Indian comics, redrawn from the margins

Once woven into everyday reading, the medium is surviving through dogged intent rather than scale

- AYUSHI SINGH New Delhi, 2 January

For three days every year, in 11 cities, Indian comics briefly come back into view.

At last year's Comic Con, which concluded its Delhi edition in December, creators stood behind narrow tables stacked with self-published books. Legacy characters reappeared on banners. Readers stopped long enough to browse, talk, and ask questions.

But outside such encounters, Indian comics remain largely absent from bookshops, libraries, and routine reading-a gap felt more keenly today because they were once commonplace.

For decades, comics in India were not a niche interest. They travelled through railway trolleys and were passed between siblings, discovered by accident rather than design. Chacha Chaudhary, Champak, Tinkle and Amar Chitra Katha were ubiquitous. That everyday circulation has collapsed. What remains is a smaller, fragmented ecosystem of creators, publishers, and readers, held together less by scale than by persistence. Indian comics today exist largely outside mass visibility, rebuilding slowly and often from the margins.

Holding it together

Comic Con is about survival.

Illustrator Saumin Suresh Patel, chief design officer at Indusverse, a studio creating original Indian superhero intellectual property (IP), has been attending Comic Con since 2011. He returns not for footfall alone, but for something the internet has not yet replaced.

"Online, everyone hits like," he said.

"Here, you get genuine reactions." Indusverse was founded by a group of creators and media professionals who also included Arunabh Kumar, CEO of The Viral Fever (TVF), the digital content studio behind television shows such as Kota Factory and TVF Pitchers. The intent, Patel said, was to build contemporary characters rather than rework older archetypes.

Owning IP determines whether a comic can travel beyond print into other formats, something Indian comics have struggled to do at scale.