Indian Comics Research Articles

The Place of Comics in the Modern Hindu Imagination

AbstractThis article provides an overview of the birth of comics in India; a discussion of the available scholarship to date, which has focused largely on India’s most prominent comic book series, Amar Chitra Katha, and its connections to classical Hindu mythology and modern Hindu nationalist ideology; a roundup of recent developments in Indian comics since the creation of Amar Chitra Katha; and briefly offers some suggestions for further research.

Super-heroes to super languages: American popular culture through South Asian language comics

: Although under immense pressure from television, movies, and video games, comics are a very effective and non-intrusive means of introducing American popular culture in South Asia in the age of globalization. The introduction of American comic books in South Asian languages, although a recent phenomenon, has already stimulated the South Asian/Indian appetite for American super-heroes and comics and has added various new cognitive and (psycho) linguistic dimensions to traditional Indian comics. The paper attempts to account for the creative linguistic strategies employed in the representation of super-heroes through super languages (Sanskrit and English) in South Asian language comics and to explain the highly diverse appeal and positive perception of comics in South Asia.

Illustrating Asia: comics, humor magazines, and picture books

Part 1 Overviews and case studies: comics as social commentary in Java, Indonesia, Laine Berman from self-knowledge to superheroes - the story of Indian comics, Aruna Rao shaping a cultural tradition - the picture book and the cartoons in Taiwan, 1945-1980, Shu-chu Wei cartooning in Sri Lanka, John A. Lent Lianhuanhua and Manhua -picture books and comics in Old Shanghai, Kuiyi Shen the corporeality of erotic imagination - a study of pictorials and cartoons in Republican China, Yingjin Zhang. Part 2 Representations and portrayals: red comic books - the origins of modern Japanese Manga, Shimizy Isao redrawing the past - modern presentation of ancient Chinese philosophy in the cartoons of Tsai Chih-Chung, Shu-Chu Wei gender subordination in Japanese comics (Manga) for girls, Fusami Ogi Malaysia's mad magazines - images of females and males in Maly culture, Ronald Provencher images of the enemy in the wartime Manga magazine, Rei Okamoto.