When the Justice League says you can’t save the world alone, all is well. But what if it is they who need saving?
Tony Davis and San Ramsankar from Kochi are working at forming a community of comic lovers who don’t want their superheroes to disappear from print. The duo are steering a growing comic subculture in the city, creating opportunities for comic geeks to meet and interact. A few months back, they opened Comic Collective, a library dedicated to comics and graphic novels.
One of the few of its kind in the country, it has in its vintage collection issues that date back to the ’70s. The vintage shares space with newer comics that span genres. Though the adult interest in superheroes today might largely be the contribution of films, there is a still a cross-section of people who love the feel of a book, the founders say.
Curl up
The library was inspired by Leaping Windows in Mumbai, a café-cum-comic book library. When Ramsankar and Davis met last year and discovered the comic lover in each other, they decided to organise events around superheroes — which turned out to be more successful than they expected. They realised there were die-hard comic geeks and cosplay enthusiasts who didn’t have a space to connect. “The library was an extension of this brotherhood. After 2009, comics vanished from newsstands and it became almost impossible to buy physical copies. The library intends to make them accessible,” Davis says.
Comic Collective is for those who love books, but want to escape the clutches of wordy prose. “That is the beauty of comics. They are artistic and literary at the same time, and that makes them unique,” Ramsankar says. The books were collected by the founders themselves, over their many trips to used bookstores and markets, street-side stalls and such, across the country. Some bits of their personal collections too have gone into the 1,400-books-strong library, which functions out of a rented house.
An imposing figure of Optimus Prime, the character from the Transformers film and cartoon franchise, made by Ramsankar, stands in a corner of the hall. The walls have superheroes leaping out of posters and an entire shelf is devoted to superhero figurines. The books are sorted publisher-wise. So there is a massive wall shelf each for DC Comics and Marvel. A smaller section for teenagers includes titles such as Bone , Scott Pilgrim and even Satyajit Ray’s Feluda series. Membership is for ages nine and above, although a majority of the existing members are over 25.
The ‘Mature reader’ section has gems such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus , Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis , The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen , V for Vendetta , Hellboy , Road to Perdition ,and 300 , to name a few. The library devotes a fair share of space to indie artists as well: Studio Kokaachi’s original and inspiring Mixtape series, the wordless brilliance of Appupen’s Legends of Halahala and the brooding imagery of Suhas Sundar’s Odayan set against the backdrop of feudal Kerala.
Indian comics (including Indrajal from the late 60s), Japanese Manga , sci-fi and political comics form the rest of the collection. The reading room has coir mats on the floor for the reader who wants to curl up. The vintage collection is not lent and can only be read at the library — a precaution meant “to preserve the books”, says Davis.
Both Ramsankar and Davis hold day jobs and run the library with help from like-minded artist friends. “We don’t earn profit from memberships, and we have so many plans, including a comics store. The passion keeps us going,” Davis says.
