COMING OF AGE

The comics industry sees a huge market with the foray of bigwigs like Marvel and Virgin. India Today's Swagata Sen reads between the lines.

Lee Falk would've been proud. After generations of comic readers had read tacky translations of his comic strips for years, referring to Phantom as Betaal and Devil (the wolf) as Bagha, finally, an Indian comic book publishing house was naming itself after him, and pledging to launch a revolution.

Phantomville, a nascent publishing house run by Sarnath Banerjee and his friend Anindya Roy receives at least two manuscripts a month. And they don't comprise just words. There are words all right, but they are merely to tell the story more acutely. The story in these manuscripts is told through comics. And finally, these comics are on Indian subjects, written for and by Indians. Reviews suggest it will be some time before these youngsters get their act right, but it's definitely a start. Banerjee and others like him are convinced there's a comics revolution around the corner, all it needs is for "more artists to be smoked out of their fox holes and supported."

Once upon a time, comics were for Sunday morning laughs. Then, comics created superheroes, and impossible-to-defeat villains. After some time, they refused to call themselves comics at all, as Garfield or Charlie Brown or Calvin talked of greater things and universities all over the world even discussed the underlying philosophies behind the sparse words in bubbles accompanying the visuals.

In India, the comics industry never really took off even though the country records sales of over five million English comics books annually, and an estimate of close to 30 million if vernaculars are included. One of the reasons for this was the easy availability of translated foreign comic books - Indrajaal Comics had Phantom, Mandrake the magician and Flash Gordon from outer space speaking in Indian languages. Archie, Spiderman and Tintin were sold at every small-town bookstore. Among local comics, characters such as Diamond Comics' Chacha Choudhry and those from Tinkle ruled the roost even a decade ago, but with a constantly digitized and Pogo-ised generation, brought up on doses of Xbox fare, even a man whose brain worked faster than a computer (which computer program does it run on, kids would probably ask these days) and with a primitively-clad assistant from Jupiter, was losing out to sleek pocket monsters and puff girlpower; his turban and white moustache was no match for the rapid urbanization that the 21st century child was going through. Even among foreign comics, supermen from Krypton in red underwear were stuff their parents read about.

But just as India has become the target of every multinational of reckoning simply because of the sheer numbers, the comics industry sees a huge market there for the taking. Asia, it is estimated, will be responsible for 70 per cent of comic book sales in the next decade. Already, the Japanese and Korean comics versions manga and manhwa respectively are becoming hugely popular all over the world. India has always had a base in this type of visual storytelling with its Amar Chitra Katha drawing on real heroes, literally. With the right moves, India, whose comics industry is under Rs 100 crore now, could quadruple in just 10 years.

And what better way to demonstrate that the market in India is getting bigger and bigger than the bigwigs such as Marvel and Virgin comics making a foray here? A couple of years ago, when Marvel had a not-so marvelous brainwave to Indianise Spiderman, calling him Pavitra Prabhakar (Peter Parker to the purists) and substituting his tights for a dhoti, they soon realised it was not so easy. If they wanted a dhoti-clad hero, they already had Chacha. It needed better retailing and marketing.

It remains to be seen whether virgin Comics LLC can achieve that and bring about that much-awaited comic-book comeback in India, but cashing in on this growing market with Indian heroes and drawing heavily on mythology, we seem to have a winner. Virgin Comics, based out of New York, is the result of a collaboration between Gotham Chopra's (Deepak Chopra's son) Gotham Entertainment Group, Richard Branson's Virgin and filmmaker Shekhar Kapur.
Launching characters such as Devi, The Sadhu and a remake of the Ramayana (a perennial favourite with animators), the series draws heavily on the Japanese manga tradition and darkens the characters sufficiently by infusing elements such as reincarnations, the dark underworld and its lords and mystic powers, all of which, post the Harry Potter wave, seems to go down well with readers.

And a comic comeback is not just about numbers. When it comes to reach, there are the likes of Sharad Saxena, who have taken the comics movement in India to where it matters. Saxena, who is responsible for the World Comics'
movement in the Indian subcontinent, has been working with comics for over eight years now, the highlight of which has been a small booklet, under the label Underground Comics, which he and his TV journalist friend Rahul Pandita drew up two years ago after the infamous Manipur killing of Thangjam Manorama Devi by the army, and the subsequent naked protests of the women.
For lack of marketing and funds, the booklet might not have reached those who matter, but several NGOs since then have been using it as an information tool in the northeastern states. Meanwhile, Saxena is on a mission to do what he does best, he is teaching villagers to draw and get their messages across through comics. He teaches them the basic tenets of graphic art, and they are then encouraged to draw it out. "Our rich story telling culture needs to be told visually. Once that happens, the comics scenario in India will change," he says.

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