Cartooning Ka Theka

The Theka

There are three major fields of interest and fascination, especially in India – Movies, Cricket and Politics. Everything beyond these fields is of little interest to people, so it feels nice when there is at least one hero who can take care of the other not so popular fields.

For example, a lot of us don’t like or understand chess. So we like it when a hero like Vishwanathan Anand comes along and really takes care of it. Keeps winning, silently, without making a hue and cry over his victories, match after match. We like it.

I call this the theka (tender) theory. Tender-Contractor, simple logic.

Geet Sethi – Billiards

Baichung Bhutia– Football

Salim Ali – Ornithology

R.K.Laxman – Cartooning

Laxman Theka

Laxman took care of the cartooning ka theka for more than 6 decades. For all those decades we never had to learn a new name when it came to cartooning.

And Laxmannever let us down, much like Arvind Kejriwal (theka for RTI) and Kiran Bedi (theka for ideal police officer) don’t. Laxman maintained a low profile and became what most theka holders become – a question in the General Knowledge book.

Political cartooning does have some other names like Keshav, Unny, Prasad and Shankar (thanks to the recent uproar).But for the layman, cartooning remained just this. A standard black-and-white thing, with some defined rules. Cartoons were identified by the character with its name on the sleeve, common man as a starved villager, the obese politician and the cartoonist as a small character (himself, donkey or parrot) speaking a one liner. (Ref: See this article’s picture or check out the fictional cartoonist Stan Kelly of The Onion).

But that is not cartooning. It’s not even the half of it, It’s just one fragment of the craft called cartooning.

The beautiful world of cartooning

Political cartooning is a phrase made up of two different things, two things which also explain the skills required to become one. A political cartoonist has to be a journalist first, and then a cartoonist.

Who is a cartoonist?

A cartoonist is a collective term for someone who can conceive an idea and then draw it out. The most important in this definition is the “conceive an idea” part.

The idea can be anything, it can be a political comment, but it can also be – a comic strip (newspaper strips), comics, social humour, webcomics. Newspaper comic strips such as Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts or Garfield, have all been created by cartoonists. One man who thinks of the idea then executes it.

Comics basically refer to a longer story, a 20-30 page story and sometimes even longer. Famous among these cartoonists are Pran -who created Chacha Chaudhary, Billo, Pinki and others. He still works from his studio in Delhi. Alone,with just one runner/assistant.

There is the famous Bengali cartoonist, Narayan Debnath who created legendary characters like Baatul The Great and NontePhonte.

Shehab was a very low-key, not-so-famous cartoonist known for his characters called Chotu-Lambu, Manglu Mandari and the secret agent chimp called Chimpu. He used to moonlight as a carpenter to earn money and died alone in a chawl in Mumbai.

There are two other cartoonists who are today associated most strongly with political cartooning – Ajit Ninan, famous for his character Detective Moochwala (Target magazine)and Neelabh Banerjee who used to write and draw Garnabh Das (Target magazine)with his brother Jayanto Banerjee (Hindustan Times).

Mario Miranda deserves a special mention here, because although a few of his cartoons were related to politics, his cartooning mostly commented on life and society.He mentioned this in a Doordarshan documentary saying, “Cartoonist is not just political, there is lot of scope for social cartooning”.His complete body of work has recently been published by Architecture Anonymous.

Offshore cartoonists

Many have championed the long-form narrative through their cartoons.

Famous among them is Osamu Tezuka (Astro Boy, Buddha series, Dororo), Will Eisner (Spirit, New York) and Art Speigelman (Maus). Robert Crumb (Underground Comix, Fritz, Keep on Truckin, Weirdo, Book of Genesis) deserves special mention here. He created many famous characters and told many quirky, interesting stories, which were at times laced with sex and violence – in a beautiful way.

Two cartoonists who have made their name writing long-form stories that have appealed to children and adults alike are Maurice Sendak (Where The Wild Things Are) and Jeff Smith (The Bone Series).

Graphic Novels

The graphic novel is a comic which is an entire story in itself, or sometimes not. I really can’t explain. I think calling it a graphic novel just makes it sound more intelligent than calling it a comic book.

Joe Sacco (Palestine) recently wrote Kushinagar, a comic based on his travels in Uttar Pradesh. Kushinagar was published in Caravan– in full.Other graphic novelists include Guy Delisle – an animator who writes about the places he visits. He has so far written about Shenzen (China) and Pyongyang (North Korea).

Graphic novels have been published here too. But talking about them, I worry will expand and become a debate in the definition of Graphic Novels and who is really a cartoonist and who is not. I think that debate is best reserved for the Comments section.

However, a reading of Orijit Sen’s book, The River of Stories is suggested. It’s out of print and can be bought from his store People Tree in Delhi or can be read online.

Animation

There are a number of animators who function in a similar way as cartoonists do. They write and animate themselves. Prominent among them is Vaibhav Kumaresh (Simpoo, Amaron Battery ads, sequences from Taare Zameen Par and Ra One). He is right now looking for funding partners for his full-length feature film, Return Of The Jungle.

Are you rich? Give him your money, you won’t regret it.

The most famous independent cartoonist involved in animation is Matt Groening (The Simpsons) but I’d also mention Bill Plympton who won the Oscar in 1987 for his animated short,Your Faces.

Webcomics

These are comics where the delivery platform is the web.In this infinite canvas almost every artist and writer worth their salt are trying to tell stories – sometimes with just stick figures (XKCD), and sometimes with little story but heavily detailed art (check out www.activatecomix.com).

These at times blur the fine line between comics and animation. The web has made all of us cartoonists. You want to try your hand at it? If my mother can do it (www.motherlycartoons.tumblr.com) you can too!

P.S. – My mother was inspired by World Comics India’s beautiful process of dividing a page in four panels and jumped at it!

Sometimes look into the theka

So take a moment and look beyond Laxman and your own world of tweets, facebook and news feeds. You’ll see this colorful world from where I come. It’s perfect, it’s frustrating and it’s ageless. We conceive ideas here and execute them, all alone!

If you want to be part of this ride take feeds from www.Drawn.ca and www.cartoonbrew.com.

And if you want to know more about Indian Comics, you could attend Comic Con India to get a better idea of the Indian comic scene. You might even get to see Chitrakatha- the comic documentary that was in the making, but was stopped for some strange reason. I don’t know why. You can watch its rough cut, or ask Alok Sharma, its maker, why he didn’t complete it.

And if you’re rich and magnanimous – yet another project to fund!

Ending point

So Laxman was great and he had a brilliant career, but now we have a new political cartoonist on the rise – Satish Acharya. Why no one else? Well today’s world is different. It’s not the world of just three to four newspapers. It’s the age of information-bombing and in this age he’s doing what’s required to be done, and at an exceptional speed and quality.

But the theka for the “other” cartoonist is still open. Am I bidding? Hell yes!