Comic Relief

It’s as if someone stole five seconds off a random Monday morning in the city held them still on paper. In fact,you can almost feel the colours in your mind — the mini bus in Amul Butter yellow-brown,the green LPG auto,the boring grey of the office goer’s shirt checks—though the Dringhanchoo cover is all in stark black-and-white. The magazine’s first edition,brought out by a group of Jadavpur University students in collaboration with teachers and artists with similar interests,was unveiled on July 1.

“It’s a bilingual magazine and we tried to focus on sequential graphic art,colloquially referred to as comics,” says Deeptonil Ray,a research fellow in the department of English at the university. Keeping with the idea,the first edition of Drighangchoo devotes most of its pages to storytelling through pictures. From Pinaki De’s caustic Encounter in English,or Deeptonil’s dreamy,dark Porijayi in Bengali to Sarbajit Sen’s A Pilgrim’s Progress which uses no human tongue for dialogues,the magazine is quite a riot of images and stories.

“The comics culture in our city needs to be revived. It has been neglected for a long time now. We plan to come out with a thicker volume in future and deal with graphic art extensively,” says Ray.

However,to ensure that t he magazine is not restricted to just comics,it also makes space for write-ups in a familiar hotchpotch of English and Bengali,which seems to have replaced this generation’s mother tongue. “We intend to make in a tri-monthly affair,” says Ray.