Life lessons in 4-panel strips ...
... and many a time even in a single panel!
Hello hello hello …
A clarification to begin with: if the non-Gen X subscribers of my fortnightly dispatch feel a little alienated by what I write, it is not intentional. The referencing of the past only helps me set the context for the topic at hand. The foundation on which we were raised has helped us cope with the newer heights which the world is scaling. Does that mean that all my posts will be referencing the past? The short answer is: No, I don’t intend to.
Now that I have set the record straight, let’s get on …
We Gen X’ers have had tough childhoods. Irrespective of the financial status of the family, we always felt deprived. Deprived, and denied, some simple (and limited) pleasures that were on offer in times where not only food, but everything else too was rationed. However, lessons in good values (read: frugality) and good habits were always in abundance. And nowhere were they in ample evidence than when it came to inculcating the habit of reading. Reading was believed to be a 2-in-1 – good values came free with the habit. And those good values would come only through ‘quality’ reading.
In the cold war era, where as a nation we cosied up to the communist/socialist U.S.S.R. as against the capitalist U.S.A., a little known Russian called Arkady Leokum was given God-like status by Indian parents. Unfortunately there was no Google or Wikipedia then to tell our parents that the good Russian actually resided in America! So why was Arkady Leokum a God? Because, much to the chagrin of kids like me and many others, he authored the de-facto birthday gift of the 70’s called …
Being American, Mr. Leokum didn’t stop at one. He had sequels that went More Tell Me Why … More, More Tell Me Why … you get the drift of how many successive birthdays were destroyed?
A close second in the quality reading universe was Reader’s Digest. It was wholesome (read: paisa vasool) reading for the whole family – no need to buy separate books or magazines. Reader’s Digest hain na!
Slightly better off households would subscribe to National Geographic. And finally, no list of books for quality reading would be complete without the mention of Encyclopædia Britannica. That series was the ultimate humble brag. Humble brag because while owning Encyclopædia Brittanica reeked of status, money, power, intellectual superiority, and also dispensable real estate to stock them, no one could accuse the owners of being materialistic.
I will spare everyone the horrific memories of Competition Success Review being forced down our throats even as we were morphing into hirsute teenagers. (Hirsutism is gender neutral … and hence I have not gender segregated the phenomenon.)
With so much of value-based quality reading, it’s a surprise we weren’t labelled Generation Academia.
Growing up, I don’t recall a single friend whose parents who gifted them comic books. Comics were seen as a waste of time.
I remember my mother being upset when I brought home Tintin In America as the first ‘book’ on getting my 2 month circulating library membership in my summer holidays. (In a way I was lucky – the unlucky ones amongst us were forced to take membership of a hallowed institution called British Council Library. As you can well imagine, the very word ‘comics’ was anathema on its premises.) That was the first and last time I held a comic book in my hands that summer. After that it was only The Famous Five, The Hardy Boys or The Three Investigators. However, throughout that summer I never forgot the joy I felt on holding a hard bound, big size, bright and colourful Tintin in my hands. But to be able to revisit that joy I had to walk the long road of reading ‘books’. It was only once my ‘quality reading’ credentials were well established that I could occasionally indulge in reading comics. To me comics became the forbidden fruit. Whatever little cash gifts I got from my relations on the occasion of my birthdays or getting good results in school were promptly ‘invested’ - mostly in buying comics from raddiwala’s (this was while I was in school, so no pocket money and hence Rhythm House hadn’t happened yet).
There was a certain rite of passage to reading comics. Acceptability (by parents) and accessibility (read: price, besides actual physical access) contributed to traversing the passage. Amar Chitra Katha and Indrajal Comics were how we typically gained entry to the world of comics. While Amar Chitra Katha made light of heavy topics like Indian mythology and history, Indrajal Comics with Phantom, Mandrake, and Bahadur & Bela as their ‘everyday superheroes’ created a fantasy world for impressionable young minds. Pran’s Chacha Chaudhary with his heartland wit, guts and bad English democratised whatever little elitism that came with the concept of comics. However, parents drew the line when it came to ‘foreign’ comics like Richie Rich or Dennis The Menace, and in later years Archie. Per them the ‘foreign hand’ of values-less, capitalist America was felt to be at work even when it came to comics! Not only did they not add any value to our lives, they took away whatever values we had. Flights of imagination that those comics helped us board were aborted even before take off.
As we grew older, and as the fascination with Indian mythology and everyday Indian superheroes started waning, we gravitated towards the likes of Tintin, Asterix and Commando, to name a few. They gave you glimpses of a world beyond Indian mythology, deftly mixing ancient and modern historical references/events, cultural nuances, along with fantastic art and production values.
If the above comics filled up the schooling years, then MAD, The Far Side, Calvin & Hobbes, Peanuts, etc became staple college years fare. These were comics that were on a different level altogether. They pushed the boundaries of how deep they could go with beguiling wit.
(Superheroes with otherworldly superpowers never caught my fancy and hence the glaring omission of Marvel or DC Comics from my repertoire of comics reading. The aversion to supernatural characters continues to this day resulting in me being blissfully unaware of the cinematic universes where movies are being churned out from an assembly line with clockwork frequency and efficiency.)
On researching about the impact of comics, I came across a few interesting papers that wax eloquent about how important comics are in the overall education of children. Miomir Dejanovic, voted Best Educator in Serbia, uses comics as educational and teaching aids. He says, “Comics enrich children in a fun way because precious life messages are unobtrusively conveyed through comics. Communicating information in the traditional way (oral presentation by teachers) is too uniform and dull for students. However, if we offer the same information through comics, children will adopt it much easier and keep it in their memory longer.”
Another paper by the Dublin City Council has been an eye-opener. It states, ‘Comic books don't intimidate struggling readers with an overwhelming page of text. They usually offer short and easy-to-read sentences, alongside other visual and text cues (e.g. character sighs, door slams etc.) for context. They're also helpful for children with learning difficulties; children with autism can learn a lot about identifying emotions through the images in a comic book. Children with dyslexia, who may find it frustrating to finish a page in a traditional book, often feel a sense of accomplishment when they complete a page in a comic book … ’
‘ … Comic books can increase inference in young children by encouraging them to “read between the lines” and infer meaning from the images. Children who read comics often need to infer what is not written by the narrator, which is a complex reading strategy.’
Besides the importance of comics as a genre in the overall development of children, I also came across some features on the ground breaking works of Charles Schulz (Peanuts), Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes) and the irreverent William M. Gaines (publisher of MAD magazine).
Claire Catterall, curator of the exhibition held to celebrate the works of Schulz observes, “For a comic strip that its creator declared was ‘about nothing’, made up only of ‘little incidents’, Peanuts’ influence on culture and society is nothing short of seismic.”
Another essay from Bruce Handy (author of Wild Things: The Joy Of Reading Children’s Literature As An Adult) in The Atlantic states,
‘What I took away from Schulz is that life is hard. People are difficult at best, unfathomable at worst. Justice is a foreign tongue. Happiness can vaporize in the thin gap between a third and fourth panel, and the best response to all that is to laugh and keep moving, always ready to duck.’
Peter Rubin, while writing a eulogy for MAD, sums it up best when he says, “It was acerbic. It was absurdist. But most of all, it was a window into the way the world really worked.”
Which finally brings me to the question I have pondered over for some time now - why aren’t comics accorded the status of books? Why are they seen as lesser to books when possibly they need more focus and pin pointedness to convey the message? In an enlightening and illuminating interview with Emma Watson (Hermione, of Harry Potter fame), Marjane Satrapi (author of Persepolis) says, “I always thought that comics were really work for monks, because it is obsessional work—frame after frame.” The more you read them, the more you realise that comics are written by some of the brightest insight miners. Brevity is the only way that comics know.
Profundity coupled with brevity with the objective of bringing a smile to the reader’s face is no easy task. To do that consistently is an award winning feat.
Whatever be the stage you are at in the comics hierarchy, I believe comics have as much power in shaping an individual as do books. They too teach life lessons the way books do. And the best part is that they (almost) always make you smile while doing so. Sometimes it can be a wistful one, sometimes wry and many a times you let out a pure unbridled joyous guffaw.
Below are some strips that I feel will illustrate (pun heavily intended) the point I just made. (I had to reduce the size of the strips to fit into the prescribed length of the post. Please zoom in to read and smile.)
A 4-panel comic strip has as much power to etch profundity and shape opinion in its reader’s mind as a 4000 word essay or a 400-page novel does.
Then why isn’t there a Nobel or a Booker or a Pulitzer for Comics?
Be braver. Be kinder.
The review this time is of a show that brilliantly captures the growing years of us Gen X’ers when our age decided the length of the pants we boys wore. Pants!?! Not shorts. Not trousers. But … pants!!!
Based on the book written by Anand Suspi, the series tracks various incidences (mostly self inflicted) that dot the life of its protagonist, Dabba, in a quaint town in South India in the 70’s & 80’s. You’ll go down memory lane and relive some of the nuances of how the childhoods of most of us have been. Treated in an authentic manner, Ashwath Ashokkumar as Dabba steals the show (he’s the new Swami, of Malgudi Days fame). Half Pants Full Pants is a return to an innocence that you would want to hold on to.
Full Disclosure: Anand Suspi is an ex-colleague and a good friend of mine. He does an awful job in a cameo as a drummer in the penultimate episode.
Half Pants Full Pants | S1 | Prime Video
Wow! That was a super rush of nostalgia with some very interesting intellectual stuff. Thanks for taking us beyond the obvious.
PS: Did u read Alfred Hitchkok too?
Excellent reading . Very well written . Makes one remember the entire journey of our past in now faded areas like comics .