A young man in a grey hoodie and black pants sits inside a bubble, afloat in space. Zoom out: and there are a hundred others like him, each enclosed in their own bubble, all drifting away. A million people, a million worlds.
The comic SandSerif is making waves on the Internet for dealing with themes like depression, low self-esteem and the need for validation, with a pinch of dark humour. Its creator is a 21-year-old from Mumbai, who prefers to go by his nickname — and pen-name — Sandy.
Over email, he explains why: he wants the comics to be his identity. “I enjoy being a character. I don’t want to attach a different name or face to it yet,” he says. The name ‘SandSerif’ was coined when he was punning around with his nickname and the font. Having started in June 2017, the comics are Sandy’s way of communicating with the world and telling them that everybody feels lonely sometimes. “The comics are basically projections of myself on paper. It’s all autobiographical,” he says. Whenever a dark thought gets him down, he translates it into a comic.
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His protagonist has eyes shaped like a chandrabindu in the Devanagari script: a bowl with a dot on top. As a result, it looks like he is perpetually tired with bags under his eyes. Another interesting quirk is that the character never has a mouth drawn on. This has something to do with how uncomfortable its creator is with talking. “I’m not very good at expressing myself by talking, be (the reason) social anxiety or just my personality.”
While words fail him, art has always been his catharsis. “Art comes from a deeper place, as compared to talking; visuals can always convey more than just words,” he claims.
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In one of SandSerif ’s comics, the character is facing a woman who throws at him a volley of literal ‘compliments’. But all of them hit a wall — labelled Low Self-Esteem — and scatter on the floor. In yet another, a faceless man called Anxiety follows him around as he goes by his day, messing everything up for him. A modern-day equivalent of the little devil on the left shoulder.
Comics like these have resonated with his growing online audience. “I’ve had people thank me for making them feel like they aren’t alone in feeling how they do. And, of course, I feel the same when I see those messages,” he says.
Most of Sandy’s comics are drawn in black and white, using colour only to imagine a parallel world where he is content. This contrast increases the feeling of alienation from society. “I don’t start a comic until I can completely visualise it in my head, punchline and everything,” he adds. He draws them digitally on Photoshop, using a wacom tablet.
Finding a way to make money off his art, Sandy has teamed up with Threadless, an e-commerce website and an online community of artists, in order to sell his merchandise: mugs, T-shirts, hoodies, pillowcases and the like, with his comics printed on them.
Given his dark sense of humour, Sandy perhaps follows the footsteps of comic legend Bill Watterson’s character Hobbes, who once famously said, “If we couldn’t laugh at the things that don’t make sense, we couldn’t react to a lot of life.”