Hail The Comic
Nowadays I directly flips to the Comics section. Not the front page for the News Headlines, not Page 3 and not the sports either. So Comics it is. Back in Jamshedpur (that’s where I am from, an eastern steel city in India) we used to read The Telegraph. It had an interesting comic section. Blondie, Beau Peep, The Wizard of Id, Hagar the Horrible, Peanuts and something I liked immensely - The Lockhorns, the old husband and wife pair who for our entertainment routinely hated each other.
And then there was Calvin and Hobbes. The others help too but C&H are the team. Calivin’s hyperactivism is best left unanalyzed. He is the mind – of a kid or a grown up man or woman, an insecure 21st century person, a world citizen suffering from all imaginable fears with hopes of an innocent wide-eyed dream.
These comics make us suddenly see the banal, the everyday, sometimes via the fantastic also but mostly with our daily insecurities, fallings, hopes and fears. They interpret our world for ourselves, make us intimate with our own personae because so busy we are with forgetting ourselves. We are surrounded by screeching traffic and miles of traffic jam and suddenly 4 frames of a comic can make us innocent and human. We stop and forget and access our humor. And the world laughs with us unknown to us.
And then as it lapses we start thinking about the hurt, the pain, the grief and how to inflict it on somebody else who might be reading the comic section stuck in a traffic jam.
