Comic Soon...

It’s on paper now. Bollywood heroes will woo heroines and fight villains between the pages of a new publication. Shah Rukh Khan, Sanjay Dutt, Amitabh Bachchan and Saif Ali Khan are some of the faces that will once again attract your attention on newsstands. And instead of glossy pictures and catchy headlines, this time the story will be told through illustrations and voice bubbles. The new Bollywood comic series is slated to be out early next month.

This is just one of the comic series being brought out by Illustrated Orchids, a Delhi-based company with operations in Singapore. Also ready for launch is the secondseries—Santa Banta & Trendy—which will also be out in April. The company is also working on a range on mythology and another one centered around Hawk, a superhero who fights terrorists. These two are likely to hit the stands in June.

"Indian comics have no international presence. No one reads them on planes," says director Rakesh Sehgal. "We want to make our comics as popular as Spider-man or Disney publications." Since Sehgal’s brother Sudhir is based in Singapore, they have launched a set-up there too. The firstissues—Santa Banta & Trendy and Bollywood; The Naughty Lover—were launched there earlier this year. 

Santa Banta, as the name makes clear, are two brothers who end up landing in trouble in each issue. And Santa’s child scientist son Trendy rescues them each time. The Bollywood series, on the other hand, contains a storyline quite like a Hindi film, with maybe a college romance, a street Romeo and a damsel in distress. Each issue will feature lookalike characters in new stories. The first one features likenesses of Shah Rukh Khan, Aishwarya Rai and Rani Mukherjee. "We showed it to Shah Rukh Khan, and he liked it a lot," says Sehgal. "We are in the process of developing business terms with him for continuing the series." Sehgal doesn’t appear a bit perturbed by the possibility of an actor objecting to their portrayal in a comic book. "If they cooperate with us, it will be good. If they disapprove, we will not feature them again," he says. 

Sehgal is also careful not to label Santa Banta as sardarjis. "Lets just look at them as innocent village folks," he emphasises. While this series is targeted at children under 10, the Bollywood comics are meant for teenagers, especially the NRIs. The mythology theme is, of course, likely to interest a wider age group. Sehgal makes it clear that they don’t have Amar Chitra Katha on their minds. "At that time, technology wasn’t such a strong point. The comic was also just restricted to India. We have to be technically stronger to launch our comics worldwide," he says. So Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, Archie... ready for some Indian competition? 

This article originally appeared in Delhi City Limits, March 31, 2006