Comics Galore!
That Marg, A Magazine of the Arts, in its current edition
should be about Comics in India is a profound statement in itself (an
encyclopaedia of Indian art, the magazine was launched in 1946, with Mulk Raj Anand
as the founding editor). It tables
essays and graphics on the journey of comics from a heady content of
superheroes and teen romances to the concurrent complex narratives;
psychological, theological, scientific, autobiographical, subversive and socio-political
in content, challenging adult readers alike. The present issue of Marg is guest
edited by Aniruddha Sen Gupta.
The fact that there is active exploration and scholarly
studies in universities across the globe and creators prefer to be hailed as
comic creators rather than art-literature artists, or other euphemisms (graphic
novelists, sequential artists etc.) is indicative that comics have arrived in the
high brow milieu of arts. Underhand borrowings of pop artists from comics in
the mid 20th century to an open collaboration between iconic art and comics is fast blurring the lines between
these acclaimed genres
of creativity.
It is indeed interesting to unearth the trajectory of the
comics in India and abroad begun in the 19th century. The process
illuminates the deep troughs that the illustrated art charted, to the sporadic
peaks which began in the latter part of the 20th century. If Punch(UK)
,Raw(US) and Bandes dessinee(France) were making breakthroughs in the West , the
Japanese Manga comics, Avadh Punch and Indrajaal comics in India were keeping
the fires burning in the East. The avant garde
came in through Art Spiegelman’s
Maus (holocaust narrative), Osamu
Tezuka’s eight-part Buddha biography, and
in India Sarnath Bannerjee’s Corridor,
Orijit Sen’s River of Stories( the first
graphic book in India ). The piece de resistance of the Indian series would be the
ingenious Amruta Patil’s Kari (a landmark contribution to the burgeoning genre of comics).
Indian traditional visual narratives of art like Bengal Patachitras,
Togalu Gombeyatta(a puppetry form from Karnatka) inform and inspire
experimentation in contemporary engagements of image and words in comics. The
generative oral tradition is subverted at times to hear new voices and view the
frame story from a different perspective. The long love-affair of India with
the two epics- Ramayana and Mahabharata thrives still, and similar is the
preoccupation of Japanese Manga with historic Japanese art. But then, Manga has
diversified and produced prolific works and its story of exploration and
breaking barriers continues steadily.
The piece on Art in Comics by Gokul Gopalakrishnan takes the
reader into shared spaces of art and comics. The fledgling forays of comic
creators to incorporate art images as book covers (Army @Love) or interweave
art into their storyline frames gives birth to a new hybrid language. A case in
example would be the subversive adaptation of the painting Whistler’s Mother in
Alan Moore’s and Eddie Campbell’s comics masterpiece From Hell. Exploring the transfiguration of Andrew
Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World, Amruta
Patil explains: “The readers’ decoding of such odes in my work is not of utmost
importance. It is an additional layer that may be enjoyed by ones in the know,
or by those returning for a re-read. There is, of course, a deliberate
reference being made to the original master painting- i hope to be ‘found out’
but it isn’t essential to the basic reading of the tale. Some references are
teasing play on the original, some are more direct. There are parallel
conversations going on with different readers- conversations with readers cued
in with art history. That is the fun of this medium, no? So much room to play!” It is yet discerning
for a viewer to see comic strips transposed on gallery walls, with many
overlapping elements- murals, graffiti, a stand-up narrator Flaneur in the City
at Galleryske Bangalore.
The craft of the genre is skilfully depicted through
original image and text drawings of Orijit Sen (diary notes of River of Stories
– Narmada dam and tribal habitats) and the Amruta Patil’s City of the Ninth
Art. Orijit Sen cannily captures the
being of the place, the inter-textuality of emotions and deep rooted
connections of land and its people in the face of man-made insensitively
planned makeovers. Angouleme France’s the city of ninth art (annually hosts the
International Comics festival since Francis Groux ‘fried public imagination’
with comic art in 1972) where artists breathe and sleep comics, opens new doors
to readers about the culture of studio spaces and collaborative art. Amruta attended a residency programme (“ in
fact i have never been in a place with so many human beings who do what I do
and do it better”) here. She packs a punch with one liners, craftily taking the
reader through an innovative experience accompanied by images.
Vivek Menezes folds in a slew of information and his
personal take on comics, as great reading material for kids today. A
surreptitious reading (it was frowned upon by elders and thought that it made teenagers
go berserk; remember the comic book villain - Dr Fredric Wertham, the
psychologist who campaigned against comics)has moved to covetous realm of
sought-after volumes ( Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic design by Chip Kidd, Manga
Guide to Physics) by parents to guide their
children in their school curriculum and facilitate breaking hard nuts
like Genetics and the Periodic Table. He cautions parents against Robert Crumbs
adaptation of Genesis as a graphic novel “keep it waiting till they grow-up”( being an
Indian parent, his bookshelf creaks heavy under academia comic books rather
than fun, wicked cartoon series). His
own journey with comics makes an interesting read. He puts himself on the page
– a ‘foundering Indian kid’ in 1980s America who became hooked on New Yorker’s hilarious cartoons and Doonesbury and Bloom
County which turned on light bulbs pop!pop! in his mind about a foreign
culture, kept his boat floating on an even keel in international waters.
Grassroot comics harbour powerful socio-political movements
in the country and abroad. World Comics India, a voluntary non-profit
organization in Delhi, trains ordinary citizens to bring forth underlying
societal problems into focus for public scrutiny and debate through scroll-like
comic graphics and punchy text. The common man is thus armed in remote locales,
says Shared Sharma and unheard voices sound without pulling any punches into
the mainstream arena. Targeted pithy prose and powerful imagery packs in a
punch - an effective medium being
practiced in North East, Rajasthan, Nepal....The Don Bosco citizen journalism one-day workshop that I
attended at ICG, with Stefan K and Gauri Gharpure as efficient resource persons, would do good to
incorporate comic journalism (Comics Power!) for their students beginning with
Goa and its myriad issues.
Shut Up About the Market and Show Me Your Internal Organs –
by Rakesh Khanna , is a shake-up to Indian comic creators to sharpen their ware
and come out with avant-garde work, to really make a mark out there on a global
platform.
The comparative study between eye-popping works available on a
platter in the US, Japan and European countries– leaves a lot to be desired in
the Indian comic scene. The article intrigued me to go looking for comic
books on Flipkart – Eve Gilbert’s Tits,
Ass and Real Estate, Linda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons! David B’s Epileptic.
He gives it to them( an appreciative thump) who can do it: “It’s easy for me to
crib about the Indian comics that I am not seeing, I am not a comics artist,
and I never will be. But most importantly I am too much of a coward. I believe
drawing a really great comic takes courage. If you are drawing an
autobiography, it takes the courage to look hard at the ugliest things you’ve
done in your life and figure out why you did them; to publish your secrets for
the world to see. If you are drawing a fictional universe, it takes courage to spend
years working obsessively and in isolation, and in the end, the market might
completely ignore you – and you will be another broke, starving artist. That’s
what I think it takes to make a really great comic.”
The reading list at the end of the magazine is to aid the
interested reader to find what is out there of value in the world of comics – a
prompt to devour the books and spread the word around, for nothing works better
than a good word.
That now your interest is piqued and you will go
in search of the comic world that we live in through the world of comics is a
certainty. Go ravish ‘em!
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