New Comics for COMIX.INDIA

Hello everyone, it really feels good to return with a good news.

COMIX.INDIA volume 03 (Third World Fantasy) is on sale now on pothi.com. You can buy your copy here. This amazing anthology of 14 black-and–white comics on fantasy and sci-fi is edited by Kailash Iyer and 242pages long. My 20page comics ‘The Last Magic’ is also one of the 14 comics of this volume. Not to mention this is my first work for COMIX.INDIA. 

Well, to encourage you to get a copy of the magazine, here is a teaser poster of my comics. Apart from this, preview of each individual comics is available on the COMIX.INDIA site. COMIX.INDIA is a very good initiative in the field of alternative and experimental comics in India. So, please buy it and read it (and also the back issues; as they are print on demand they never go out of stock ) and if possible help spread the word.

This issue will be officially launched on September 19, 2010, 7:00pm at Yodakin Bookshop, Delhi (2, Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi 11016. 

And a note for the comics artists- submission for COMIX.INDIA vol 04: Real Stuff is open until October 31, 2010.

And as always, constructive feedback is something I always enjoy so don’t hesitate to disturb me. 

Love you all...

Should any free soul come across...

These few pages are the manifestation of my ever-growing passion about anarchism. I created this comics as part of ‘comics without border’ an online comics workshop organized by COMIX.INDIA and Eastside, London during June this year (you can read other participants' works here). Thanks to Bharath Murthy and Ciara Brennan for giving me the opportunity to go for this excellent journey (It’s a pity that the output of the workshop was not great). Otherwise I wouldn’t go for this story right now.

The b-w version of the comics is already published by Kindle magazine, a Kolkata-based art and culture magazine, in their July issue graphic storytelling supplement. (The ten 4-page works published are created by Aditya Bidikar & Nitin Veturkar, Arkadeep Bhattacharya, Bharath Murthy, Gokul Gopalakrishnan, Amrita Sen & Harsho Mohan Chattoraj, Kailash Iyer, Lavanya Karthik, Deepak Sharma, Nandita Basu, Orijit Sen).

I won’t like to say much about this work but all that I can say is – it was fun. ‘Fun’ in a different way than one may assume. While creating the storyline I fell in love with Emma Goldman. I spent a whole week in a trance, hardly spoke to anyone but my brother and then I realized what she meant when she said -“I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy.” This comics is all about that.

I would very much like to make a full size graphic novel (I already have plans) with these characters someday where I can go for a longer journey through anarchism.

The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.

                                                           

                                    
  

     

Visual Literature mag

After almost one year of planning  we are finally going to start our comics magazine. These days there are some good initiatives to publish comics magazine in India. All I can say that they have inspired us a lot. So we are thinking of taking it to a new hight. There will be comics as well as articles about comics as an art-form and as a medium. Plus there will be news about upcoming events and current affairs on this field. In short, we are thinking about a complete all-round monthly comics mag. These initiatives won't be able to change the comics scenario of India in one day but together we can give it a try.

Contributions are always welcome but please make the effort to read the submission guideline on the magazine's blog first. 

Visual Literature mag on facebook

Visual Literature mag blog

Growing culture of collecting comics in India

Recently I was checking a certain blog’s comment section and was amazed to find the increasing public interest in collecting comic books, mainly Indrajal comics. Doing some research on the matter I learned that some old issues of the mentioned comics is sold at a price quite high for the Indian comics culture. Sometimes the price is as high as thousand Rupees each but mostly sold between Rs 10 and Rs 100. Some people are really concerned with it.

This doesn’t seem rite and only reminds us of the fall of the speculators market in the US during ‘90s. Why would people be interested to buy cheap quality translated comics against that price? I still don’t understand what makes Indrajal comics this much hit. Compared to that Amar Chitra Katha is much better and I won’t be astonished if people starts collecting them against higher price. This is the high time for Indian comics as there are lots of new initiatives being taken everyday to produce quality material. Then why this childish craze? Why this going backward?

When asked if he collects comics, Scott McCloud answered in a certain interview that, he is not a collector and has a very strong antipathy toward collector culture. 

“They nearly destroyed the industry in the ’90s. It’s so beside the point. It’s fetishist stuff. We hope people will read what we write and draw, not just shove it in a bag. Comics are for reading. It’s demeaning to have them sitting with baseball cards.”

The foolish publicity stunts and marketing schemes of the American comics Giants (you know what I mean) did much harm to the industry and the medium. I’m sure the situation here isn’t going that way. But still the culture of collecting comics is not something desirable. Well, I have a knack of collecting piece of works (other than single panel like ads) that uses images and text side by side to narrate a story or establish an idea (but is not what we call comics or even sequential art) but that is simply for academic purpose. I would like to burn my entire collection of the Bengali translation of Tintin before ‘collecting’ Indrajal comics or any other comics.

You can cherish your leather-bound volumes of Sandman or the first Tintin comics your parent bought you but you would never like to stack hundreds of comic books and never reading them. That reminds me of a character from Corridor who never even looks at his Phantom collection just because his friend borrowed the fourth volume and never returned it. Comics is an art form and a communicative medium and should be treated that way and not as some artifacts or collectibles. This is the art-form that gives the creator most freedom, more than any other. Please don’t bring it to the same standard as Baiji dance. Read a comics, re-read it, read it over and over but don’t fall in the habit of just collecting them.

New Experiment: Visual Poetry

This work is part of my new experiment with Visual form of poetry. This one is originally a poem by Srijato, my favorite contemporary Bengali poet and probably the finest poet of this generation. When I thought of making comics with poetry as text I new that I was going to work on his poems as I spend a considerable amount of time everyday reading his works. His poems keeps me sane and alive. (Funny info about me: I sleep with his Uronto Sob Jokar under my pillow. lol) 

Talking about Visual Poetry, it's still at the basic stage of experimentation therefore I wouldn't like to say much bout it. These days I'm working on one of my own poem written about 6 years ago. So you can hope to see some more in the future. 

And as always I need your feedback, in this case more than ever. 

New Work

Hey folks! Great news. My new cartoon strip has just started being published from this Sunday (15 Nov, 2009) in a local Bengali periodical named Samakal Katha (talking contemporary times). The strip is titled Chashma (or the spectacles). And not to mention this is my first ever work published in the print medium.

I'm looking forward to get your feedback.

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