Comic Book Karma: Visual Mythologies of the Hindu Modern
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Postscripts 4.2 (2008) 177–197 Postscripts ISSN (print) 1743-887x doi: 10.1558/post.v4i2.177 Postscripts ISSN (online) 1743-8888 Comic Book Karma: Visual Mythologies of the Hindu Modern J. BARTON SCOTT MONTANA STATE UNIVERSITY [email protected] ABSTRACT Virgin Comics, a transnational corporation with offices in India and the USA, has tried to put its chosen medium—the comic book— to novel use. In 2006, Virgin (now Liquid Comics) began marketing titles that remobilize Hindu mythology for the global entertainment market. Paying particular attention to the series Devi (2006-), this article situates Virgin’s comics within several discursive and insti- tutional conjunctures. First, I trace how Virgin’s chief “visionaries” sought to “modernize” the Indian comic. By bringing the vocabular- ies of Nehruvian developmentalism to bear on this popular cultural form, Virgin signals that in post-liberalization India the aesthetic has outpaced the industrial as the byword of global modernity. Second, I consider Virgin’s attempt to render the comic book a fully fungible medium, that facilitates the development and exchange of intellec- tual property across entertainment platforms. Newly dematerialized, Virgin’s ethereally cosmopolitan comics are nonetheless haunted by the material specificities of the postcolonial nation-state. Keywords: Hindu comic books; Contemporary India The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become. Charles de Bros (epigraph to Devi no. 2, 6) © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010, 1 Chelsea Manor Studios, Flood Street, London SW3 5SR 178 Comic Book Karma The comic book Devi tells the tale of Tara Mehta, a woman literally pos- sessed by tradition. Kidnapped by a coterie of priests, drugged, and sub- jected to a secret ritual, Tara wakes up to find herself the vehicle of the goddess Devi. Now her earnest alter ego keeps commandeering their shared body to protect the oppressed urban masses of Sitapur. A deity for a secular age, Tara/Devi fuses the human and the divine and so rein- vests the mundane world with epic significance; but she is none too happy about it. As a self-consciously modern woman whose short skirts flout the disapproval of her gossipy neighbors, Tara defiantly refuses to sacrifice what she is to the goddess that she could become. Nowhere is her refusal of all that Devi represents—duty, tradition, religion—on more gleeful dis- play than in the facing panel (Figure 1). With a policeman collapsed in her arms, Tara declares that, if the priests had wanted her to save the world, “You should have asked me first” (Devi no. 1, 15). Produced by Virgin Comics, Devi reworks the venerable sixth-cen- tury Devi-Mahatmya in order to mythologize the cultural conjunctures of twenty-first century India. In doing so, it responds to the demand of Shekhar Kapur, one of its creators, that the Indian comic be “modernized.” The allure of the Indian comic has waned, Kapur claims, since the golden days of his childhood, when popular mythological titles were exchanged throughout India. Times have changed, but the Indian comic has not. “Somehow,” it failed to “develop the new art forms” that emerged in places like Japan in response to television and other media (Kapur 2007). Kapur and Virgin Comics seek to update the genre by adopting visual idioms from other major comics industries and grafting them onto nar- ratives drawn from India’s own rich mythological heritage. “Modernity” and “mythology” thus emerge as the axes around which Virgin creates comics that it insistently presents as distinctively “Indian.” This article contributes to the “‘visual turn’ in modern Indian studies” (Ramaswamy 2003, xiii) by analyzing how Virgin Comics deploys this trio of terms. I argue that Virgin’s comics intervene in the discursive construc- tion of the Indian nation, but in doing so become involved in a series of constitutive contradictions. I trace how, in both corporate publicity and comic book mythology, Virgin negotiates between nationalist and cosmo- politan ideals; immaterial and material production; and the sci-fi future and the mythological past. After describing Virgin Comics and its medium, I analyze each of these three animating tensions, returning periodically to the split figure of Tara/ Devi to consider how the sacrifice that is demanded of her stands in for sacrifices demanded of the Indian nation.1 In conclu- 1. Tara Mehta is, of course, not the first woman to have national tradition thrust upon © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010 J. Barton Scott 179 Figure 1. “You should have asked me first” (Devi no. 1, 15). By permisison of Liquid Comics, 2009, © Liquid Comics. sion I return to the de Bros epigraph with which I began in order to sug- gest that Virgin itself ultimately finds it impossible to fully sacrifice what the Indian comic is for what it could become. her; since at least the late nineteenth century, the regulation of feminine, domestic space has been central to the articulation of cultural nationalism (Sangari and Vaid 1990; Chatterjee 1993). © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010 180 Comic Book Karma The life and death of a comics multinational Virgin Comics was founded in 2005 as a transnational enterprise linked to the Virgin Group, the British conglomerate that also includes companies like Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Records. Virgin Comics has established additional ties to Gotham Entertainment, a U.S.-based company designed to distribute American comics in India. The “Chief Visionaries” behind Virgin’s launch were filmmaker Shekhar Kapur (noted for directing Elizabeth, 1998), business mogul Richard Branson (who helms the Virgin Group), and self-help guru Deepak Chopra (the prolific author of titles like The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, 1994). From the outset, Virgin Comics styled itself a nexus between “West” and “East.” It would re-mythologize American characters like Spider-Man for India, export Indian characters to the West, and outsource artistic talent to the major comics multination- als (Rai 2004). The company established offices in New York and Bangalore and in 2006 began plying its house blend of world cultures in three flag- ship series: Devi, Snake Woman, and The Sadhu. Over the next two years, Virgin would develop a thick portfolio of titles. These include series that riff on Hindu and Buddhist mythology (India Authentic, Deepak Chopra’s Buddha, The Tall Tales of Vishnu Sharma, Ramayana 3392 A.D Reloaded, and Project Kalki; all in the “Shakti” line), as well as series that operate within genres like horror, fantasy, noir, and espionage (Zombie Broadway, Voodoo Child, The Stranded, Shadow Hunter, and Gamekeeper). Virgin quickly began establishing links with the film indus- try, recruiting celebrities like John Woo, Guy Ritchie, Nicholas Cage, and Jenna Jameson to create comics series, and developing relationships with Warner Brothers, New Regency, Sony Online Entertainment, the Sci Fi Channel, and other companies (“Liquid Comics”). It also sold concepts to be developed as video games, most notably a Sony Ramayana 3392 A.D. Reloaded (Boucher, “Virgin,” 2008). In April 2008, I visited Virgin’s Bangalore facility to learn more about the comic book production process. At Virgin, a comic image begins as a drawing, generally sketched in either pencil or pen, although some- times generated on computer. Hand-drawn outlines, once completed, are scanned and colorized digitally. Depending on the number of panels, coloring a page takes between two and six hours. Once coloration is com- plete, the page is moved upstairs to the text department, where speech bubbles and special effects (e.g. “BAM!”) are added to the panels. Finally, a draft version is sent to the editorial staff, housed partly in Bangalore and partly (at that time) in New Jersey. The Bangalore staff comes to Virgin with a wide range of experience; it includes portrait painters, photogra- © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010 J. Barton Scott 181 phers, and muralists formerly employed by the film industry. The latter group had adorned the office stairwell with colorful murals of the major Virgin characters. Some of the staff had been devotees of comics when young; others had little to no exposure to comics prior to joining Virgin. English and Hindi were both spoken in the office. After my visit, in August 2008, the company separated from the Virgin Group and reorganized itself as Liquid Comics. The split seems to have been caused by general financial duress at Virgin; the conglomerate decided to shed a comics company, which, despite its proliferating plans and projects had presumably not yet proved profitable (Boucher, “Virgin,” 2008). The new Liquid Comics relocated its American headquarters from New York to Los Angeles in order to further facilitate links with the film industry.2 Comic book nation: Redefining a genre Although in his call to modernize the Indian comic, Kapur does not name his comic book bogey, his clear reference is to the Amar Chitra Katha (“Immortal Picture Stories”). This beloved series has dominated the Indian comics market since 1967, when it was founded by Anant Pai; it now boasts 440 titles, with over 90 million issues sold. Formally, the Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) simulates American comics that were available in India in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Tarzan, The Phantom, and Mandrake. ACK issues hover at around thirty-two pages and divide each page into three to six individual panels, most of which juxtapose text and image. Like those American com- ics, the ACK relies heavily on text to convey narrative, and it compresses action into relatively few frames. For a variety of reasons, including a loyal and vocal readership resistant to change, the visual style of the ACK has remained fairly uniform since the late 1960s (McLain 2009, 2–3). When Anant Pai launched the ACK in 1967, he positioned it as an inter- vention into the cultural and class politics of the nascent nation.