the series Legs Weaver for which in 1999 he wrote the script for the special issue 4 titled “L’Immortale”.
In 2000 Mario teamed up with Luca Enoch to co-write and illustrate Morgana for the French market which was originally published by Les Humanoides Associes and later also published in Italy, Germany, Portugal Spain and the USA. In 2004 Mario joined writer Kurt Busiek to create a new series titled Redhand which was also published by Les Humanoides Associes.
Between 2006-2009 Mario worked on illustrating various comic covers including Federico Memola‘s series Jonathan Steele published by Star Comics, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, Doctor Fate and Shadowpact for DC Comics, Skrull Kill Krew for Marvel and Push for Wildstorm. During this time Mario also collaborated with acclaimed writer Christos Gage on the four issues limited series X-Men and Spider-Man.
Mario worked more for Marvel between 2009 and 2010 illustrating a five-pager written by Bob Gale for “Amazing Spider-Man” issue 600 and doing interior artwork for the following issue. He also renewed his collaboration with Christos Gage on another four issue mini-series “Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four”.
In 2011 Mario collaborated with Matheiu Lauffray, Tirso and Zhang Xuaoyu on “Les Chroniques de Legion” which was written by Fabien Nury and published in France by Glenat. Two years later French publisher Delcourt released the first “Cutting Edge” book which Mario illustrated for writer Francesco Dimitri. Since then three more books have been released and the last volume is scheduled to be released in early 2015.
Amongst his many influences Mario lists masters Cavazzano, Magnus, Pazienza and Miyazaki with the latter being the reason why Mario became a professional comics creator and not a business consultant.
