A page from The Plague Doctor’s Apprentice

It was thus that the wheels of Comixense were set in motion. Sen roped in an editorial team that consists of Annie Sen Gupta and Francesca Cotta, with him helming the ship. The trio dug into their bank of contacts to form a talent pool of writers and artists, who are given a theme as a reference point for each issue. The editors then sift through the material once all the ideas are in, and select a set of five or six stories which they feel are tied by a common thread without the plot lines seeming like carbon copies of each other. Different artists are next entrusted with the job of bringing each story to life pictorially. The editorial team acts as the fulcrum around which the writer-artist duo operates to give each comic its final shape. And finally, the panels are sent to a printing press in Delhi where they are turned into tangible material that not just youngsters, but people of every generation can leaf through, and not scroll through.  
 
But why is this entire exercise important? What sets comic books apart from other visual storytelling mediums like pattachitra or even cinema? Sen tells us that comics are a unique literary vehicle because of the coexistence of words and images. “Things like theatre and films work through the dimension of time,” he says, explaining, “Each moment in time replaces the next because by the time you watch one scene or sequence, it has obliterated the previous one. That’s just how it works. But comics are one medium where every moment of time exists simultaneously — you aren’t losing what you’ve left behind as you move ahead.”

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Orijit Sen

Moreover, Sen adds, it’s up to the reader to fill in the blanks between two panels. “There is a progression in time between one panel and the next, and it’s up to you to imagine what happens in the middle,” he says. That makes the reader a de facto creator of sorts, because they are building their own worlds within the framework of the story that’s been given to them. This process engages various parts of the brain. “You have to exercise your verbal, textual and visual understanding of things,” Sen explains, ending with, “That’s why, at the risk of sounding pompous, I feel that those of us who read comics as kids are smarter than the rest.”

We’ll leave it to you to judge the merits of that last statement. But consider this scenario: there are two teenagers. One is scrolling mindlessly through social media on a smart gadget. The other is poring over a comic book, seeping in the words and art in it. Who among them is likely to have a more vivid imagination?

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