MAKES GOOD COMIC SENSE

Comixense, a new comics quarterly, could well prove to be great mind candy for a digital generation

- Rajesh Devraj

Ulugh Beg from Samarkand meets Ptolemy in a fantastical city of astronomers. A Chinese girl named Yong Le confronts the plague and its prejudices in medieval Italy. The scientist Jagdish Chandra Bose investigates the irritability of plants in early 20thcentury Bengal. These are just a few of the varied and richly illustrated stories in Comixense, a new comics quarterly published by the Ektara Trust.

The brainchild of comics artist Orijit Sen, Comixense is targeted primarily at school-goers: the aim, in Sen’s words, is to reach out to young minds “in a manner that credits their intelligence, imagination and empathy”. It isn’t the first magazine with that ambition: the much-loved Target worked the same beat in the ’80s, and in more recent times, the excellent Hindi magazine Chakmak has brought together a dazzling array of writing and illustrating talent in its pages.