Step into any Comic Con India and the wide impact of the infectious good spirits is comparable to that of The Walking Dead’s outbreak; and this year’s set of Comic Con India events promise to offer no different. While the starpower of Comic Con India isn’t comparable to the ones in London, San Diego and New York, there’s still a great deal of appreciation for the growth Comic Con India has experienced over the years. Hyderabad, as usual, inaugurates the Comic India season across the country and the run-up to this weekend’s festivities is riddled with excitement.
Jatin has great things to say about this year’s International Guests. One of them is the wildly popular Nathan W Pyle whose web comic series Strange Planet is surely one you’ll see your friends regularaly reshared, retweeted or posted to Instagram Stories. “There are people who love Marvel and then people who love DC Comics. But there’s a new set of people who are drawn to the web comics circuit and fanatically follow it,” explains Jatin, “I think web comic strips are the new newspaper comic strips of which many people became fans over the years, you know? And it’s tough to pull off a web comic; you have to be witty and funny in a few panels. The atmosphere now is all about the digital and when we think ‘popular web comic series’, many people think of Strange Planet .”
Nathan’s visit to Hyderabad comes ahead of the release of his web comics as a book of the same name, too. Then Jatin starts chuckling, “Yes, we have had fans ask us why we haven’t gotten Nathan in Delhi and Bengaluru as well, but we also had to consider Nathan’s scheduling.”
We need a hero
One of the biggest comic convention trends tangibly visible through cinema, comic book publication and cosplaying has been the popularisation of villains as heroes which we’ve seen through Suicide Squad , headline-making Joker and the to-be-released Birds Of Prey . New York Comic Con, which wrapped up on October 6, already saw some cosplayers dress up as ‘Harley Quinn 2.0’ with the bright yellow fringe jacket and cropped hair, all in anticipation of the 2020 film. Will we see the same appreciation at Hyderabad Comic Con? Jatin responds there will be a Birds Of Prey experience centre but he doesn’t have many details. Others include Terminator, Frozen 2, Vikings with AXN, Lego: Batman with Sony Pix, a possibility of one around Black Widow and an e-sports event by AMD Gameon.
Cosplay of Hela at Hyderabad Comic Con 2018
PUBG has raised many questions around the self-regulation in gaming especially in India. Given the AMD Gameon experience includes PUBG, it’s possible the panel they will have will open questions to the controversy around the headline-generating game.
In terms of cosplay, Jatin explains that he’ll only know on-site given the wild creativity of cosplayers. He adds, “ Avengers: Endgame was such a watershed event after which the world took a collective sigh. Everything after that seemed so much smaller and lighter, apart from Joker which is an anomaly. I feel the attention will shift towards television for a bit, especially given the new Marvel content announced at D23 Expo. Recreating the atmosphere that came with Endgame will be impossible.”
- With each Comic Con expected to surpass the greatness of the previous year’s, how does Jatin and his team make sure they don’t end up monotonous? Jatin says staying clued in on the business side of entertainment is majorly vital to also knowing the pulse of their fans. Disney’s partial acquisition of Fox was one of the more impactful headlines this year. Prior to this Fox didn’t have a huge presence in India but Disney changed that for the country, hence the Terminator add-on in the experience centres.
Another major comic convention pattern for 2019 has been the inclination towards deeper storylines within a specific universe. We saw that with the Avengers but we may see that with Star Wars too, with all the new series and original films announced by Disney this year. But Jatin, who used to be a huge Star Wars fan, says the new content and its impact on fans and followers won’t come close to what happened with Avengers. “The power of Star Wars is carried by legacy fans, not the newer fans. And the fans are limited, unfortunately, because of the generations the universe impacted. All that said, I do believe this year’s Comic Con India will be much more varied in terms of trends.”
Equally worth a huge scope is 2019’s gifts of reality-altering video games such as Gears 5, Code Vein, the upcoming Death Stranding, Last Of Us Part Two, Control and more. While not a huge gamer himself, Jatin knows enough of the lasting impact these immersive experiences have on fans. “There’s been a good amount of gaming cosplay; the past few years has seen Overwatch [with cosplays of Genji by Akshay Churi] and Halo. Earlier Anime and Manga used to dominate the cosplay line-up, and some of the key winners have been around gaming.”
Hyderabad Comic Con will take place at Hitex Exhibition Centre on October 12 and 13. Tickets, starting at ₹599 per head, are available on comicconindia.com/hyderabad.
