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India's first Comic Con, real but not surreal
Tamil pulp fiction, vintage Star Wars poster designs and political spoofs make India's first comic convention noteworthy, but not otherworldly
India's first comic convention wouldn't have been born if Jatin Verma and his team of graphic geeks hadn't forgotten to get travel visas.
“After we collected the money for the San Diego Comic Con, we realized we had no visas. So we decided to bring the comic con to us,” says Verma, CEO TwentyOnwards Media.
The idea turned into Comic Con India, a convention at urban fairground Dilli Haat in New Delhi with its usual fare of rural artisans and craftspeople.
Verma says it was a perfect location because they wanted that kind of “walk-in public."
They were looking for comic virgins to rediscover Indian comics with a vernacular focus.
In all, some 15,000 fans, geeks, nerds and a whole lot of costumed freaks turned up.
Here's six of the most fun pickings from India's first comic con.
Creative Gaga
The walls of the next door stall were lined with copies of Creative Gaga's launch issue.
The covers featured eye-catching sketches -- one a psychedelic explosion of color and the other a darker drawing of a man slouching in the corner.
The independently published design magazine's team believes they’re filling a niche.
“Our focus is not on peoples' lives, that other design magazines gravitate towards. Ours is a journal of technique, inspirations and processes from the innovators in the field of design,” says editor-in-chief Nitin Tiwari.
Along with art director Anureet Phul, Tiwari isn't promising verbose features and in-depth critiques -- just slick designs, sophisticated layouts and lots of know-how.
Blaft Publications
A couple of stalls away, a thick novel with a drawing of a beautiful Indian woman drinking what looks like blood from a skull lay on an obscure shelf.
Blaft’s anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction Part 2 is dramatic, macabre and full of blood, gore and sex.
Blaft Publications attempts to bring to the English reader just some of the 40,000 to 50,000 novels that Tamil pulp fiction writers pump out yearly.
Titles like “Hold on a minute I’m in the middle of a murder” or “The hidden hoard in the cryptic chamber” do the sales trick.
Rakesh Khanna, Blaft’s founder left the sunny beaches of California, moved to Chennai and went from teaching math to translating classic Hindi and Tamil pulp novels, for an audience that would otherwise never get to read them.
Working with his wife Rashmi Devi Dasan and editor/co-director Kaveri Lalchandi, they raid library lists for the most popular books, and proceed to meticulously translate stories about lust, vampires, curses, prostitutes and detectives.
This is hardcore Indian pop culture.
Campfire
A tall white man dressed as Chacha Chaudhary stood at the Campfire stall where publications like "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" and the "Hound of Baskervilles" rub shoulders with "Sita: The Daugher Of Earth" and "Nelson Mandela," making up a wide mix of Campfire’s abridged, graphic novel adaptations.
Chacha Chaudhary aka Andrew Dodd, used to be a banker; now he’s editor-in-chief at Campfire, the brainchild of Jayshree and Keshav Thirani.
They hit upon the idea when they realized badly written scripts didn’t hold their grandchildren's attention long and were far from inspirational.
Campfire works closely with freelance script-writers from India and the United States, and Indian artists, to create books that encourage kids (and adults) to get to know their classics better.
At Comic Con itself, Campfire sales crossed Rs 1.5 million.
ABSTRAKTSIA
In the convention hall section between Avenger Toys and an animation school stall, five men sat surrounded by dark, surreal sketches.
A book ominously titled "The Damned Book" sits at a desk. Rupam Dutta intensely scribbled away with his pencil, while Bhanu Pratap handled enquiries.
Together with Aakshat Sinha, Swapnil Singh and Abhinav Senger, they make up an art collective called ABSTRAKTSIA.
Their virgin graphic novel takes a Hitchcockian theme and delves into deep, dark psychological territory.
“We are trying to make something avant garde,” says Pratap.
Each issue of "The Damned Book" series, they say, will be themed and will engage artists from all over the world.
Abhijit Kini
A hat tip to the Comic Con backdrop poster artist himself, 29-year-old Abhijit Kini who created the extensive crowd shot in homage to MAD comic’s artist Aragones.
Kini’s hero drew MAD’s iconic Marginal Thinking strip, and the young Indian illustrator and animator hopes to do the same.
At the Comic Con Kini also launched his first virgin graphic novel, "Uuddilawmanus," the story of a Bhojpuri super hero who is half-man, half-otter, set in a futuristic, technologically advanced place called Beehar.
This not-so-alternate reality world with mutant humans and cliched Bollywood villans, is, according to Kini, a spoof on India's political system.
Buzzingaa
People stepped all over each other to get hold of Anish Beri and Kunal Kapoor’s Buzzingaa 3D posters. Today, their website, the only place they retail, is 98 percent sold out.
Considering the 24-year-old computer buddies are selling posters that “put the awe back in awesome” for under Rs 549, it's a steal.
