“Have you heard of Habibi by Craig Thompson?” Cartoonist Biswajit Balasubramanian pulls out his phone and browses for the title. A series of black-and-white intricately-done artworks tells the story of two escaped child slaves who reunite after ages — all set in an Islamic landscape. The topic is intense. But, a majority in India still cannot believe that graphic novels can convey something as hard-hitting and socially relevant like Habibi does. “When I say I am a cartoonist, people still think my work is childlike. The depiction may be so, but the topics are certainly not.”
This mental block seems to be a concern for Balasubramanian, who has been creating cartoons for the past 15 years. As a step towards changing this, he organises a one-day comic art workshop today at Forum Art Gallery, which he co-founded. “No, it is not necessary to know how to draw,” he affirms. “It’s okay even if you use only stick figures for your illustrations; what’s important is the narration.”
Narration, the key
How are you going to tell the story? Where are you taking the stick figures after creating them? Can you succeed in making each page a cliffhanger like, say in Asterix ? At the workshop, the participants will be given a brief about developing characters, creating panels, use of colours, and so on. Following this, the first line of the story will be given to a participant. “He or she has to develop on it, and tell the ending to the next, who takes it off from there.” At the end of the seven-hour workshop, they would have created a comic book — a collaborative project — which they can take home.
In Chennai, the challenge is that there aren’t any dedicated groups like in the West, where the interest is immense — Balasubramanian realised this during a stint in a summer camp in New York a year ago. Sipping hazelnut cappuccino in a café on Whites Road, he recounts the days spent cartooning at River Junction in Vermont. “We had resource persons who had done cartoons for The New Yorker , 500 titles in Marvel , brought out their own comic books... There was a team of three doing a comic book on the war veterans of Vietnam and Afghanistan; they would meet them in hospital, listen to their stories, and narrate them in illustrations. The maturity in cartooning and graphic novels is at a different level,” says the artist, who has done over 2,500 cartoons.
The workshop might be the beginning of a comic art club, a forum for conversations around this art, he hopes. Meanwhile, he is busy conceptualising artwork for the walls surrounding Bharathiar garden in his hometown Madurai, and also working on a graphic novel that traces his roots to Saurashtra. Just as we leave, a group of known faces enters the café, and breaks into conversation about the workshop, until one sighs “Only if I knew how to draw”. And, Balasubramanian begins his patient reply.
@ Forum art gallery, Adyar
10 am to 5 pm
Tel: 42115596
