Introduction: First Contact

Comics came to India rather late and can still not be called a fully established artform. However, there was an appreciable ‘sunrise’ period in the history of the form, and recently the diversity and ambition of new comics works has been on the rise. Comics, a form that tells stories through pictures and words combined in complex symbolic relationships, is one of the most complete artforms ever invented. It can truly be called one of the twentieth century's biggest literary innovations, right up there with stream-of-consciousness, science fiction and cyberpunk. At its best, it can involve the written word, the sound effect, the picture and the frame in a brilliant orchestration of meaning. At its best, it is a form most likely to stretch its creator(s) to within an inch of their life. At its worst, it can plumb depths of sulphurous badness unavailable to less powerful forms. Yet even its name is a subject of contention. Is ‘comics’ singular or plural, editors ask authors with furrowed brows. When is a picture-story a ‘comic’, and when is it a ‘graphic novel’? These are important questions, not just because their answers matter, but because the motives behind the asking of the questions tell us a lot about how the form is viewed and how it has developed.

Across the globe, every culture has used pictures, with or without text, to make stories. The frescoes on the pyramids, the carvings on Indian temples, the Mayan books, the Bayeaux tapestry, all are early versions of picture-stories. They are not, however, comics, and for that development we must thank the American pulps of the early twentieth century. They invented the system of panels or frames laid out on a page, with speech bubbles and boxes, that we recognise as the signature technique of comics. From America, this innovation made its way across the globe, to Europe, Japan and finally to India. As the name suggests, the ‘comic’ was originally meant to be funny, satirical, per haps a political or social lampoon. The American and European newspaper cartoons of the nineteenth century were its nearest ancestor, and in their tradition of mordant commentary the cartoonists set themselves up as the court jesters of this new realm of print.