COMIC KAUN?

Contextualising Comics in India

Mridula Chari

A project report submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for

the Degree of Master of Arts in Media and Cultural Studies

School of Media and Cultural Studies

Tata Institute of Social Sciences
Mumbai

2013
 DECLARATION

I, Mridula Chari, hereby declare that this dissertation entitled ‘Writing the Image: Contextualising
Comics in India’ is the outcome of my own study undertaken under the guidance of Dr K.P.
Jayasankar, Professor, Centre of Critical Media Praxis, School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata
Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. It has not previously formed the basis for the award of any
degree, diploma, or certificate of this Institute or of any other institute or university. I have duly
acknowledged all the sources used by me in the preparation of this dissertation.

4 March, 2013 (Mridula Chari)

 CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that the dissertation entitled ‘Writing the Image: Contextualising Comics in India’ is
the record of the original work done by Mridula Chari under my guidance and supervision. The results
of the research presented in this dissertation/thesis have not previously formed the basis for the award
of any degree, diploma, or certificate of this Institute or any other institute or university.

(Dr K.P. Jayasankar)

Professor
4 March, 2013 School of Media and Cultural Studies
 The mating of drawing with caption has produced a new
but very dependent and transitory pictorial genre.

The future will be more informed than delighted by it.

Clement Greenberg

Steig’s Cartoons: Review of All Embarrassed by William Steig

(1945)
 ABSTRACT

The comic book industry in India today is seeing an unprecedented boom in sales and public
visibility, a trend that is mirrored in developing markets across the world. With the inauguration of an
Annual Comic Convention at New Delhi, comic book readers and artists are regrouping and mingling
to an extent not seen before. As the points of interaction increase, the kind of content that is produced
also changes accordingly, as well as the manner of expression of fandom.

This research aims to examine the causes for this apparent surge in publishing and interest as well as
the spaces that have risen around it. It also studies some of the texts of the last decade to see how
inclusive or not this new boom is and how comic books, as a foreign form adapted to local talents,
negotiate between accurate and desired representations, and creative expression.
 CONTENTS

List of illustrations v

Acknowledgments vi

1 Introduction 1

2 Ramifications of Spatiality 11

3 Multimodal Reading 23

4 The Contested City in Indian Graphic Novels 36

5 Conclusion 48

Appendix
I Interview schedule 53
II Ancillary images 55

References 59
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig 3.1 Internet usage statistics for 2011 (International Telecommunication Union 2011) 24
Fig 3.2 Internet usage graphic (BestEdSites.Com n.d.) 25
Fig 3.3 Comic Books Ordered by Comics Shops in North America (in units) (Miller 2011) 28
Fig 3.4 Common social networking icons 33
Fig 3.5 Sousanis (2012) on the multilayered nature of thinking in and through comics 34
Fig 4.1 The narrator’s grandfather stands above Kolkata (Banerjee 2007, 179) 38
Fig 4.2 Photograph and sketch merged seamlessly (Banerjee 2007, 184) 39
Fig 4.3 Digital Dutta (Banerjee 2007, 90) 40
Fig 4.4 ‘Talking heads’, extract (Banerjee 2007, 175) 40
Fig 4.5 The city reclaimed (Banerjee 2007, 213) 41
Fig 4.6 Indira Gandhi as Mother Moon (Ghosh 2010, 46) 42
Fig 4.7 Parvez and VP narrowly escape (Ghosh 2010, 22) 43
Fig 4.8 ‘Kitne aadmi they?’ (Ghosh 2010, 182) 44
Fig 4.9 Things fall apart (Ghosh 2010, 167) 44
Fig 4.10 Riding the skies (Ghosh 2010, 222) 46
Fig 4.11 Calcutta wildlife (Banerjee 2007, 126) 46
Fig 6.1 McCloud on the location of comics (McCloud 1993, 51) 55
Fig 6.2 McCloud on the limitations of definition (McCloud 1993, 22) 56
Fig 6.3 A Campfire title 56
Fig 6.4 Non-Hindu mythological formulation 56
Fig 6.5 Sita’s Ramayana by Samhita Arni and Moyna Chitrakar which uses Patua art 57
Fig 6.6 Abhishek Singh’s recently released Krishna: A Journey Within 57
Fig 6.7 Damned Book 1 by Untitled Creations, an independent publisher 58
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are some people without whom this dissertation would not have been made.

To Dr K.P. Jayasankar, my research guide, my thanks for his continuing and active encouragement
and support throughout this process

My respondents, who were all unanimously willing to talk to me despite long periods of non-
communication and equally long meandering interviews

P. Niranjana, to whom I turned at moments of crisis and utter panic, but more importantly, in
excitement at discovering new possibilities

K.V. Nagesh and those long rambling discussions that were key to the formation of many of the ideas
in this research

Shruti Ravi, a conveyor of soothing words before interviews, enthusiastic company at the Comic Con
and deliverer of wild-eyed pep talks and motivational speeches

Nithila Kanagasabai, part panic board, part partaker in helpless hilarity at the impossibility of
completion

My friends in and out of class: Abha, Nitya, Shivani, Ananda, Pratik, Sriram; faculty and staff at
SMCS

Prashant for his creative input and of course, Appa and Amma, for enduring frequent complaint
sessions and helping me through all those moments of doubt with the vague conviction that yes, one
must finish this research, because after all, “whose daughter are you?”

My sincere thanks to all of you for your constant encouragement and support.
 1

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

1.1 OVERVIEW

1.1.1 Towards a Definition

The use of illustrations to depict narratives is not a particularly new concept. Illustrations have been
an integral part of many texts all over the world for thousands of years. Millennia-old cave paintings
depicted hunting scenes. Egyptian hieroglyphs were an early form of pictorial writing. Japan, from the
11th to the 16th century, had the tradition of ‘emaki-mono’ or ‘picture scroll’. The Tale of Genji, an
immensely long narrative written in 1000 CE by an unknown Japanese courtier, was illustrated on a
picture scroll about a hundred years later. In India, statues carved on temples depict events from epics,
while folk art forms, like kavads in Rajasthan, have stories painted on them that are narrated with the
aid of a storyteller. In 12th century Europe, the Bayeux tapestry was made; it is a 250-foot long work
that tells in entirely graphic form the story of how in 1066 William of Normandy arrived in Britain
and became its king.

With examples as early as cave painting and Indus Valley hieroglyphs, the primacy of image over
word has often been tom-tommed by those who seek legitimacy for the comic book as an art form. No
matter the variety of its possible antecedents, such attempts to link the history of comic books and
illustrated narratives to a perceived glorious and culturally rich past is no more than an attempt to give
it some grounds for authenticity as a valid form of cultural expression that ought to be taken as
seriously as other narrative forms. This is possibly linked to the relative novelty of the form and it has
only been in the last decade that academicians have begun to move past definitions of comics to a
more comprehensive understanding of the texts themselves and the market forces surrounding them.

Nevertheless, it would be instructive to examine what comic books actually are before one delves into
a more detailed study of them. Scott McCloud defines comics as ‘Juxtaposed pictorial and other
images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic
response in the viewer.’ (McCloud 1993, 9) While this definition is certainly functional, it neglects
certain aspects of comic books, such as the manner of its production and consumption in historical
and contemporary terms. It also fails to address the essential mixed breeding of comics as an
intermingling of text and image, or of space and time. A single-panelled image that employs text
within speech bubbles or as descriptive sound effects as a signifier of time, for example, does not fall
 2

within the narrow definition of comic books as sequential images. McCloud acknowledges this
himself and states that this is only a functional definition. (McCloud 1993, 10)

What then, are comic books? If there is a differentiation between cartoons such as those single-
panelled entities found in newspapers and comic strips, is there also a personable difference between
comic strips1 , comic books2 and graphic novels3 ? The differentiation, one posits, lies more in their
agendas and that of the readers, since all three share that basic sequentiality of images juxtaposed with
one another, often in conjunction with textual material. They are neither mere static images nor blocks
of text and their study therefore must be informed by this basic understanding. The two aspects of text
and image, however, do affect how one looks at and reads comics.

While it is true that literacy and the development of iconic images into symbolic ones is an ancient
process rooted in early glyphs and rudimentary textual and pictorial communication processes, there
is some measure of immediacy in certain kinds of pictorial representations, which cannot be equalled
by the exacting level of decoding required by textual literacy. 4 The images of comics therefore work
at a more involved level of decoding.

What must be noted about comic books is that they depend not just on images, but on text as well and
therefore cannot be considered as exclusively belonging to one or another. Further, even those comics
that have an absence of text do depend on temporality to be understood, something that single images
do not require. Whatever its form, the content of comic books has tended towards narrativisation,
rather than mere static representation.

Another temptation is to link comic books with film, although this too can be argued against. Films
exist exclusively in time, moving from one event to the next with no possibility of moving back to
contemplate previous scenes simultaneously with the on-going one. On the other hand, the spatiality
of comic books is among its defining features. This, in conjecture with saccadic tracing,5 demonstrates
that comics invite one to read in a non-linear manner. One therefore needs to develop an entirely new

1
Panelled comic books that do not exceed a page in length, often found recurring in print publications, or online
as webcomics.
2
Longer, more sustained narratives that span more than a page and that are usually found in publications
dedicated solely to comics.
3
A literary term for comic books that is normally used for those comic-style narratives that have lengthy-self-
contained narratives.
4
It is tempting to regard all images as universal, but styles of depiction vary from culture to culture as does the
extent to which one can ‘understand’ or ‘read’ an image. The tokens which even the least complex images use
depend largely on the reader’s integration into a certain cultural paradigm to be interpreted, leading to widely
different readings across time and location. Thus, one cannot state that all images are universally decodable, and
that they might, across all forms, be instantly more accessible than a local textual literacy.
5
The tracing of saccades, or the minute movements of the eyes, has gained pace in recent years, with significant
attention beginning to be accorded to it in theorisation about comics.
 3

mode or strategy of reading that involves unlearning, to an extent, the manner in which one usually
reads.6

In defining comic books, one must look at its existence as a hybrid entity at the juncture of three other
depictive forms viz. literature, film and static images. From literature, it draws text, from film, its
temporality, and from static images, the most striking aspect of its form – spatiality. A prevalent
preoccupation among academicians is the justification of the comic as a form independent of these
others and worthy, therefore, of a dedicated field of study. Scott McCloud, one of the earlier theorists
to write about comics, dwells on this in great length in his book Understanding Comics, and many
academics since have followed this line of reasoning. They note that the temporality of comic books
define and set them apart from other, more static forms such as literary works or paintings. Comic
books depict ‘a whole event […] not just a point in time’ (Saraceni 2003, 7) with each panel and it is
this apparently frozen temporality that sets them apart from other narrative forms.

In the course of this research, I propose to move beyond these early arguments and examine comic
books not as entities of their own, nor as a mere mishmash of text and image, but as popular cultural
products, that although in the West began as a medium of subversion, have now globally been
reduced to yet another object of mass production. The trajectory of the narrative of comic books in
India at present seems to have picked up from the West in its mode of production and it is this recent
boom, reflected the world over, that I wish to examine through my research.

1.1.2 An Abridged World History of Comics

It is difficult to speak of comic books in India without touching upon the place where the medium first
flourished at the turn of the 20th century. Histories of comic books, especially those written by
scholars based in the United States of America, tend to give one the impression that comic books
there emerged and developed in a vacuum, without any reference to parallel thriving industries in
Europe and Japan, not to mention the smaller industries that were also present in countries like
Mexico, Brazil, the Philippines and India. It is, however, not incorrect to suppose that comic books in
their present form originated in continental Europe and came to full development in the USA.

As mentioned earlier, comic historians are inclined to link present-day comics to pre-historic
examples of sequential art. The next event histories refer to is much closer; the first comic book is
generally regarded to have been a 19th century work by Rodolphe Töpffer, sometimes referred to as
the ‘Father of the Comic Book’ (Duncan and Smith 2009, 24). The Swiss artist and teacher published,

6
Cf. Chapter 3 for a more detailed note on multimodal reading.
 4

in 1837, the first of seven ‘picture stories’, entitled Les Amours de M. Vieux-Bois.7 The form had its
ups and downs, spawning on one hand the sort of political cartoons found in Punch, a British
humorous and satirical magazine that coined the term ‘cartoon’, and on the other, more rudimentary
forms where images served more as illustrative accompaniments than as a significant contribution to
the narrative.

In the USA, comic strips began to appear in newspapers towards the end of the 19 th century. It was
Richard Outcault’s strip, Hogan Alley that was the first comic to be anthologised and published in a
separate cheap book called Yellow Kid and sold at newsstands. Other anthologies soon followed after
the immense popularity of Yellow Kid. These publications were generally of a poor print quality and
led almost directly to the bad reputation comic books had for the most part of the 20th century as
imprints of low form and content, not worthy of being taken seriously. As late as the 21st century,
scholars continue to cite contemporary examples of this persisting impression of comics. Paul
Williams and James Lyons note,

Certain articles about comics still perpetuate stereotypes, assuming the medium remains the preserve of
awkward pubescent males, as this example from The Times (London) demonstrates: “COMICS.
Cheap, flimsy, disposable. Scattered next to dirty socks on teenage bedroom floors” (Greenwood 2004,
15). Usually those stereotypes are introduced to disarm a potentially dismissive reaction by preempting
reader skepticism. Nonetheless, this confirms the premise that consumption of comics cannot take
place without apology. (Williams and Lyons 2010, xii)

Comic styles began to be adopted by Hollywood, with characters such as Mickey Mouse already
gaining popularity. In 1938, the first Superman comic book was released. This was the first superhero
to feature in a comic outside the environs of a newspaper. The rising popularity of comics in the USA
had resonances in Japan, where Tezuka Osamu, regarded as the pioneer of manga and inventor of
lasting stories such as Astro Boy, Black Jack, Metropolis and Apollo’s Song, began to usher in a post-
World War II boom in Japanese comics. By the 60s, his characters had become so popular in the USA
that when Tezuka asked two street children in New York whether they had heard of Astro Boy, they
replied in the affirmative. (Natsu 2009, 4)

Although there were successive waves of superhero comics that dominated the American market, in
Europe one saw the rise of such as Moebius and Hergé, with wildly differing styles and readerships,
who nonetheless produced work different from the American staple. The American cultural
domination of the European market could not be entirely effaced, however, and there were
correspondingly many artists who cut their teeth on comics that were either direct translations or
knockoffs of established American superheroes from equally established comic book publishers like
DC and Marvel.

7
This could be transliterated from French as The Loves of Mr. Oldwood
 5

A shift in perceptions about comic books began in the 70s when a series of publications using the
comic book mode and targeted towards ‘mature readers’ began to circulate. The primary audience for
these comics were young adults who had been consumers of traditional ‘superhero’ comics as
children and had outgrown the form, but mature comics, with their wider range of themes, began to
garner a wider audience. Will Eisner’s A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories, published in
1978, was one of the first publications to use the term ‘graphic novel’. The term was meant to cover
works of a more serious and ‘literary’ nature, with much longer, finite narratives that could not be
extended over hundreds of issues. As a concept, it was intended to efface the association of illustrated
narratives with busty women and muscular men dressed in capes and skin-tight leotards.

The 80s saw the market opening up to the popularity of these comics, with terms like ‘graphic novels’
and comics intended for ‘more mature readers’8 beginning to circulate. (Weiner 2010) (Round 2010)
Artists like Will Eisner, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman began to recalibrate the content of comics to
suit older sensibilities with longer, more complicated and more political narratives. Even superhero
comics were revamped for this older audience, with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and
Knightfall receiving critical acclaim. By the 90s, comic books, or as they were then called, ‘graphic
novels’, had begun to be widely accepted. Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1991), a quasi-autobiographical
account of the artist’s father’s experience of the Holocaust, and Persepolis (2000), a French-language
comic by Marjane Satrapi, were much lauded soon after their publication.

By the 21st century, comic books have come to be established as accepted forms of expression, to the
extent of them even being desirable reading material. Leading newspapers regularly review comic
books9 and list the more popular ones in must-read lists. Even academia has moved beyond
apologising for comics, with comics studies now an established discipline in several universities
across North America and Europe.

1.1.3 Cultural History of Comics in India

In India, comics have a history that more or less mirrors the development of illustrated narratives in
the West.10 The form developed first in indigenous political comics and then moved towards
sequential narration. Chandamama, India’s oldest comic book magazine, was established in 1947. Its
content was derived from mythology and Amar Chitra Katha, when it was established in 1967,

8
The DC imprint Vertigo, intended for adult readers, was established in 1993, following a surge in what were
perceived to be more mature comic publications.
9
For example, Mint Lounge, the weekly leisure edition of the business newspaper Mint, regularly featured
comic books and comic book artists from March to June 2012 in almost every other edition.
10
For a more detailed history of Indian comic books, Bharath Murthy’s An Art Without a Tradition: A Survey of
Indian Comics is invaluable.
 6

followed the same format. In 1969, Pran Kumar Sharma created Chacha Choudhary, a localised
superhero, with a brain that was supposed to be a supercomputer.

Comic book houses like Raj Comics, Diamond Comics and Indrajal began to corner the Hindi-
speaking market, while Amar Chitra Katha and its sister publication, Tinkle, monopolised the
English-speaking one. Between them and readily available translations of popular French comics like
Tintin and Asterix, many English-speaking children from the 70s and 80s onwards had access to a
fairly wide range of comics. In the 90s, the sales of Indian comic houses began to falter and access to
comics dipped, corresponding to a global depression in the comic books market. However, by the 21st
century, the industry recovered with a completely different market and sales strategy.

The comic book industry as it is at present is a relatively recent phenomenon. Artists and publishers
have greater communication opportunities, both with themselves and with their target audiences.
Interestingly, artists report that it was the interest of established publication houses that pushed the
first crop of writers to create longer graphic novels that were then marketed as Indian versions of the
global product. The Internet aided this new surge in comic books, but it was the Annual Indian Comic
Convention, a spinoff of Comic Con International: San Diego in the USA that managed to organise
the market comprehensively. This Comic Convention has now completed two successful years in
Delhi, with a third scheduled for February 2013, and also has a packaged Comic Convention Express
that tours Bengaluru and Mumbai between Comic Conventions in September and October.

With the Comic Convention presenting an albeit market-oriented view of comic books on offer, it is
easier to examine emerging styles. Translations of superhero comics like Mandrake and Phantom in
the 1970s and 80s seem to have evolved in two strands: watered-down modern children’s superheroes
like Giddoo the detective dog and, possibly inspired by the success of Amar Chitra Katha,
superheroes rooted in Indian mythology. The latter are often reinterpretations of Indian epics from the
perspective of underdogs like Ravan from the Ramayan and Draupadi from the Mahabharat.

Before the 21st century, only few publications like Tinkle chose to venture into secular grounds, and
none at great length. Sarnath Banerjee’s first graphic novel Corridor, published by HarperCollins in
2005, is an illustrated story of about eighty pages and deals almost exclusively with contemporary
India. This set off a trend of introspective realist narratives that drew from foreign realists like
Marjane Satrapi and Art Spiegelman. Authors like Amruta Patil with Kari and publication houses like
Blaft have taken up comic books in a more sustained manner and one sees newer publications of this
sort even in large book stores.
 7

A significant trend that ought not to be discounted is that of independent artists who move beyond
studio type productions to create shorter self-published stories that can veer from gore to light
accounts. Experimentation with art has also come to the fore, with independent artists using
significantly different, original styles. Publication houses like Tara Books promote the use of
indigenous art to push the standard conceptualisation of comic books as panelled linear narratives.

1.2 AIMS

Through this research, I would like to examine this new boom in the comic book industry and see
what its implications are for artists and readers at large. My research covers a few broad aspects.

Who produces comic books and who consumes them? Do they have a wide readership or even
acceptance? Apart from explicit sexual content, is there a significant difference in comics marketed
for adults and for children in terms of art work? Are there limitations in who can access them? Where
are they consumed? The oldest comic book shop in the world, Lambiek, was opened 42 years ago in
Amsterdam. There are as yet no comic book shops in India; the most we have is dedicated shelves to
comic books in high-end book shops. As the new post-2000 market is so young, one does not yet see
new Indian comic books in second-hand shops. It is to spaces like comic book library, Leaping
Windows, that readers are beginning to turn to access Indian and other comic books legally and with
the convenience of print.

Further, I wish to examine the reasons for the boom itself. Casual conversations with comic
academicians across the world at a global conference held in Oxford revealed that this recent boom in
the comic book industry in India has also taken place in countries across the world, with developing
countries like Brazil and the Philippines especially producing a large volume of new, uncharted work.
My hypothesis is that a combination of natural market forces in conjunction with a rising visual
literacy engendered by the Internet that encourages users to combine both images and text while
reading and which also provides a more direct platform for artists and readers to interact have
contributed to the rise in popularity of comic books.

Finally, the new market gives artists an unprecedented amount of creativity; there are as yet no
formulae that one might apply with certainty of success. At most, the mythological comic lends itself
to a formula, but ‘original’ realist and non-realist narratives do not at this point conform to any
patterns. How artists deal with this is of particular interest because of the conflicting influences of
local and global traditions. Independent artists are at a peculiar juncture of being able to follow their
own norms but also being obliged to pay heed to market demands if they wish their comic books to be
 8

read. This involves some amount of compromise, either economic or artistic. My research will
examine how these interplaying forces correspond, through a detailed textual analysis of two texts by
artists supported by established publishing houses.

1.3 RATIONALE

1.3.1 A Personal History

My interest in comics is predicated on an avid childhood consumption of anything one could read. My
reading habits included, though were by no means limited to books meant for children and/or adults,
encyclopaedias, toothpaste tubes and comic books, all of which were subsumed in the category of
‘things to read’. I confess I never glanced for very long at the art, unless it was exceptionally striking.
More often than not, the text of the comics obscured my reading of the accompanying visuals, and
not, as I believe is usual, the other way around. As I grew older, I read comic books less and less, until
by the age of 13, I had weaned myself entirely on to purely prose works. While I encountered comics
intermittently in the intervening years, I did not seek them out, as other more dedicated aficionados
did, but neither did I think they were especially beneath my notice.

By the time I was 19, comic books were what the ‘cool kids’ read. They would rave about Watchmen,
Persepolis, Moebius and other names I did not even vaguely recognise. During this six year hiatus,
comic books were no longer the Amar Chitra Kathas, Tinkles and Archie’s of my childhood. They
were edgy narratives which pushed the boundaries of speculative fiction and non-fiction. After much
coaxing, I read Gaiman’s Sandman and succumbed. This time, it was not the plot, which I found fairly
engaging, but the art that drew me in completely. The pictures were dark and self-indulgent. Entire
pages were devoted to single panels, allowing one to soak in the expanse of the world created by these
artists. The art was no longer a crutch which propelled the plot forward; it was the text that was
secondary to the art. This called for an entirely new, challenging relearning of how one read and
digested information.

Over the next years, I set about devouring the ‘greats’ of Western comic books. I was, however,
stymied by my limited knowledge of comic books and it has only been through this research that I
have moved beyond the American stalwarts to European artists. My knowledge of contemporary
Indian works is also influenced by this period and it has been through artists, publishers and readers
with whom I interacted with at Comic Conventions and in interviews that I have gained much of my
reading knowledge of the current Indian comic book scenario. While I have come a long way since
19, I realise that there is still more to learn about and this research will necessarily be limited in those
aspects.
 9

1.3.2 Academic Understanding

By the 1970s, academic interest in comic books in America was beginning to gain currency,
corresponding to a similar rise in cultural studies. Comic books as a medium of apparently popular
expression began to be studied seriously. Thierry Groensteen, a prominent French academic began to
contribute to comics theory around the 1980s and by the 1990s, there was a wide range of academic
and other work that referred to or dealt extensively with comics.

A certain theoretical frenzy about comics today is understandable, as it has been in other art forms in
periods of their rapid development—think of the debates about painting that roiled Renaissance Italy.
But such intellectual arousal rarely precedes creative glory. (Schjeldahl as cited in Martin 2011)

Martin explains this in her work on the nature of graphic novels. However, as comics are yet to be
located on the plane of academia, much of the comics theory that has emerged until now has been
informed by literary or film studies, by aesthetics, by Marxism, feminism, psychology, philosophy – a
truly interdisciplinary cornucopia that often borrows from the methodologies of cultural studies. A
few practitioners attempt to move beyond comics theory as merely an offshoot of other branches of
study, with the aim to establish distinctly feasible methods or ‘toolbox’ (Kukkonen and Haberkorn
2010) researchers of comics can refer to in the course of their studies. There do remain those who do
not seem perturbed at the lack of structure in comics studies. These, like Scott McCloud and Thierry
Groensteen, produce vastly different work, both almost entirely in the terrain of comics, with little
reference to other academic disciplines.

It is possible that all this posited comics theory will eventually do is borrow methodologies without
referring to their origins, but what is clear even today is that academics have gone beyond apologising
for comics as a form of expression or attempting to define them. The thrust of research today is in
finding a permanent footing in academia through the production of a large corpus of work that varies
across interests, universities and methodologies.

In India, comic books remain at the fringes of academic study. There are very few researchers
working on long-term comic book research projects, and most of these are focussed on comic books
of the past. One exception is Bharath Murthy, the aforementioned Indian comic book historian, who
now works on the growing manga phenomenon in India. I am yet to find any research material on
comic books in India in the present. It is possible that, like this research, others are also in various
stages of completion, or have not been disseminated widely. If this is the case, one hopes that through
digital projects, researchers in this relatively nascent field will be able to share resources more easily.
 10

Nevertheless, it remains that as far as I can tell the work I propose to do through this research has not
yet been examined in India. This makes the motivation for this research somewhat more interesting
than it might have been in a different context.

1.4 METHODOLOGY

As mentioned above, theorists interested in comic books often have to search a long way to find
methodologies appropriate to their research. Fortunately, this has not been my conundrum. It has been
fairly evident since the very beginning that my research depends more on feedback from producers
and consumers involved in the comic book industry and not as much on the textual substance of
comic books.

To this effect, during the course of my research, I conducted interviews with artists based mostly in
Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru, which are also the locations of the Annual Indian Comic Convention
and its offshoots. I spoke to readers who have been following the industry closely as well as to
aspiring artists. I also conducted a basic survey of readers at the convention and elsewhere, all of
whom are familiar with Indian comics.

I attended three Comic Conventions – the annual one in Delhi in February 2012 and the Express
version at Mumbai in September 2011 and 2012. These Conventions informed the drift of my
research. As a supplement to this, I have done a textual analysis of two texts that deal with middle-
class concerns of urbanity and space.

Finally, in September 2012, I attended and presented a paper at the First Global Conference: The
Graphic Novel, organised by Inter-Disciplinary.Net. A revised version of this paper is included as the
fourth chapter in this research. At the conference, I interacted with academicians from all over the
world. Topics ranged from discussions of postcolonial comics to new methods of comic making in the
digital age. Some of these discussions have informed my research to an extent.

I have attempted to read extensively on contemporary comics theory from around the world and
attempted to draw, like other theorists from different disciplines viz. aesthetics, semiotics, space,
cyberculture and visual literacy.
 11

CHAPTER 2

RAMIFICATIONS OF SPATIALITY

2.1 INTRODUCTION

2.1.1 Space and Access

In 1968, Kees Kousemaker, a Dutch comics enthusiast, opened ‘Europe’s first antiquarian comic
shop’ (Lambiek n.d.) in the middle of Amsterdam. Kousemaker passed away in 2010, but the shop
continued to thrive and it is now the oldest surviving comics shop in the world. Two years later,
comics enthusiasts in San Diego held a fundraiser for a three-day event they called San Diego’s
Golden State Comic-Con that was attended by 300 people. (Comic-Con International: San Diego
2013) This event would later become Comic-Con International, the third largest such convention in
the world, with thousands of attendees flocking to it every year. In 1974, the Festival International de
la Bande Dessinée d'Angoulême was started in France; it is the second-largest comic convention in
the world today. The largest convention, however, is Comiket in Japan that was started in 1975, and at
its latest occurrence saw an attendance of over 500,000 people.

These spaces were established around the time when perceptions about comics were beginning to
change. At the time, comics were still looked down upon as spurious reading material, as has been
mentioned in numerous material and other histories of comics in the USA and Europe. With the
establishment and future success of places like Lambiek and these conventions, comics began to move
more conclusively towards materiality, solidifying it in the popular imagination as something that was
not just an item that could be bought at a store, but was important enough to have stores dedicated to
it.

This was only one of many steps towards the legitimisation of the form as one worthy of inclusion in
a cultural economy that seemed to consider it as a disreputable artefact. Prior to these specialty shops,
comics abroad tended to be distributed through newsstands and by subscription. There was also a
thriving direct market in which publishers corresponded directly with their readers. The underground
nature, as it were, of this distribution of comics did contribute in part to them being considered as
somewhat suspect publications. Ian Gordon says,

One reason comic books enjoy a newly found respectability is that they are no longer a mass medium
with numerous genres of stories printed on cheap paper sold in pamphlet form. … In search of
respectability, at the end of the 1980s the industry and the media heralded the transformation of c omics
into graphic novels—books sold in bookshops rather than on newsstands. (Gordon 2010)
 12

This commercialisation of distribution contributed to the altering perceptions of comics. On one hand,
the more widely accessible comics became, the more likely they were to be seen by a wider audience
who would therefore be able to judge for themselves whether comics were indeed, as was claimed by
various hysterical factions, likely to draw children away from reading more acceptable prose text
works. On the other, by placing comics in legitimate spaces within the purview of the capitalist
system of production, the values attached to them changed accordingly. From getting entire sections
to themselves in bookshops, to being conspicuously consumed in shops dedicated to them, comics
begin to be viewed differently by consumers who ascribed normative values to them that
corresponded to the prevalent capitalist system, i.e. the value attached to legitimate spaces of
distribution was then also attached to the product that was the subject of distribution.

However, there is an important counter point to this: the readers themselves. The more integrated
comics become into a visibly legitimate capitalist system – it is a fallacy to assume that there was
some golden period when they were not11 – the more they isolate those readers who place a premium
on the exclusivity of comics, who relished them for being available to a select few. There is thus a
tension between the larger subset of new comics readers and those who recall an older, less mercenary
system and this is reflected in the kinds of spaces that have risen around comics over time. In The
Production of Space, Lefebvre discusses the impact of hegemony on space, saying,

Is it conceivable that the exercise of hegemony might leave space untouched? Could space be nothing
more than the passive locus of social relations, the milieu in which their combination takes on body, or
the aggregate of procedures involved in their removal? The answer must be no. (Lefebvre 1974, 11)

In this chapter, I seek to examine the spaces in which over the past few years, comic books in India
have begun to appear, from physical spaces to digital ones. The materiality of comics, whether in
content or production, seems to have correspondingly altered in this process of institutionalisation,
leading to various modes of resistance or acceptance by those individuals involved in the process of
creating or consuming. David Harvey speaks of the larger impact of the changing nature of local
spaces on global cultures in The Condition of Postmodernity. While clarifying some issues in this in a
later essay, he says:

Places, like space and time, are social constructs and have to be read and understood as such. There are
ways to provide a materialist history of this literal and metaphorical geography of the human condition
and to do it so as to shed light on the production of a spatially differentiated otherness as well as upon

11
They have in fact, never been less objects of mass production in India, as is evidenced by the decline in the
fortunes of studio comic houses like Diamond Comics, Raj Comics, etc. and the rise in fortunes of those comics
attached to prose publication houses, which are nevertheless not produced on a remotely similar scale as that of
the old regional comics.
 13

the chimerical ideals of an isolationist communitarian politics and the dilemmas of a non-exclusionary
and hence universal emancipatory politics. (Harvey 1993, 25)

Harvey’s understanding of space and place is informed by his position as a Marxist scholar; what is
especially interesting is his insistence on the potential ‘universality’ of place and not its particularity,
as is often suggested by theorists dealing with space and time. His contention that place exists on a
plane with space and time and not apart from them corresponds to the coexistence of these elements in
comic books. Not only do comics represent space and time within themselves, they are a subset of
place as well and cannot be separated from those locations in which they are made available to
readers, as this links them irrevocably to a larger capitalist system of production. The universality-
particularity distinction Harvey draws in his paper is of particular relevance as one cannot assert that
comics exist in vacuums outside these spaces of distribution. This chapter will therefore qualitatively
assess the impact the various avatars of the Indian Comic Con have on both artists and readers.

2.1.2 Reader overview

As part of my data collection, I surveyed a sample of twenty readers about their reading and other
preferences. As my research is based primarily on English language comics, I spoke to those who
were familiar with the recent surge. I spoke to six independent artists who were familiar with the
industry and who had achieved varying degrees of success, to seven readers, as well as to several
others with whom I had shorter, more informal conversations.

Of these, all were English speakers and readers of English comics. Most of them had a history of
reading comics as children, though reading patterns varied. There were far fewer women than men,
though my sample was not exactly representative. The oldest reader was a 38-year-old professional
and the youngest was a 17-year-old student. All seemed to be from a middle class economic
background.

A little over half of these listed manga and anime among their interests. Many listed Amar Chitra
Katha and Hindi superhero comics as their childhood reading preferences. More than half read Asterix
& Obelix and Tintin comics, and only nine listed American superhero comics. Of the above sample,
eight had read graphic novels. All of them have read some Indian comics published in the last decade.

In the qualitative interviews, their reasons for reading comics ranged from them being easier to read
than prose books to merely enjoying the art. A few of them were aspiring comic artists who read in
order to hone their narrative and artistic skills. Many also spoke about the relevance of the plots of
these comics to their own personal lives.
 14

2.2 THE CONVENTIONAL ROUTE

2.2.1 Comic-Con International: San Diego

Global conventions to celebrate art go back a long way: one could number the first global culture and
industry fair, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, held in London in 1851, as
beginning this trend. Of the three largest comics conventions in the world, Comic-Con International:
San Diego (CCI:SD) could be regarded as the most diversified. Its history as meeting point for
practitioners and aficionados of the comic book industry is well-established; by virtue of being the
oldest surviving comics convention, it is also the adjudicator of many significant awards, from the
prestigious Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards (‘the comic book world's version of the Oscars’) to
the less renowned Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award. (Comic-Con International: San Diego 2013).

Now in its 43rd year of existence, CCI:SD is a multi-genre four-day festival that draws participants
from around the world, including a respondent to this research, who was the first Indian to have a stall
there. The venue has become a space for far more than comics, with premier film previews, television
networks vying for event space and even an academic conference that is held in conjunction with the
event. CCI:SD therefore has a unique industrial drawing power that holds immense sway in light of
the crowds that throng it every year, to the extent that tickets have to be booked well in advance.

Over the years, CCI:SD has transcended its origins as a mere event restricted to a few days to become
a spatial entity that occupies not just a physical space but a significant conceptual one in the
importance accorded to it by even those not entirely invested in the comic book industry. As an icon it
has been represented across various popular cultural formats, with mentions in television shows like
Futurama Fry, Entourage, Beauty and the Geek and The OC. Almost every significant name in
American comics, from Don Dougherty to Neil Gaiman has been associated with this convention at
some point or another. The centrality of CCI:SD to the international comic book industry cannot be
disputed, with its premises being the focal point of a great number of publisher-artist-reader
interactions.

However, by virtue of its physicality, CCI:SD is not easily accessible. As CCI:SD itself admits, it can
physically accommodate only a limited number of people. At the last convention, it sold 130,000
tickets across its four days. Tickets for the July 2013 convention start at US$24 for a day pass and go
up to US$175 for a four day pass that includes Preview Night. Children younger than twelve years are
allowed free entry with paying adults. Although it positions itself as an ‘international’ convention, it is
not easy for those who live far away to attend it, thereby being open only to those who have the
required cultural and economic capital. These issues are not unique to CC:SD; closed spaces of all
 15

sorts face similar problems. They now become evident only when compared to events that could be
organised, say online 12 .

In 2007, Tom Johnston-O’Neill, a contributor to The San Diego Participant Observer, mentioned in
an overview of the varied kinds of comics around the world, that the San Diego Comic Con was
somewhat lacking in its representation of non-American comic books.

No doubt the international potential of the convention is hampered by logistics and the cost of long
distance travel and the rising bureaucratic difficulties foreign nationals have in visiting America. But
the organization could perhaps do a better job at promoting the rich diversity of comic creatio ns found
through out the world. (Johnston-O'Neill 2007)

He goes on to question how truly international CCI:SD is, with both participants and attendees being
of a largely North American cast. By 2012, this dimension appeared to be changing. A respondent to
this research whose books and comic imprint were showcased at a stall at CCI:SD says, ‘At the
Comic Con, there weren’t that many people from other countries, so there was a lot of interest in our
books. There were many who wanted to use our books to teach in classrooms. […] We have had
orders from around the world for our books because they give an alternate view of Islam.’

With its limitations on the number and kinds of people who can attend it, CCI:SD assumes a
monopolistic role in the region, if not in the entire international market, wherein it – and by extension,
its organisers – holds sway over market systems, controlling what is thought of as comics and thereby
controlling the kind of work that is produced on a regular basis.

2.2.2 Annual Indian Comic Con

‘A few years back, to avoid the costly expense of traveling abroad to a comic convention, a group of
relatively young people in Delhi decided to create one on their own in their home city,’ says a
document uploaded on the Annual Indian Comic Con (AICC) website. (Annual Indian Comic Con
2012) These Delhi-based professionals were instrumental in kickstarting AICC, an extremely young
copy of CCI:SD. It completed its third consecutive year on 10 February, 2013 at New Delhi, but has
been enterprising enough to reproduce itself in Bengaluru and Mumbai at a smaller scale with some
minor changes in the rest of the year.

AICC takes place at Dilli Haat, a popular open cultural venue in the heart of New Delhi. It has a
combination of outdoor and indoor stalls, with the prime focus being on a large outdoor stage. The
outdoor stalls are the largest at the venue and are taken up by the larger players in the industry:

12
A medium that has its fair share of accessibility issues, from the most basic one of having an internet
connection in the first place, and then having one with sufficient streaming ca pacity to access a live online
event.
 16

Marvel/DC13 , Amar Chitra Katha, Campfire 14 , Bombay Merch15 , film sponsors, etc. There are few
artist-specific stalls at these locations. The indoor stalls have a more vibrant mix of content, with
various independent artists having individual stalls. One also finds smaller publishers here, such as
Blaft Publications, which specialises in experimental fiction and pulp art and World Comics, an
initiative that promotes localised comic-making, as well as merchandising sections that sell special
pens and inks that artists are likely to find useful. All these stalls have been there for all three years of
AICC.

From its first to its second year, the number of people who attended AICC increased from 20,000 to
50,000, according to company figures. The number of participants also went from fifty to eighty.
Most attendees were either college students or working professionals (38% and 37% respectively),
and the rest were school-going children. The gender ratio is 2:1 favouring males, and over half the
attendees reported as belonging to upper middle-class income groups, many of whom spent at most
Rs. 500 at the venue. (Annual Indian Comic Con 2012) At the time of writing this research, figures
for the third year had yet to be compiled, but it seems likely that attendance will have increased since
the first.

In 2011, AICC launched two travelling editions in Bengaluru and Mumbai, called Comic Con
Express. These Express versions were smaller and held in closed venues with fewer stalls. For
example, in 2012, Mumbai had 50 stalls, compared to New Delhi’s 80. Most of these stalls were
merchandise-oriented and had no dedicated section for independent artists who were not attached to
larger publishers, thereby making it a far more corporatized an exclusive venture. The Mumbai
version was renamed the Mumbai Film and Comic Con (MFCC) in its second year in 2012, in an
effort to brand it more closely with the city and correspondingly, there was an increased presence of
filmmakers and producers at the event, from a promotional stall for The Hobbit: There and Back
Again (fantasy seems to be the genre of fiction most often conflated with comics) to sessions with
film critics and authors. Similarly, Comic Con Express: Bengaluru (CCE:B) was also product-
oriented, more intent on establishing relationships between commercial producers and buyers than
between comic books themselves and new readers.

I have attended three of these Comic Cons. The first time was in 2011 at Mumbai when I had only just
begun to mull about comic books as a potential topic for research. In February 2012, I attended the
New Delhi one with what I thought were my research questions then in mind and in September 2012,

13Largest comic book publishers in the USA

14An Indian publication house that deals largely with adaptations of literary and mythological classics
15
Bombay Merch is a popular online retailer that began by selling pop culture posters but has now expanded its
range to include items like bags, t-shirts, wallets, keyrings, etc.
 17

I attended the Mumbai Con again, this time with my finalised research questions and a generally new
perspective on comic books and the industry. My opinions below are formed both on a reading of
those spaces as I experienced them as well as on interviews and informal conversations with
participants and attendees. I spoke informally to far more people than I interviewed at the Comic Cons
before my research questions were finalised. These conversations were in part what led me to settle on
which aspects of the comic book industry I would like to examine. Of these, the conventions
themselves were one as I found that they were unprecedented in drawing together such a large
conglomeration of people with shared interests. This was even more remarkable because comic books
have traditionally been regarded as not worthy of serious attention and the presence of so many
attendees in a single space belied that contention.

This package of Indian Comic Cons (ICC) seems to be well on its way to establishing itself as a
significant presence in the nascent comic book industry in India. It enters the market at a seminal
moment in the industry where it is shaking off the formulaic myth- or superhero-based comic books
of the past in favour of more contemporary narratives that move beyond established storylines. Its
position in modern times is thus directly related to its role as a facilitator between artists, publishers,
commercial manufacturers and readers. Most of the artist respondents to my research kept coming
back to this need to move beyond old narratives and tell their own stories in a more relevant fashion
and they found ICC extremely important to get their message out to a larger audience especially since
they either choose not to associate with larger publishers or are not mainstream enough for them.
They are therefore compelled to resort to other tactics to engage their potential audience, from
publicising themselves online or actively promoting their books at spaces like the ICC.

An artist with a stall at AICC spoke of its impact on his work.

Before the Comic Con, we had to promote our work online through word -of-mouth and that wasn’t
really effective as people weren’t willing to experiment with new stuff. Now that they have met us at
the Con and seen our work before buying, they know that what we have to offer is good and they’r e
more likely to buy our stuff.

Another corroborated this.

The thing about the Con is that it’s not like the San Diego one. We’re still all figuring out how to do it,
we don’t have the pull of big publishers so we have to make it on our own. It kind of gives us the
ground to experiment, to find out what people want to read, whether we want to make the kinds of
things they want. One problem with readers, especially old ones, is that they still want the same
superheroes, they want Amar Chitra Katha, they want DC/Marvel stuff. Only the more advanced kind
reads graphic novels and they are the ones who know that comics can be different, but we want to
reach out to everyone. Our art is different, so are the stories we’re telling. And the Con kind of helps us
get all of that together.
 18

ICC’s value to participants is therefore of particular importance at this moment to aspiring artists in
the comic book industry in India. Its position in the imagination of readers is significantly less
important. It has not yet transcended to that evasive cultural space of ‘cool’; by virtue of its novelty, it
has not yet attracted that special brand of diehard fans who live and breathe comics.

One manner in which it does begin to encourage participation is by hosting Cosplay, a contraction of
‘costume play’, that is popular at comic conventions around the world. Participants of Cosplay dress
up as characters with the aim to achieve as close a likeness to the character as possible. Although this
form of fancy dress, as it were, is said to have originated at the Las Vegas Science Fiction
Convention, it was popularised at Comiket in Japan and is now closely associated with manga. At
ICC, most cosplayers, as those who participate in cosplay are called, dress as manga or anime
characters. The rest seem to be inspired by superheroes as these costumes are easiest to procure. At
the end of each day, the participant with the most innovative or realistic costume is felicitated in front
of the rest of the crowd and wins a prize.

Attendees at various ICC events report that cosplaying is a major attraction as in this place they can
express their fondness for a character or just comic books in general in a space that is open to it and
where they won’t face negative criticism for their flamboyant outfits. Some also spoke informally of
the relief they felt on entering the Comic Con as disapproving stares at non-conformist clothing
outside the venue were changed into approving ones within the venue. The attention they get is also of
some importance, though some spoke of irritation that wearing different clothes was an excuse for
anyone to want to take a picture with them. Nevertheless, the notion of a comic convention as a safe
space to express interest is prevalent.

In my own experience, there was a sense of camaraderie at both the conventions I attended as those in
costume were more enthusiastic and willing to talk about my research than those who hung at the
peripheries and seemed uncertain about their place in the event. Those who dressed up were accorded
some respect because of their complete identification with the event and seemed more at ease in the
crowd. They were also the ones who tended to drift across groups over the day, as opposed to other
attendees who tended to band together in smaller numbers. Their costumes became an instant point of
conversation, which facilitated their fluid movement across the venue.

Not only are there static stalls for attendees to visit, there are also events scheduled through the day,
usually centred on a single stage that is reused for every event. Events include quizzes, film releases
and talks by comic artists and publishers on how to get ahead in the industry, or on their own personal
 19

lives. In 2012, AICC managed to get Robert Crumb, a leading artist of the underground comix 16
movement, to speak on his work. Also present was Gary Groth, the editor-in-chief of The Comics
Journal, an American news and critical comic book magazine and co-founder Fantagraphics Books,
an alternative comic book publication house. These sessions were too packed to accommodate
everyone who wanted to attend them, despite it being an open event.

The presence of these international figures helped to legitimise AICC to a large extent as they lent
some validity to their claims that the Indian comic book industry is about to become a significant
player in the international market. The irony that the Indian comic book industry desires validation
from a person (Crumb) who described the comic book industry of his own country as a ‘bleak cultural
landscape’ during his talk and who in his own practice has consistently rejected the corporatisation of
comics is a telling comment on the topsy-turviness of the industry.

2.2.3 There and back again: a critique

To understand the overwhelming success of comic conventions around the world, one must first
examine the typology of a fan, without whose existence or continued involvement, these projects
would never take off the way they might be supposed to do. A fan can be considered somebody who
likes an item enough to physically draw out their love the item in the physical world. This might
involve anything from writing appreciative pieces, creating fan art around the object, or simply
recording a testimony of their approval, whether in real life, on social networking sites, or merely
within their heads. Michael Chabon comments on this aspect of fandom when he says,

For in playing, or writing, or drawing, or simply talking oneself deep into the world of a popular
artwork that invites the regard of the amateur, the fan, one is seeking above all to connect, not only
with the world of the show, comic book, or film, but with the encircling, embracing metaworld of all
those who love it as much as you do. (Chabon 2009)

The fan, it seems, is then constantly in search of some approbation for his/her activities, a channel for
which might seem to be provided by Comic Conventions. As reported above, ICC at least might seem
a veritable cornucopia of activities for fans of all affinities. There are the requisite stalls where one
might possibly procure volumes that are more difficult to obtain as well as stalls that have products
derivative of comic book content. There is also a high possibility of meeting and interacting with
artists one admires by mere virtue of the monopolistic nature of the space, wherein comics seem to be
the focal point of attraction.

And as at any good convention, people can do more than just see – they become active participants
from being passive consumers, whether through dressing up as characters and thus clearly articulating
16
Comix, as opposed to comics, is a form of underground, non -mainstream comic books that is especially noted
for their overt sexual content and adult themes. They are not, however, entirely pornographic in nature.
 20

their interest and active engagement with comics, participating in regular quizzes scheduled through
the day, or by merely suggesting new directions which artists and publishers can take. This
participation is not just accepted, but encouraged by the organisers of the ICC, through their daily
contest rewards. This acceptance also filters across to other visitors, with those in costume constantly
being asked to pose in photographs, or sign autographs.

At face value, the ICC, like much else, seems to be a fairly utopic space. There is that apparently ideal
interaction between producers and consumers, which can be said to restore to comics some level of
personality. One can further argue that by putting these two categories into contact, art itself might be
furthered, both by inspiring consumers to cross the channel into production and by pressuring
producers to produce art that is seemingly more relevant to those they wish to create for. AICC harks
back to an early conception of art in a non-mechanised age, where though the product itself might be
mass-produced, the author of the product is not, as it were, dead, a concept that seems to contradict
not only Barthes’ 1967 work, but also Benjamin’s seminal essay on art in the age of mechanical
reproduction. The corresponding aura that surrounds this art is apparently resurrected 17 with the
forefronting of the physicality of its production, as has been mentioned by attendees of ICC.

Nevertheless, if this idyllic representation of ICC in its various avatars is examined somewhat closer,
one begins to see the fissures apparent in its structure. While there is no denying its efficacy as an
outlet both for producers and consumers to exhibit their interests at a personal level as has been
reported by these interviewees, the larger structures within which they operate need to be examined
somewhat more critically.

ICC is foremost a commercial venture. While its creators might speak of their passion for comics, this
model nevertheless requires sponsors to continue to stay afloat and it therefore requires an audience
that will provide enough potential rewards to make it worth everyone’s money. One can therefore
argue that the ICC exists not to facilitate an interaction between artists and readers of comics, but to
facilitate the expansion of possible customers by popularising the concept among a potentially new
audience. While there will be hardcore comics fans at ICC, there is also a significant subset who are
introduced to comics – or at least to new kinds of comics at ICC. As so many publications cover
comic books and artists in the weeks leading up to ICC, as well as for a significant time afterwards,
there is a certain publicity lent to the industry that alters its relationship with its consumers.

17
I call this a resurrection in the context of Benjamin’s essay on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction where he envisions the possibility of art losing its auratic properties with the obscuring of its
manner of production.
 21

The consumers themselves are subject to a reification in the name of industry figures, wherein they
are co-opted into the paradigm of conspicuous fandom, where on one hand they are they actively
encouraged to display their status as fans – they must, of course, be members of that elite inner circle
of geekdom – while at the same time being urged to purchase those artefacts and memorabilia
available at various comics stalls. There is always a sense of urgency prevalent in the stalls, an
awareness that ICC will last only a limited number of days and that those products or discounts will
not easily be available again, as the next iteration of the ICC will be at a different location at an
unspecified time in the future, and these products will not again be easily made available in accessible
physical spaces. This reading of the average attendee might seem to argue for a distinct lack of agency
within the structure of the ICC, but it should be noted that attendees by virtue of their presence at the
convention already imbricated in the system and their choices are limited by the overall model offered
to them.

In a Foucauldian sense, with great power comes – if not great, some – resistance that only confirms
the existence of power in the first place. In the role of superheroes there are those independent comic
artists who contribute to the industry without being a part of it. As outsiders in this system, they are
allowed greater creative autonomy—with the accompanying disadvantage of a lack of profitable
returns. By their very defiance to, or more accurately, by their wariness of a corporatized industry,
they are at once denied a share in the profits that accrue to those within it. Their means of interaction,
however, are not curtailed, and there is every possibility that they might even make that legendary
‘breakthrough’ that will permit them to live off their art.

This too is another sort of narrativising in the cast of putting the underdog in the role of an eventually
successful victor, although the story of the independent artist does tend to lend itself to that particular
mould. One must be wary of such storytelling as it tends to efface their realities. While the artists I
spoke to are indeed privileged in their socio-cultural status as middle-class English-speaking people,
their circumstances are such that most cannot live off comics on a daily basis. Their jobs are often
completely unrelated to their particular talent sets and their comics are often completely ignored by
mainstream media. Even those artists I met were made visible only by the ICC; there might be scores
of others who never have the opportunity to transcend to this level of visibility, or have to work that
much harder to put out their work to a wider audience, or to make their involvement with comics
sustainable. On this point at least, the ICC does conform to the utopic vision outlined at the beginning
of this subsection.

I would contend that the consistent weekly coverage of comics for almost five months in the Mint
Lounge, for example, worked to accustom newcomers to the prospect of the respectability of comics
and to its essential acceptance as a medium of some repute. The heightened visibility of comics over
 22

the past few years, whether in films that draw narratively18 or stylistically19 from comics, or in a
general awareness of its novel utility as a hybrid medium of expression, has resulted in a newer set of
players in the field that in turn feeds into this larger overall system.

At this point of time, the comic book industry is at a momentous point of expansion. It has established
its presence in the publishing industry as a literary force to reckon with, or so it is claimed, and it has
also begun to nestle into the minds of those who could be potential readers and potential artists.
Significantly, the industry cannot be a self-contained amorphous behemoth that floats ambiguously in
search of new consumers. As an entity that aspires towards self-perpetuation, it requires new creators
as well, those who will be able to further its own ends by contributing to an increased output that will
in turn lead to more consumers and more profits.

There is a dual process of mythification at play here. One is the official mythification that is created
by both the creators and participants in the ICC, wherein they endorse the idea of the ICC as a space
where comics can flourish in a largely free and fair manner 20 . The other is the larger process that
exists as a meta-comment on the status of comics themselves in the minds of a certain subset of
English-literate people who might, by virtue of the publicity attendant to the ICC, bestow some
amount of patronage upon this newly burgeoning industry.

As such, the ICC is not as much a celebration of already-existing industry-consumer relationships as a

calculated market-building strategy, and can itself be regarded as a symptom and not a product of
neoliberal capitalism. In understanding its role as a space in which comics are produced and
consumed, its alignment with a bourgeois hegemony ought not to be understated. In this space, the
relationships between producer and consumer are solidified, leading therefore to an alteration in the
production of comics itself. Through the establishment of new production houses that demand certain
house styles from their artists and that contribute to the imagination of the audience as a certain kind
of person and not another, the very content of comics adapts itself to what are commonly called
market forces.21

18
Any of a host of superhero film adaptations, such as tho se of X-Men, Spiderman, Batman, The Avengers, etc.
Of the highest grossing superhero films since 1978, the top ten have been made in the last decade. The cited
figures, however, have not been adjusted for inflation. (Box Office Mojo 2013)
19
Films that reference comic book styles directly, such as Waltz With Bashir (2008) or Persepolis (2007).
20
The freedom and fairness of the ICC is of course directly related to the amount of money one is willing to
pitch in to the system in order to maximize one’s own visibility.
21
This imagination begins at a very basic level in the above-mentioned document released on the AICC website
that profiles the average attendee at a conference.
 23

CHAPTER THREE

MULTIMODAL READING

Reading in a purely textual sense was mugged on its way to the 21 st century
Will Eisner, Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narratives

3.1 INTRODUCTION

Academicians have long concurred on the increasing visuality of global cultures, especially with the
adoption of newer communication models like the television from the 1920s and 1930s, which moved
audiences away from audio-based radio, graphical user interfaces that in the 1980s were instrumental
in the popularisation of personal computers, or the use of smartphones today that prioritise the not just
the viewing, but the interactive experience. The shifting nature of communication technologies can be
observed even in the terminology employed for consumers of these media; from listeners of radio and
viewers of television, computers and phones now have users, a reflection of the changing integrated
nature of these later devices that call upon their consumers to not just to see or hear, but to act.

Although it is disputed that technology indeed brings about such intricate neurological changes in
some people, let alone across all those who consume it, the relationship shared by technology with its
consumers does indubitably have an affect that can be measured in material terms, for instance, by
tracing the production and consumption patterns of products. Using this as a starting point, one can
then extrapolate and see whether one can judge whether various patterns that emerge are correlated or
merely coincidental.

One of the topics of discussion at the First Global Conference on Graphic Novels (GN1) was how the
past decade had seen a sudden rise in comic book publishing in developing countries across the world.
Over informal conversations, we hypothesised that this might be because of increased accessibility to
the Internet which changed not only the kind of reading material those with a connection could access,
but also the very way in which people read. While the Internet is indeed a very significant
communicative space, it would require research of far greater depth to ascertain its precise
significance to the publication of comics. In this chapter, I therefore attempt to see whether a
preliminary correlation can be established between the two, leaving the exact degree of correlation to
another space. I will therefore look at changing communication media technologies that also pattern
 24

the emerging culturescapes of comic book readers in India, to see whether one or another can be said
to have had any influence on each other.

3.2 TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT

3.2.1 Facts

Fig 3.1 Internet usage statistics for 2011 (International Telecommunication Union 2011)

The adoption of the Internet as a communicative medium has risen exponentially over the past two
decades across the world. In 2000, there were 361 million Internet users across the world. By the
middle of 2012, there were 2.4 billion users, over half of whom are based in North America and
Europe. (See Fig 3.1)

India’s Internet connectivity has risen even more rapidly. From no Internet connections in India in
1990, there were 5 million in 2000 and 137 million by mid-2012, ranking behind China and the USA.
(Internet World Stats 2013)

This number is a small fraction of India’s overall population, comprising just 11.4%. Of these, 80
million users are in cities (71%) and the remaining in rural areas. Of these, a large number are
English-speaking. This adoption of the Internet as a communicative medium corresponds with the
liberalisation of the economy in 1991.

Internet usage patterns themselves have changed considerably across the years. With increasing
access to higher bandwidth rates, the kind of content that is being transmitted across these various
 25

undersea Internet cables laid across the world is also adjusting

accordingly. Content available today is far more image-oriented
than before, and tends to employ a more sophisticated integration
of image and text. Where an image like Fig 3.2 in a newspaper or
magazine might be accompanied by a paragraph of explanatory
text, online, which is where I have sourced this from, it speaks
entirely for itself.

3.2.2 Globalisation and knowledge flows

Globalisation has long since come to be accepted as a real
cultural force in the world; it is the smaller nuances of
globalisation that attract academic interest nowadays, from how
global economic and cultural flows adapt themselves to local
areas, to the extent of the changing nature of the political
economy. A significant aspect of the theory of globalisation
focusses not only on its economic consequences, but also on its
cultural ones. While markets, physical or imagined, are the sites
at which economic transactions occur, the medium of cultural
flows appears to be precipitated by communicative media. This
is elaborated upon by Appadurai, when he speaks of new ways
to examine cultural flows in the context of a global political
economy. He says

'Mediascapes', whether produced by private or state interests,

tend to be image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips
of reality, and what they offer to those who experience and
transform them is a series of elements (such as characters,
plots and textual forms) out of which scripts can be formed of
imagined lives, their own as well as those of others living in
other places. (Appadurai 1990)

While on the one hand he points towards examining cultural

commodities, like comic books in this case, via media
technologies, or ‘mediascapes’, his prioritisation of the image is
significant when considered in conjunction with the former. In
terms of visual communication at least, one of the more
significant media of the present day seems to be the Internet.
James Lull, in Culture in the Communicative Age, says
Fig 3.2 Internet usage graphic
 26

The Internet has evolved to become less a technological form and more a communications medium,
which opens up limitless cultural possibilities. Rather than just reinforcing traditional structures of
political-economic-cultural authority, information technology, the Internet, and mass media make those
structures all the more porous. (Lull 2001)

Lull goes on to argue for the importance of locating the Internet not just in terms of hard data
transfers, but as a site of cultural exchange and interaction. This assumes greater consequence when
seen in the context of visual cultural studies, a field that focusses on the increasing visuality in
everyday lives, something that is not necessarily restricted merely to urban centres across various
media, although the Internet itself as it is today is a geographically restricted medium22 . Various
theorists have corroborated this visuality of modern communicative cultures. In his book entitled ‘The
Skin of Culture’, Derrick De Kerckhove points out the increased necessity of visual decoding in the
present day, as opposed to previous times that prioritised oral modes of communication. From the
adoption of written scripts as a set of signs that represent various sounds to complex images that
saturate media around us, his general contention is that the nature of societies under certain conditions
are changing at a rapid pace. He says

… as McLuhan has pointed out in The Gutenberg Galaxy, the “split between the eye and the ear,”
which is consequent to the diffusion of alphabetic literacy, can create strange difficulties in cultures
that remain oral. … In this regard we are presently witnessing a reversal; the words of a statesman on
television are given weight not by their content, but by the image of the pers on who pronounces them.
Another reversal is a tendency in contemporary law to pay attention to oral contract… (De Kerckhove
1995, 106)

Although some of De Kerckhove’s further arguments seem somewhat unfounded almost twenty years
later, he did identify this shift away from a preoccupation with literacy in the traditional sense, i.e. the
ability to read and write. In the context of television, this results in an oral and visual culture 23 ; in the
context of the Internet, the medium in question, a composite of oral, visual and literate cultural flows.

There has therefore been a fair amount of academic grounding for this notion of the present being
preoccupied with visual information, something that has long since been suggested by theorists of
postmodernism and poststructuralism, such as Jacques Rancière, who speaks of the hyper-
resemblance of the image or Guy Debord who talked of modern society being one of a spectacle.
(Ranciere 2007) (Debord 1977)

22
Although received wisdom implies that the internet is a free and open space that everyone in the world
regardless of region, caste, class, it is by no means unacknowledged by theorists that the internet is accessible
only to those who have that basic capital to have access to a computer in the first place and the means of
connecting to the internet in the next.
23
Kerckhove’s distinction is between visual and literate cultures. Whereas literate cultures are those that
prioritise the written word, visual cultures prioritise images.
 27

Academicians have since taken this forward in several similarly meaningful ways. Paul Messaris
examines ‘the relationship between visual culture and cognition’, acknowledging not only the
existence of a visual culture, but its less tangible impacts on human lives and cultures. He says

The cognitive impacts of visual culture are likely to accelerate as people's informational uses of media
continue to shift from verbal to visual sources - in other words, as the realm of information goes
through the same changes that have taken place in that of fictional entertainment. (Messaris 2001, 190)

All these sources seem to concur that contemporary cultures and the fact that it does indeed have an
impact on cultural practices across the world, changing not only cognitive patterns but creative output.
As the nature of information changes, so does the manner in which it is processed and output thereby
created. This by no means a revolutionary idea if one considers McLuhan and his axiom, ‘the medium
is the message’. (McLuhan and Lapham 1964) However, the field of Internet studies in the context of
social and cultural studies is a nascent yet thriving academic area.

3.3 COMICS IN THE LAST DECADE

In this section, I will give a brief overview of the state of the comic book industry both locally and
globally with reference to market figures. I deal specifically with the last ten years because of the
reported spurt in comic book publishing in developing countries that is said to have developed in the
past decade. This spurt coincides chronologically with the adoption of the Internet in developing
countries.

3.3.1 The global industry

In the early 90s, comic books in North America were at their highest sales ever. Merchandising
associated with comics sold at comic book shops and collectors outbid each other in speculating on
increasing prices. The value of comic books sold for a few cents in the market could sometimes
appreciate to thousands of dollars. This all came crashing in 1993, when the speculative bubble burst
– a combination of a sudden exit of several speculators who lost faith in the market, as well as an
industry that focussed too singularly on middlemen distributors who attempted to drive prices up.
(Last 2011)

As shown in Fig 3.3, although the industry did recover from its dip in the late 90s, it has not yet
returned to that peak of sales in comic book shops. What has happened, however, is an increased
production of material affiliated to comic books, especially films. In the past decade, there have been
adaptations of comics of all genres, from superhero comics to realist narratives. This, in conjunction
with the increased output of critically acclaimed graphic novels that are given a fair amount of
 28

publicity in news media, has led to an increased general awareness and acceptance of comic books
today.

Fig 3.3 Comic Books Ordered by Comics Shops in North America (in units) (Miller 2011)

In the past ten years, countries like the Philippines, Brazil, China and India have also seen a rise in
comic book publications by local artists.

3.3.2 The local industry

According to primary sources, the comic book market in India went through a major dip from the
mid-90s to the mid-00s. There were fewer sales of comics of all languages. In 2004, with the
establishment of Virgin Comics (now known as Liquid Comics) and their first imprint of adaptations
from Hindu mythology, there was a renewed interest in comic books that led to the establishment of
other publishers in the market as well. Several of my artist and publisher respondents stated that the
Internet was part of the reason for the comeback of comics, as they are able to connect to a wider
audience than was earlier possible.

There are those publishers attempting to tap in to the children’s market, but a large number at the
Indian Comic Con were aiming to speak to the young adult category, who are also active on the
Internet. There are about ten to fifteen dedicated comic book publishers in the market at the moment,
or twenty five if one counts publishers who also produce non-comic titles. (Arpana 2011)

There seem to be a few broad categories under which comic books written in India can be classified.
One is that of mythological comics that, in the Amar Chitra Katha vein, largely portray stories from
 29

Hindu mythology, although there are a few comics that are narrations of famous Sufi stories, as wells
as some that draw from other mythologies and literary classics. Closely related are superhero comics
that draw upon the valorisation of seemingly invincible beings who fight on behalf of the ‘good’.
These are usually targeted at younger readers, although there are a few satirical publications such as
Jumpers, which poke fun at the superhero typology while remaining within that specific framework.
Finally, there are those comics that deal with the present day. A key feature of these books is their
preoccupation with urban centres and concerns.

Apart from these three broad categories, are those comic books that cannot easily be classified
because of their eclectic subject matter, or because these categorisations are irrelevant to them.
Enterprises such as World Comics India, run by Sharad Sharma, attempt to bring comics to rural
populations and encourage people to tell their own stories instead of relying on others’ narrations of
their own lives. The general drift, however, has been to target these comics at people between the ages
of 18 and 35 who regularly access the Internet.

3.3.3 Consumption patterns of comics

One of the questions I asked readers in my survey of their reading habits was how they accessed
comics nowadays. There was a difference in access to foreign and Indian comics.

Readers of foreign comics reported that since they were too expensive for their means, they read them
in large bookstores that stocked them, where they are permitted to read for long periods of time
without being required to buy the books. Many also reported downloading comic books illegally or
copying them from friends who had digital copies of the same. They said this was convenient in that it
allowed them to read a wider range of comics. However, they all concurred that they preferred to read
comics on paper to comics on a computer as this gave them more freedom of navigating through
comics that require a non-linear reading mode. 24

Those who read Indian comics said that they preferred to buy them or borrow them from libraries.
Many of those based in New Delhi said that the Comic Convention had become a significant space for
them to buy such books, rather than second hand bookshops where they had initially used to buy
them. There were many who said that if given the option, they would not buy these comic books even
though they were much cheaper as they felt that foreign comics provided more value for money.
These were also the ones who admitted that Indian comic books, especially those published in the last

24
Neil Cohn speaks of non-linear reading strategies in his paper on the same entitled Navigating Comics:
Reading strategies of page layouts, where he says ‘navigation of comic pages follows patterns and strategies
that extend beyond the z-path used to read written text and common Gestalt groupings like proximity, and is
influenced by levels of expertise.’ (Cohn, Navigating Comics: Reading strategies of page layouts 2008)
 30

decade did not really appeal to them. One of the reasons for this was the low production value of
comics, both in terms of paper quality and art or narration.

Of these interviewees, only a few said that they avidly followed the work of contemporary Indian
artists. They were selective about who they followed, however, and expressed cautious optimism
about the state of the industry and stated that they would prefer to wait before they began to follow
these new artists avidly.

While most said that they had read comics since childhood, the Internet changed their relationship
with comics. Their access to comic books expanded, as well as the kinds of books they had read. I
found through my interviews that my own personal trajectory of engaging with comics was not
entirely uncommon. There were several English-language comics readers who spent the latter part of
their adolescence consuming comic-style material in formats other than the comic book one, with
examples such as anime in television – that later led to serious interest in cosplaying and Japanese
culture – adaptations of comic books in films and also by browsing webcomics. With the Internet,
their reading shifted back to traditional book-length comics, although in the digital not physical
medium.

Of my interviewees, three described themselves as hardcore comics fans. These were avid collectors
or readers of comics of all varieties, had been brought up on a diet of comics and continued to be
fascinated by comics in adulthood. One of them reported an interest in new Indian authors; the other
two were not as impressed.

3.4 MULTIMODAL LITERACY

3.3.1 The changing image

Although comics themselves are by now an old form25 , theorists are only just beginning to speak of
the changing nature of the image brought about by comic art. This change is especially evident in this
‘visual culture’ that puts an emphasis on the primacy of image. Where images were earlier looked
upon as sites of meaning (Barthes 1972) that had to be decoded for their politics, images in comics,
while no less contentious, have come to assume another, more nuanced, layer of meaning in their role
as a narrative aid.

25
They are only a few decades younger than film, though they have not yet achieved the same degree of
acceptance.
 31

Semiotic theory today speaks of the hyperresemblance of images in that they are no longer mere sites
of resemblance in which they refer to an original ‘Other’, but are resemblances that refer to nothing
but themselves. In speaking of the ‘alterity’ of such images with reference to modernity and
photography, Rancière says:

The break with this system does not consist in painting white or black squares rather than the warriors
of antiquity. It does not even exist, as the modernist vulgate would have it, in the fact that any
correspondence between the art of words and the art of visible forms comes undone. It consists in the
fact that words and forms, the sayable and the visible, the visible and the invisible, are related to one
another in accordance with new procedures. In the new regime – the aesthetic regime in the arts, which
was constituted in the nineteenth century – the image is no longer the codified expression of a thought
or feeling. … It is a way in which things themselves speak and are silent. (Ranciere 2007)

Rancière’s identification of the image as such assumes some interest when taken in conjunction with
comic books. It might seem somewhat heavy-handed to take his words more literally than they seem
to have been intended, but with his establishment of the relationship of the word with the image, he
gives a renewed importance to the manner in which we read images in the first place. For if we are to
take him at his word, the image is no longer a mere site of contestation in which semiotic battles are
fought. In their relationship with the unsayable and the invisible – and it is important to note that
many are of the opinion that images are just that, passive objects without life that exist only to be read
and with no independent capacity for expression26 – images transcend, through comic books, to the
level of a narrative function.

While this might well be solely because in comic books the image is no longer a singular entity, but
one that must be seen in relation to all those around it, the collective nature of the image, especially
when in conjunction with words, that other narrative medium, is something that is transformed
through comic books. W.J.T. Mitchell speaks of this apparent discord between words and images as ‘a
struggle for territory’ in his work entitled ‘What Is an Image?’ He studies the notion of the ultimate
imagined separation between the two and gives the cause of it.

Because the relationship between words and images reflects, within the realm of representation,
signification, and communication, the relations we posit between symbols and the world, signs and
their meanings. ... The image is the sign that pretends n ot to be a sign, masquerading as (or, for the
believer, actually achieving) natural immediacy and presence. The word is its "other," the artificial,
arbitrary production of human will that disrupts natural presence by introducing unnatural elements
into the world-time, consciousness, history, and the alienating intervention of symbolic mediation.
(Mitchell 1984)

One would not go as far as to say that comic books were made with the specific intention to overcome
these differences, but as a product, they do fulfil this role. When people read comic books, they need

26
However, for those not aware of the discipline of semiotics, viz. most of my respondents, this is a self-evident
fact. Many spoke of the multiple narrative possibilities of the image
 32

to relearn how they read books. Cohn’s work on reading strategies is only one aspect of this work;
there is another kind of change at play with comic books, and that is how one looks at the very image
itself. At a very basic level, to read comic books, one must be ‘literate’ as it were in the decoding of
images to make meaning. This implies a level of familiarity. 27

There is a multimodality of reading that is being engendered here. People are changing how they look
at images. Images transcend to the level of words, which is to say they are not just looked at, but read.
This is something that has been done ever since (and before) Barthes spoke of the image, but what’s
different here is that the image is no longer simply an object. It becomes, like words, a narrative
construct, and in conjunction with words, it becomes an entirely new being.

In the interplay of text and images, comic books represent only the latest form of reading. When
comics shift the image from its essential ‘imageness’ to a narrative tool, the very nature of the image
is altered, and thereby of the comic itself. The image shifts, therefore from its previous state as parole
to a more developed state of langue, as it is no longer party to singular utterances.

3.3.2 The Image and the Internet

The above subsection merely attempted to show how comic books might allow us to look at
relationships between words and images as embodied in comic books differently. What is left to this
understanding is how these altered perceptions actually interact ‘in real life’.

If one does accept the postulation above that the nature of the image has changed within the comics,
one must then see how far it is applicable to those who actually read comics. As mentioned in the
Introduction, even discounting the mythologies built around comics that draw upon prehistoric art
forms, comic books are a relatively old form in modern times, almost as old as film. However, comics
were not as avidly embraced as films were, even though both were new forms at the time. One reason
for this might be the modes of distribution. Films were extremely well distributed and were easily
accessible to anyone who could see or hear; comics, however, depended for the most part on the
acquisition of literacy in the relevant language, even if it did not demand as much in terms of
decoding its images. Moreover, comics seem to have been regarded as a corruption of the Word – a
watered down manner of expression that could not aspire to the latter’s greatness. 28

27
Those respondents who returned to reading after a while spoke of how they tended to read words over the
images rather than the other way around; those who read comics without any break in continuity spoke of how
important the images were to navigate through comics.
28
As mentioned in informal conversations at GN1.
 33

What, then, has led to this sudden change in the fortunes of comics that they have only of late begun
to be accepted as narrative forms not to be looked down upon? One aspect of this is the cultural
connotations of a comic that are heavily influenced by the matter within them. The perceptions of
comic books as meant for children, vulgar, distasteful, and so on, have been partly documented
elsewhere in this research, as well as in hundreds of other academic works. I would however hazard
that part of this changing perception is due to the increasing visuality of cultures, brought about not
only by television, but by the Internet.

Since the 80s in Western countries, and in the last decade in countries where the comic book tradition
was not especially new, such as in India, the adoption of the Internet has led to a greater interaction
with image-heavy material. Indeed, one of the limitations of dialup Internet connections was its
inability to efficiently transmit high quality images. In the early years of user-oriented Internet access,
when HTML websites were still easily found, there was a tendency of words to be broken up into
manageable segments.

Fig 3.4 Common social networking icons

Later, words and images began to be seen together, with images aiding the narrative functions of
words, making things easier to comprehend, or providing a visual relief on the screen, as is common
in magazines and newspapers in also print. Images served an iconic role on computers, where they
represented certain functions such as ‘save’, ‘print’, ‘copy’, etc. Today, these iconic images are only
rarely accompanied by explanatory words. If one looks at the design of popular web browsers, for
example, one sees a primacy of such iconic images, such as in Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. On
websites too, there are certain images that need not be explained to the average user.

The change over these years has been to shift images from their basic iconic roles (Fig 3.4) to more
complex ones. (Fig 3.2) This shift towards the role of images in comics might be of some
consequence to the increased acceptance of the same in recent years in this country.
 34

Others have noted the influence of images in comics in the structuring of our thoughts. (See Fig 3.5)
In his paper on ways of thinking in comic art, Sousanis mentions the impact of the visual on cognitive
processing.

Fig 3.5 Sousanis (2012) on the multilayered nature of thinking in and through comics
 35

It must be noted that comics are not the only such expression of visual languages, and is not the only
visual medium to have profited from the structure and accessible distributive framework of the
Internet. Cohn, one of the proponents of looking at comics as a primarily visual language speaks in
passing of the necessity of not restricting visual cultures only to comics, says

However, though the Internet does not place restrictions on distribution and economics, web publishing
still does not equate to the usage of the medium as a language. … John Barber stated that the Internet
allows for comics to break free of their “ivory tower” and become “a true form of communication.” …
Though the web allows for the employment of the medium to enter a level playing field of distribution,
the Internet … does not free visual language from “comic culture” itself. Truly, a socially prevalent use
of VL would not restrict it to the inclusive comic industry. (Cohn, Un-Defining Comics 2005)

Finally, while it must be noted that the Indian comic book industry does seem to have risen in tandem
with the adoption of the Internet in India, it cannot be forgotten that its most important contribution is
the increased accessibility to and not of comics. The former is a distributive mechanism aided by the
tools of the Internet, while the latter refers directly to that which is contained within comics, which
requires a certain location (urban), age (early adulthood) and cultural capital (knowledge of the
English language and its associated cultural tropes).

The comic book industry in India might have already been poised for a ‘revival’ even without the
Internet and I do not claim that the Internet is the sole reason it seems to have succeeded. It stands at
the coincidence of several other factors, such as the concurrent rise of the English language book
publishing industry, or the coming of age of a generation of children who grew up with comics and
were in search of comics that would be of interest to them as adults. All these are factors reported by
my respondents, though they are by no means an extensively representative sample. I focussed only
on the Internet as, like comics29 , it is in that liminal space of being not only a medium of distribution,
but a medium of cultural change itself by virtue of its interactivity and structural makeup.

29
Comic books stand in a liminal space between word and image.
 36

CHAPTER 4

30
THE CONTESTED CITY IN INDIAN GRAPHIC NOVELS

4.1 GRAPHIC NOVELS IN INDIA

Globally, comics have long been used as a medium of expressing resistance and subverting larger
narratives. For a significant period in comic history, these integrated image-text serialisations were
looked down upon as being ‘low art’ and of engaging in trivial pulp storylines. Over the years, the
medium has been rebranded and has now begun to be looked upon as an ‘acceptable’ form of
expression. One sees comics like Persepolis and Palestine that employ this combination of words and
images to evoke a deeper sense of what it means, for example, to be an outsider, or to negotiate with
one’s societal realities to bypass the norms imposed upon one by larger patriarchal systems. In India,
this new range of longer narrative comics has begun to also appropriate these styles and explore ways
in which dominant ‘single’ stories can be rewritten, largely through the use of humour.

At a time when Indian writing in English is flourishing and publishing houses are in what may be
considered a boom, the Indian comic book industry and its target audience seem to be at somewhat of
a disjunction in terms of how authors relate to their readers and vice versa. (The Guardian 2010)There
is a sense that the narratives produced by the industry today do not quite relate to the everyday
realities of people’s lives. While India’s nascent annual Comic Convention and the packaged versions
thereof are spaces for consumers to interact with producers of comics, these spaces are not easily
accessible to all potential customers. Comic book readers tend to prefer to buy Indian comic books
and illegally download foreign ones largely because of the latter’s prohibitive pricing and wide online
availability. This disjunction results in many more people being ‘comics-literate’ than industry figures
indicate. Even so, it is only of late that contemporary Indian life has begun to be depicted in comic
books and as of now, it seems to be primarily an English-language phenomenon.

Compared to the volume of other comic output, there are few graphic novels 31 with original plots or
art in India. Gokul Gopalakrishnan says in Waiting for the Dark Knight, an article on the state of
comics in India today, ‘the graphic novel in India displays a great reluctance to move beyond the
familiar to tread uncharted territories.’ (Gopalakrishnan 2011) One of the cautiously explored
territories thus far has been urban spaces in India. Chimimanda Adichie speaks of the danger of a
single story where one's conception of a place or a time is so coloured by the silent propaganda
30
A version of this chapter was presented at the First Global Conference: The Graphic Novel
31
When I use the term ‘graphic novel’, I refer to comics that employ lengthy, self-contained narratives.
 37

around it, one is not immediately able to move beyond it to recount it differently. She says, ‘Power is
the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.’
(Adichie 2009) With counter narratives that bring to the fore the underlying violence in urban
histories, these comics appropriate and thereby reclaim those moments by shifting the focus from the
larger official story to smaller, less potent characters.

I chose graphic novels as the object of my research in order to see what new lengthier narratives had
to say about the Indian context. There is more than enough work already existing on comic books set
in alternative localities, whether it is the fictionalised mythological past of Amar Chitra Kathas, or
larger-than-life superhero comics set in the present. While graphic novels are by no means obliged to
rest only in a ‘realistic’ present, there is nonetheless a prevalent tendency for them to draw from a
world recognisable to the present, though they do tend to draw from magical realist styles in prose
literature. Further, their status as relatively recent incumbents in the comic book publication scene
makes a study of them more pertinent to this research.

In this chapter, I will focus on two books contending with these spaces, The Barn Owl’s Wondrous
Capers and Delhi Calm by Sarnath Banerjee and Vishwajyoti Ghosh respectively that, from different
perspectives, examine and attempt to rewrite urban history and thereby attempt to reach out in a more
meaningful way to their targeted audiences.

Theorists of humour, like John Morreall and Alison Ross, agree that humour can be experienced when
a sequence of events departs from a norm, whether unexpectedly or not, and is usually accompanied
by a thrill of recognition or surprise. (Morreall 2009) (Ross 1998) The emotional distancing
occasioned by humour is often key to helping one to overcome traumatic events. (Douglas 2002) Dark
or not, humour is as often used as a literary device, from satire to slapstick, and, as with every literary
device, there is a gradation of the desirability of different brands of humour, as with the elevation of
satire over slapstick. One sees the use of these elements in the theorisation of urban spaces that occurs
in these two novels and it is not historicity or the lack thereof that binds them together, but their
humorous exploration and construction of urban spaces and of the people who can access and own
them.

The protagonists of the books, whether migrants or returning after a prolonged absence, or judged by
their sexuality, confront the cities in question as outsiders, and attempt to reconstruct them through the
lens of their personal experiences garnered outside these spaces. Migrants are the lifeblood of cities,
embodying as they do their own hopes and aspirations, as well as those of cities in the economic
potential they bring with them, while those returning to their home cities must reimagine their
conceptions of the cities in question and some must leave them forever. The circumstances under
 38

which they leave their homes, though largely non-violent, are nonetheless signifiers of a larger
malaise in which the protagonists find themselves obliged to deal with the reality of a changed city on
their return. Both books deal with this complex reality by highlighting individual stories set against
the backdrop of more dire circumstances. In both books, the contributions of the protagonists are
inconsequential on the larger scale of things; even when they move from being observers to actors,
their actions are side-lined and rarely have any personable effect on ‘history’ as a larger entity.

In mainstream Indian media accessible to a large number of people, such as film, there is a reluctance
to engage with traumatic events of India’s past. Comics, by having such a narrow audience, manage to
slip under the radar of official censure, allowing them to narrate stories without fears of hindrance.
While this might change in later years, graphic novels like these are crucial steps, both in the
development of comics as a narrative medium in India, as well as in coming to terms with our history.
‘Conflicts are signposts of the living. Memories are black-and-white obituaries of irrelevance,’ says
VP in what could be a voiceover in a self-referential page that shows him writing what is apparently
Delhi Calm. (Ghosh 2010, 24) Although his testimony as a witness is as much a product of fiction as a
real account of the events of the Emergency, it remains an important sign post in Indian graphic
novels that seek to revisit and rewrite our ‘single stories’.

4.2 THE CASE FOR THE BARN OWL’S WONDROUS CAPERS

Fig 4.1 The narrator’s grandfather stands above Kolkata (Banerjee 2007, 179)
 39

Banerjee’s The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, released in 2007, follows the quest of the protagonist
to locate an heirloom left to him by his grandfather, a diary also entitled The Barn Owl’s Wondrous
Capers. Interspersed with his hunt in Kolkata, are excerpts from this diary, accounts of ‘the dark
armpits of history’ as written and experienced by the Western legendary immortal character, the
Wandering Jew, here called Abravanel, who finding himself in Kolkata in the l8th century, recounts
its history from the perspective of an outsider to both Indians and British colonial forces. This is
Banerjee’s second graphic novel, and like his first, is a non-formulaic examination of characters
absorbed in the unique cultural milieu of their cities. Sparse black-and-white sketches interposed with
photographs further emphasise the interaction between the fantastical and realist elements of the
novel’s two main narrative strands, blurring the line between them. (See Fig 4.1, 4.2)

Fig 4.2 Photograph and sketch merged seamlessly (Banerjee 2007, 184)

This network of urban interactions is the mainstay of support for Abravanel in The Barn Owl’s
Wondrous Capers. His knowledge of how the system works, both in Europe and in India, keeps him
alive and reasonably well. Significantly, it is his ability to maintain a low profile that allows him to
maintain a certain lifestyle across millennia. Like Har Kishen and Joideep Mukherjee, while he is a
witness to momentous events, he rarely participates in them. In a series of events relating to colonial
powers in Kolkata, including an especially protracted sub-section that deals with the history of the
metropolis, Abravanel recalls his interactions with key players in the field. As a Jew in a Christian
colony and later as a Bengali, his perspective on this time is as an outsider, a matter of flippancy, not
solemnity.

Kolkata was the capital of British India from 1772 to 1911 and Delhi from 1911 to 1947. Founded by
a British East India Company agent, Job Charnock, in 1690, Kolkata is wholly a product of British
colonialism. Banerjee’s caricatures of key historical characters reclaim, to an extent, the valorised
 40

depictions one might have of them. As in colonialist accounts, they occupy the centre stage, but are
always observed through the eyes of ever-present Indian characters. In effect, they are performers, not
in a theatre, but a circus, as their actions are always subject to an irreverent and often bemused gaze.

The babus and landholders of Kolkata, a vast number of whom were instrumental in the shaping of its
past, are equally caricatured and implicitly criticised for their opulent lifestyles in the pay of their
British masters. Despite their positions of power with respect to other Indians, these Indian elites were
also subject to the vagaries of the British and this tension is evident in various definitions of the term
‘babu’ juxtaposed with each other in the book. ‘Lord Macaulay, the Governor General of Bengal and
the most prominent gardener of the Empire, gave a new definition to the word babu: ‘Babu is a native
who is Indian in flesh and blood and English in taste and opinion.’’ (Banerjee 2007, 194) This is
contested by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee: ‘Babu has various meanings: to the poor babu means a
richer person, to the servant babu means the master and to the English rulers the word babu means a
clerk.’ (Banerjee 2007, 195)

Fig 4.3 Digital Dutta (Banerjee 2007, 90) Fig 4.4 ‘Talking heads’, extract (Banerjee 2007, 175)

The interactions in The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, whether a depiction of the private world of
Digital Dutta (Fig 4.3), or a two-page montage of a number of ‘talking heads’ met by the narrator in
his quest for the elusive diary (Fig 4.4), are designed to evoke a sense of amusement at the sheer
number of stereotypical depictions particular to Kolkata's denizens. Banerjee’s depictions show a time
of untrammelled debauchery, both Indian and European. (Banerjee 2007, 110, 125-126) His biting
descriptions of the excesses of babus, or administrative clerks, politicians, rich men are especially
delightful and he depicts their fall from moral perfection, along with their colonisers, with glee. His is
a book of constant dissonance with expectations and does not require much cultural attuning to be
understood.
 41

It is not just a quest that compels Banerjee to cast a wide range of characters, many of whom appear
only once. His first book, Corridor, though set only in a bookshop in New Delhi is also populated
with a number of characters, each with distinctive noses and hair styles. In The Barn Owl’s Wondrous
Capers, this canvas is expanded, not just with a more defined plot and characters, but also in his
depiction of them. Along with his characteristic caricature sketches, his use of photographs to bring
out a sense of Kolkata is engaging. These photographs appear towards the end of the novel, when the
narrator, losing hope, decides to suspend disbelief and follow a psychic ‘mental map’ given to him by
Kedar Babu, a civil servant who claims to have found his French wife by following one such map that
appeared in his head while travelling.

Fig 4.5 The city reclaimed (Banerjee 2007, 213)

Very few of the pictures of this part of the quest, located in the heart of the city, have many people in
them. Kolkata in these photographs looks like a deserted city, inhabited only by cartoons sketched
over these scenes, and this is acknowledged by Banerjee: ‘Cities like Calcutta have intricate ways to
keep their secrets, forever carefully not to blurt them out to the uninitiated.’ (Banerjee 2007, 209) The
slight disjunction between reality and fantasy in the book is exacerbated by eerily empty pictures that
are unusual for crowded Indian cities. It is in this part of the novel, in whimsical sketches, such as one
where a man photographed sitting on a verandah is given what seems to be a black-and-white
sketched friend sitting next to him and mirroring his posture that one sees a notable number of
marginalised characters interacting with the city a great deal more than any other. (See Fig 4.5) Here,
they truly belong to the spaces they occupy, reversing the balance of power and making the narrator
more of an awkward outsider than he already is, a role reversal one does not often see in The Barn
Owl’s Wondrous Capers.
 42

4.3 THE CASE FOR DELHI CALM

Fig 4.6 Indira Gandhi as Mother Moon (Ghosh 2010, 46)

While fantasy is the focus of The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, Delhi Calm, by Vishwajyoti Ghosh,
gives a seemingly authentic account of the twenty-one month Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi
on 26 June 1975 to 21 March 1977. This is a dramatization of incidents before and during the
Emergency and is told from seamlessly shifting points of view of apparent followers of the popular
socialist leader, J.P. Narayan. 32 As in other graphic novels such as The Watchmen, the panelled
sections of Delhi Calm are interspersed with longer sections of text that detail the history of Indira
Gandhi and J.P. Narayan. (See Fig 4.6) Though all historical figures are given pseudonyms, their true
identities are apparent to any reader even remotely aware of the narrative’s context. This veiled
attempt at a historical portrayal is further enhanced by the sepia wash of the novel’s panels and an
epilogue that details the characters’ fates after the Emergency has been lifted.
In Delhi Calm, the three primary characters, Vibhuti Prasad (referred to as ‘VP’), Parvez Alam and
Vivek Babu (referred to as ‘Master’) are all strangers to New Delhi, brought there by a desire to do
32
Indira Gandhi, daughter of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and head of the Indian National
Congress Party, first became Prime Minister in 1966. She was assassinated in 1984 by her bodyguards, ten years
after the events of Delhi Calm. J.P. Narayan was a socialist leader, who fell out with the Congress and sought to
create a more socialist political front. He rose to great visibility during the Emergency, but was unable to sustain
the movement for long.
 43

something of real political relevance that remains out of their grasp in their home town of Jamalpur.
New Delhi, for them, becomes an uneasy location, where they must not only contend with learning
the rules of a new city, but also with the very real strictures of authoritarian forces bent on eliminating
all forms of resistance. In somewhat Foucauldian terms, to these characters, power is not epitomised
by actual force, but by the possession of knowledge. Those who know how to game the system are
safer in hostile environments and also more respected.

Fig 4.7 Parvez and VP narrowly escape (Ghosh 2010, 22)

Parvez and VP’s strained relationship becomes the focal point of one such potentially disastrous
encounter with the Delhi police. (Fig 4.7) ‘Information is everything here, Parvez,’ says VP after he
has safely manoeuvred them out of harm’s reach. (Ghosh 2010, 23) Indeed, entrepreneurship is the
mainstay of life in New Delhi, or ‘Powerpolis’ as the book terms it. Unlikely relationships are formed
under the aegis of necessity and opportunism, such as that between two minor characters, Har Kishen,
a chaiwallah, and Joideep Mukherjee, an engineer at the Central Public Works Department, who
 44

entertain a healthy dislike for each other, but ultimately come together in a business venture funded by
a scheme instituted by the controversial figure of Sanjay Gandhi, Indira Gandhi’s son.

Fig 4.8 ‘Kitne aadmi they?’ (Ghosh 2010, 182) Fig 4.9 Things fall apart (Ghosh 2010, 167)

A similar montage in Delhi Calm does not work in quite the same way, perhaps because its humour is
not incidental, but is contained in its very premise, that is, an allegorical representation of a traumatic
event seen through the eyes of fictional characters who, bound by actual historical facts, are only able
to assert their agency in small ways. One needs to be familiar with Hindi movies, for instance, to
understand where the context of something like in Fig 4.8. (Ghosh 2010, 182-183) The line, ‘Kitne
aadmi the?’ from Sholay, a Hindi Western released on 15 August, 1975, during the Emergency, has
since assumed a nearly iconic status and is immediately identifiable to most Indians. Here, Ghosh
touches points of resonance, not dissonance and it is the familiarity with the context at hand that turns
the pages of his book. Consequently, the visuals in Delhi Calm are more concerned with showing
fractures on a large scale (Fig 4.9) than with dwelling on frames with great individuality as does The
Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers. Beneath the light humour of its surface, the tension of Delhi is
palpable, visible in the cracks between panels and the disarray of sketches, as can be seen in the
images shown here.

In locating the city as the focal point of culture and power in a community, Lewis Mumford also
speaks of the effects of conflict. (Mumford 1938, 3) He says, ‘… the war-metropolis, as an expression
 45

of these institutions, is an anti-civilizing agent: a non-city.’ (Mumford 1938, 278) New Delhi in
particular is depicted as a non-city in Ghosh's book. A repeated motif is of fractured panels that
disturb the tranquillity of the novel's monochromatic sepia wash and belie the nostalgia one tends to
associate with such colours. For the most part, New Delhi is shown as a conglomeration of generic
lanes and small houses. In Ghosh's avoidance of major landmarks, one sees once again an emphasis
on minor characters and their contained movements. New Delhi loses its character to the stultifying
atmosphere of the Emergency; at moments of great crisis, the panels encasing these characters
become frenzied in form, but not especially so in content, highlighting underlying tensions and very
real danger that manifests itself only in New Delhi and not in the flashback scenes set in the
characters' home town of Jamalpur.

4.4 ANALYSIS

The authors' decision to populate their cities with only a certain stratum of people is somewhat
problematic because of their constant emphasis on the tension between these relatively comfortable
middle-class characters and those with visibly enforceable power that in turn invisibilises others with
an equal claim to urban spaces. The authors are primarily concerned with very middle-class English-
speaking Indian concerns of space and ownership, of who belongs to a city and how they can access
it. These concerns, though placed in historical settings, reflect modern anxieties of space and
ownership, as one sees, in the aftermath of liberalisation33 , the rise of a middle class that is both
Westernised and somewhat uncomfortable with their Indian cultural legacy. These tensions between
rulers and the ruled and in the networks established in the two novels are expressed evocatively in the
images. The spaces the characters occupy are in conflict and the pictorial depictions of the city
interact with the text to amplify their concerns.

Quite apart from each city's historical relevance, there is also an ever-present unease among its current
inhabitants. Both authors are silent to an extent on the issue of marginalised communities like women
and lower castes. Banerjee does indeed attempt to depict a wide social range of characters, from
Imperial rulers to punkahwallas, but only the wealthy or those with wealthy forebears, the erudite, and
the immortal are given significant narrative roles, while all others are relegated to cameos. These gaps
also manifest themselves in New Delhi, where such absences are more pronounced, focussed as Delhi
Calm is on a narrow band of middle-class characters.

33
In 1991, there were a slew of economic reforms that paved the way for foreign direct investment in India,
leading to a measured opening of Indian markets to the global economy. India’s middle class is said to have
benefited from this move.
 46

To an extent, the authors’ use of humour is an easy hook for readers new to comics. However, by its
very use of humour and fantastical tropes, it also signals a more systematic categorisation of its
readers because of the accessibility – or lack thereof – of its references. Not only, for example, does
the constitution of these cities with a certain set of inhabitants refer to who authors imagine them to be
populated with, but there is also a sense of construction of the readers themselves who might relate to
such depictions.

Part of this perceived dissonance might also be attributed to the lack of continuity in Indian graphic
novels. American graphic novels, to cite one instance of national continuity, were pioneered by artists
who cut their teeth on a more generic superhero framework; artists in India seem to have plunged into
the melee in a direct attempt to emulate the kind of narratives already popularised in the West. This
then seems to have left the industry in a limbo wherein it attempts to draw upon foreign narratives and
narrative techniques in order to explore stories of a more local origin. There are those who might refer
to this confluence of styles as glocalisation, as it is in effect the transformation of a global form to suit
local cultural sensibilities and expectations. One must note, however, the extent to which this
transformation occurs. In both The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers and Delhi Calm, the narrative
format remains the same, however different the voices might appear. There is no significant attempt at
experimentation, nor any evidence to suppose that the comic book format is anything but a foreign
one.

Fig 4.10 Riding the skies (Ghosh 2010, 222) Fig 4.11 Calcutta wildlife (Banerjee 2007, 126)
 47

A consistent trope in these books is the use of fantasy that through images that militate against what
‘common sense’ might construe as not normal reinforces the distance these books have from the real
world. In Delhi Calm for example, the idyllic panels that refer to Moon’s childhood (Fig 4.6) or
progress to power work to create a sense of suspended calm away from the frenzied action within the
text. At the same time the frequent steps away from the present in The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers
when juxtaposed against the relatively mundane, if slightly bizarre, panels of the present. While these
effects might have been as easily achieved in prose or in film, the capacity of comic books to engage
with time in a more flexible manner is telling. A car floating gently over a flattened stylised sky (Fig
4.10) or a zebra walking down a street in colonial Calcutta (Fig 4.11) have a discernible impact as
images, because not only do they challenge the idea of a reality, but also the image of it.

The fantastical elements in these books also refer to a certain idea of what the consumers of these
books might have the capital to comprehend. Fantasy as a concept only has relevance when posited
against the notion of a singular ‘reality’. When fantastical elements are employed in these books, only
those readers who share that common understanding of a generally accepted reality will be able to
understand it. On the other hand, this medium does lend itself more easily than film to a visual setting
of unreality, as it were, partly because it does not attempt to capture reality in the first place.

Comic books, unlike film, are not ‘always already’ enmeshed within ‘reality’ as they are not obliged
to show only what is in front of a screen. The narrative possibilities open to a comic therefore already
refer to an artificially created reality and their departure thereof is perhaps less remarkable than in
other media. This is not, however, a universally applicable formulation. If one were to employ
techniques, as Banerjee does, of a fotonovela that integrates photographs and texts in a comic book
format, this might not hold true, although the ‘reality’ of this might be contested in the larger context
of the work around it. This formulation is merely to demonstrate that distance from whatever one’s
notion of ‘reality’ might be, though seemingly influenced by the form in which it is presented is not
necessarily a constant implication of it.

The question now at hand is whether the fact of the format being foreign impacts those readers for
whom English language comics are intended. As mentioned in Chapter 3, comic book readers are
generally already familiarised with the narrative mode of these publications and therefore do not need
to be further acclimatised into a ‘comic literacy’, as it were. It is only to those unfamiliar with the
rigour of reading comic books, accustomed though they might be to comic strips encountered in daily
life, that these novels might seem unduly unfamiliar. Comic books as a medium seems destined, like
film, to be appropriated into various narrative formats without upsetting the viscerality of the medium
itself.
 48

CHAPTER 5

CONCLUSION

5.1 FINDINGS

A year and a half ago, I began this dissertation with the ambitious plan of mapping the current comic
book industry in its entirety, from a detailed genre analysis of the texts available today, to what I
envisioned as a close examination of what it really means to be a comic book aficionado, whichever
side of the production cycle one might be on. My goals, as can be seen in this research, have been
significantly narrowed down since then.

What I have attempted to do here is to map only a few aspects of the industry: where it is located,
what the implications of this location are on reading strategies, and what exactly do its newer texts say
and to whom. My primary focus remains on the state of the industry as it is today, informed as this
text is by the basic question of why it has seen such a remarkable spurt of interest in the past few
years, since not only is the raw number of publications increasing, so is the breadth of content and
range of artists and publishers. Poised as this industry seems at the cusp of wide success, it seemed
pertinent now to examine its implications from this location.

In the first chapter, I attempted to draw together the disparate reaches of comic book studies in India
and across the world in an attempt to locate my own research. As this field is relatively under studied
in India, locating comics in a historical and cultural context was of some importance; the outline
therein, however, is likely to be of greater interest to a lay person than to someone embedded in the
comic book scenario, as it only barely scratches the surface.

It is interesting that there are as yet few studies today such as Murthy (2009) or Nandini Chandra’s
The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha 1967-2007 (2008) done on the present day comic book
industry in India, or even on the wildly popular adoption of manga by many who grew up watching
anime serials on television. Most studies that that are freely available are focussed on old comic books
– the main preoccupation is Amar Chitra Katha and superhero comics – and dwell only in passing on
the present day. This seems to be changing, however. Popular publications like Time Out and critical
ones like Art India seem to be beginning to devote more attention to new comic books. While my
research is by no means definitive or comprehensive, I hope that it does provide a starting point for
some studies.
 49

One of these points was the study of new spaces that have developed around comic books. One of the
challenges the industry faces is the perception of comics as juvenile or circumspect reading material.
There might be a small subsection of readers who do not have to overcome these perceptions, for
many, reading comics is a matter of some conflict in their personal lives – or so they reported in my
study. Through spaces like the Annual Indian Comic Con that visibilise comic books and bring them
to the fore in an ostensibly acceptable and popular space, this perception is gradually changing.

In as much as the Comic Con provides a space for interaction, it could also be perceived to be doing
what has been done online for several years now, which is to say it provides a space for enthusiasts
and newcomers alike to interact with each other, share ideas and express their interest openly. In this
space that blends commercial activity with private modes of subversion34 or interaction35 , it is quite
possible that if it survives, it might become an avenue of some significance in the years to come—or
not.

At this point, it is unclear in which direction the comic book industry will evolve. If it follows a
strictly Western trajectory, it is possible that it will continue to produce graphic novels for several
years until some seminal text appears, as heralded by Gokul Gopalakrishnan (2011), at which point
critical acclaim might also draw in a larger comic book audience. This, however, is unlikely, for as the
industry has shown so far, the comic book as a form is evolving in Indian hands, if one looks at books
like Bhimayana, for example, or Sita’s Ramayana, both of which employ folk art and non-panelled
structural elements, something that seems to militate against the general perception of comic books.

It is also possible that numeric growth is not necessarily the only outcome of this current phase of
enthusiasm. One of the major problems of comic books abroad and also in India is the rising cost of
production both in terms of money and the environment. Like prose books, it is very likely that comic
books will also eventually need to evolve to digital formats, which will further distance it from a
potentially subversive audience. Spaces like the Annual Indian Comic Con, for all one’s critique of
them, are relatively open and encouraging of what is albeit only a limited strata of new readers. It
remains to be seen whether this will have any discernible impact on the industry.

Another gap in contemporary comic book research seems to be the link between the Internet and
comic book audiences. A number of comic book readers, conforming to the ‘geek’ stereotype 36 , are

34
Reading expensive books for free, for example
35
Cosplaying, speaking with artists
36
An equal number, however, are not. For more on the changing perception of ‘geeks’, people who are
interested in what is perceived to be a certain ‘uncool’ subset of activities, such as comic books, sci-fi, coding,
etc, read Jason Tocci’s Geek cultures: Media and identity in the digital age (2009)
 50

also ‘digital natives’, as it were, conversant with online communities and sharing, and are therefore
influenced by what they read and see online, whether through social media or other methods.
Especially in developing countries, the adoption of the Internet has led to a significant cultural influx
in terms of the matter that is now freely available to anybody who has the means to access the Internet
and the skills to download foreign comics illegally.

Whether just a mere reading of foreign comics has increased interest in making them is debatable;
most of my artist respondents, for example, were avid comic readers well before they read comic
books online and many expressed a distaste for digital comics, while avowing their necessity in a
curtailed economic space. Nevertheless, despite this circumspection, there is also a younger set of
readers who were not similarly prejudiced and whose financial means did not extend to purchasing
inaccessible comics easily. This might have an impact on comic book production in years to come, if
not in terms of content per se, then perhaps in simply an awareness of the medium.

Multimodal reading strategies with reference to comic books have been studied in some detail by
certain scholars. However, the impact online material might have had on comics leads to exciting new
possibilities, some of which were discussed at the First Graphic Novel Conference, such as a paper
reading strategies in digital comics (Nichols 2012) or interactive comics, also called ‘hypercomics’
(Goobrey 2012).

This chapter of my research aimed to see if any link could indeed be established between comic
books, Internet usage and developing countries. As mentioned in that chapter, the way in which one
looks at an image is changing and the change that is being engendered is similar in both comics and in
content available online. There is perhaps a need to look at this more closely at this field.

My own goals, however, were more modest than this as I merely attempted to establish a link between
the two. The fact that most of these new comic books are in English was significant as it seems to
correspond to a similar subset of Internet users. It would be interesting to see how much further this
could go and whether it would indeed alter modes of expression.

Of the existing modes of expression, I also examined how long form comic books, popularly known
as graphic novels, speak to their readers, and also to what kind of readers they speak. The textual
analysis of two comic books, both based in cities, reflect the urban concerns of both authors and
readers. Through that aspect of my research I looked at how these two comics both construct and are
constructed by their readers. Both employ humour, which seems to be shaping up as a popular trend in
long-form comics that are marked by a certain level of ironic self-reflexivity.
 51

There seems to be a certain duality in comic books in India today, wherein they might be insiders as
far as making comics goes, but are also still aware of the fact that comic books are still to be
popularised among a wider audience. This seems to have resulted in a semantic game of sorts,
wherein a large number of ‘new’ comic books verge towards humour and exaggeration. By making its
contents larger than life, these comic books signal readers to engage critically with their very
structures. It is possible that such a wealth of self-reflexivity and in-jokes is a critical feature of comic
books today precisely because the industry seems to renew itself and there is space for such humour to
be expressed. It is also possible that this trend might die down in years to come as comic books settle
more easily into generic conventions, as such productions tend to do.

5.2 FURTHER RESEARCH

The overall thrust of my research has been to examine the meaning-making structures of the comic
book industry as it stands today. As with all studies, there are certain aspects in which it was limited
in scope, or examine only starting points in research.

It would be interesting, for one, to examine comic book-specific spaces in greater detail. As I attended
the Comic Con in India in only two locations, I was unable to speak of the importance of Bengaluru
as a convention space. Many comic book artists in India hail from major metro cities such as New
Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata. Most of them concurred that the comic book scene
in New Delhi and Bengaluru was much more interesting than that in Mumbai.

One of my initial ideas was also to study the meaning of being a fan, from what it meant to be sneered
at for your reading interests or dressing habits, to the impact spaces of consumption might have on
one’s own practices as a fan. In spaces like the Annual Indian Comic Con that engender such
relationships, it might be instructive to see, for example, navigation strategies of fans or which stalls
they tended to cluster at, to see the exact details of their conversations, what they purchased and why,
and why they attended the convention at all.

There are also spaces like Leaping Windows, the comic book library in Mumbai that provides access
to comic books at an hourly rate of Rs. 30, or at varying membership plans. The library itself is an
accessible space that was first only digital and has only just recently moved to a physical location.
Several young readers frequent this library on a regular basis, and it has been widely featured in news
publications. Dedicated comic book stores and libraries are almost unheard of in India and the impact
such a space might have on readers might be of some consequence.
 52

Another aspect of note is the production strategies of both artists and publishers. Comic books were
once regarded as subversive creative outlets in countries where they were especially looked down
upon37 but not especially so in India. Artists on one hand, often make conscious decisions to stay
away from institutionalisation as they fear the impact it might have on their creative output. On the
other hand, comic book publication houses also seem extremely open to experimentation in search of
a formula that will ‘click’ with an audience. These strategies are significant at this stage, though it is
possible that some amount of hindsight will be of use in examining this phenomenon in full detail.

Finally, it might be instructive to embark upon a comprehensive comparative analysis of the industry
now and as it was when it began, updating in the process the generalised histories of comic books in
India. This would be an invaluable resource to scholars in search of a basic understanding of the
changing nature of the industry, for not only has the output of comic books changed, but also its
audience.

The scope for further study of comic books in India today, however, is only limited by one’s
imagination and academic interests, as this field is still to be researched to any level of depth. Perhaps
as the years wear on, respondents will be more bored than amused at the idea of studying comic books
academically. For myself, I was fortunate that all those who I spoke to were immensely interested in
my research. The fact that this research was conducted at all speaks of the already-established
significance of the industry. To return to Schjeldahl who I quoted in the first chapter of this research,

A certain theoretical frenzy about comics today is understandable … it commonly indicates that an
artistic breakthrough, having been made and recognized, is over, and that a process of increasingly
strained emulation and diminishing returns has set in. (Schjeldahl as cited in Martin 2011)

This work is only a minor contribution to the evolution of comic books in India and only a distanced
‘emulation’ at that. Perhaps Comic Kaun, the title of my research, will be less relevant in time to come
as comic books might begin to be accepted as not only a legitimate form of expression, but one that is
not entirely foreign to its readers.

37
Amar Chitra Katha, for all its Hinduisation of Indian history, seems to have done quite a bit in making comic
books respectable. After all, how circumspect can a publication that makes children interested in religion, god
and the nation be in popular imagination?
 53

APPENDIX I

INTERVIEW SCHEDULE

Reader questionnaire
1 How old are you?
2 When did you start reading comics? Why/how/what did you read?
3 Which was your first comic?
4 What do you read nowadays? (Indian/foreign)
5 Why do you read comics now?
6 How do you access them?
7 Do you own comics?
8 Do you read other things as well nowadays?
9 Does your social circle approve of reading comics?
10 In what direction do you think Indian comic book narratives are evolving?
11 What do you think of the current trend of ‘realist narratives’? Do you think these books
accurately reflect your experiences?
12 Do you think these books more widely read than the standard fare of ACK, Raj Comics, etc.?
13 What genres do Indian comics today cover? What genre would you like to see explored more
in India?
14 What do you think of the recent boom in comics publishing?
a. What effect has it had?
b. Why has it come about?
15 Which publishing houses come to mind when you think of comics?
16 Would you be interested in creating comics as well?
 54

Artist questionnaire
1 Why did you begin to make comics?
2 Do you work on your own to make comics?
3 What are the challenges of producing comics? (Paper quality, funding, etc)
4 Is the role of comic writer and artist separated or do artists tend to also plot their work and
vice versa?
5 What is more essential to a comic: plot or art? If art, what aspect of art? (With special
reference to the role panels play)
6 Which comics first influenced you? And since?
7 According to you, what aspect of comics in India needs to change most?
8 What trends do you see in Indian comic books today? What styles?
9 Why do you think your favourite comic works?
10 Would you say your art is influenced by traditions of any region? How?
11 Does your family/social structure support your work now?
12 What genres have you explored? What genres would you like to explore further?
13 Are comics widely read? By whom? How do you distribute them?
14 How have comics changed from twenty years ago? Are you a part of that change?
15 What is your intended readership? (Adults, children, languages) Do you intend to expand
beyond that?
16 Who, according to you, reads the new comics in India’s market: adults or children? (Also,
educational background, social status) Why?
17 India has been described as a ‘comics-resistant’ culture. Would you agree with this? How
would you change this perception?
18 What, in your opinion, are the Indian comic industry’s strengths? And weaknesses?
19 How accessible are comics to people who speak regional languages? Do you think this might
change?
20 How do your readers perceive comic artists in India? (In terms of role models, etc)
21 Are new comics more widely read than the standard fare of ACK, Raj Comics, etc? Why?
22 How do you think the industry will change in the coming years?
23 Would you attend a Comic Con? Why?
24 What has your experience at Comic Cons been like?
25 Would you say Comic Cons influence the industry or its readers in any way?
26 Do you make a living off your comics? If not, do you think it might be possible in the future?
 55

APPENDIX II

ANCILLARY IMAGES

Fig 6.1 McCloud on the location of comics (McCloud 1993, 51)

 56

Fig 6.2 McCloud on the limitations of definition (McCloud 1993, 22)

Fig 6.3 A Campfire title Fig 6.4 Non-Hindu mythological formulation

 57

Fig 6.5 Sita’s Ramayana by Samhita Arni and Moyna Chitrakar which uses Patua art

Fig 6.6 Abhishek Singh’s recently released Krishna: A Journey Within

 58

Fig 6.7 Damned Book 1 by Untitled Creations, an independent publisher

 59

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