Bengaluru’s graphic novel artistes choose to be zine

BENGALURU: Bengaluru’s comic and graphic novel artistes aren’t waiting around for  readers to find them, instead they are bringing out their art in smaller doses as ‘zines’. You can make a zine (short for magazine) on anything, even a trip to the park or on draping sarees, and print it out on your own; you don’t need a big publisher to okay it across a heavy desk. Madhav Nair, a zine maker who organised a workshop for the general public at Cubbon Park Metro Station recently, says, “These are self-published and you don’t sell more than 500 copies. They are cheaply printed for a few tens each, like photocopies of your black and white work or offset prints for the colours, and distribution is controlled by you too.”

He says it is huge outside India, and the culture is just catching in Mumbai and Delhi. Graphic artiste Appupen, aka George Mathen, who has published his works with bigger houses like HarperCollins, says that zines were big in eighties abroad “in the US more than in Europe”. “But now, popular artistes such as Adrian Tomine, repackaged their earlier art-school zines in fancy cardboard boxes and sold them for a good price, this has all the art students across the world excited,” says Appupen.

“It is the new cool, we used to do in college too. If you wanted to share your artwork, you simply took a photocopy and passed it on to friends… we didn’t think of calling it zine then,” he says. Dismissive as he may sound, Appupen has been helping art students review their zines and is part of an informal collective that sources work from a few artistes and brings them out as smaller zines of say 20 pages, and distribute them.Madhav says that zine culture is at heart about control over the content of your books. “They are not large scale, industrial products. You bring them out once in a while, like a periodical,” he says. They are then sold among friends or fellow enthusiasts. 

Zines also experiment with the physical form of the book. Studio Kohl in Mumbai, for example, brought out a zine on saree draping folded as a saree. Enthusiasts collect these oddities for the novelty. “I am proud of owning one of those,” says Madhav, who is a student at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology.

At Chitra Kala Parishat, Anand Shenoy and his friend Mohit are running a zine publishing project Pagalcanvas that brought out six of them, including one that used butter paper to layer the telling of a story on alter-egos and pets. Their comics are printed for `20 or `30 a copy and sold at `30 or `40, only enough to help them publish their next project.

Run wild but stay on the plotline
Zines, which are quick-on-their-feet, allow for quirky collaborations. For example, Anand took the images of a friend to tell a short story of a travel. “There is no proper narrative, it just shows a character Atom Thimma moving through various landscapes,” he says.  But Appupen cautions against running wild with this freedom. “Artistes tend to take zines lightly, since they don’t need you to meditate on a story as larger graphic novels need you to. While zines help people get started, a larger publisher could do a reality check… for example, they will come and say that a story or its telling won’t work. Without that, zines with their obscure stories could put people off the medium.” 

What we made
Zines made by general public at the Cubbon Park Metro Station, at a workshop organised by Deadtheduck and Pagalcanvas last weekend, will be on display from October 20 to 23 at Silent Comix+Zine Festival again at the the same station.