The Hollywood movie Unbreakable (2000), directed by Manoj Night Shyamalan, has an interesting premise. David Dunn (Bruce Willis), a security guard at a local college stadium, miraculously survives a catastrophic train crash outside Philadelphia. Of the 132 passengers on board, David is the sole survivor and astoundingly sustains no injury. A few days later, David is contacted by one Elijah Price (Samuel L Jackson), who is a comics buff and runs a comic book art gallery named Limited Edition. Elijah has a strange theory. He suffers from a rare genetic condition that makes his bones fragile and hence is nicknamed Mr Glass. David, on the other hand, avers Elijah, is strong and immune to injury or sickness. Elijah who believes that superheroes of comics are based on real people thinks that David is one such—a superhero.

Though David is at first skeptical of Elijah’s theory, he tests and finds that he indeed is immensely strong, and recollecting past events from his life, he also realizes that he has never been sick or injured. David also discovers that he has the ability to ‘see,’ by touching or coming into physical contact with a person, the criminal acts committed by that person.

Later, David attends an exhibition at Elijah’s comic book art gallery and meets the latter’s mother, who during their conversation reveals that her son believes that there are two kinds of villains: “the soldier villain who fights the hero with his hands, and then there’s the real threat— the brilliant and evil archenemy who fights the hero with his mind.” Moments later when David touches the wheelchair-bound Elijah’s arms, he gets a glimpse of a few criminal acts committed by Elijah—a plane crash, a hotel on fire, and a train crash. These are just three of the innumerable acts of sabotage engineered by Elijah over the years with just one motive: to find out whether anyone emerges unscathed from all these ‘accidents,’ someone gifted with supernatural powers, a superhero. And Elijah, conversely, is the archenemy, “the one who fights with his mind,” finally finding his match in David. In other words, just as every supervillain in comics needs a worthy adversary, Elijah, who has chosen to fashion himself after a supervillain, has sought and found his.

Academy Award-winning movie Birdman (2014), a dark satire on comic book movies, on the other hand, focuses on the struggles of actor Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton)—who is most famous for his movie role of the iconic comic book superhero Birdman in the eponymous blockbuster and its equally successful prequels—to shake off his association with the masked caped superhero character that is proving to be more popular than Riggan Thomson the actor himself.

These are but two instances where comics and comic book movies have inspired moviemakers to come up with interesting storylines. From the earliest Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941) to the recent Deadpool (February 2016), comic books and comic superheroes have spawned movie adaptations, prequels, and sequels, many of them turning out to be surefire blockbusters and money-spinning franchises. The fact that twenty-six English movies based on comics were released in 2014 and 2015 and, at the last count, sixty-three more are being filmed shows the growing popularity of comic book movies.

As moviemakers are showing increasing interest in movie adaptations of comics, the movie adaptations in turn are generating renewed interest in comic books, bringing in new readers from all age groups and genders. ComiXology, a leading online comics hub that sells digital versions of comics from over hundred publishers including Marvel and DC, registered sales of an impressive six billion comic book pages between 2009 and 2013, with four billion of those coming in 2013 alone. No wonder Amazon, the American e-commerce giant, chose to snap up ComiXology for an undisclosed sum in 2014. Today, ComiXology is an Amazon subsidiary.

The reasons for the popularity of comics are not far to seek. Comics are easy and fun to read. The language used is precise and crisp and the pictures that accompany complement the words, enhancing the reading experience. While the genre of comics has already acquired the status of mainstream art form with its own distinct language and creative conventions, two recent but unconnected developments seek to cement that status and recognize comics as a field of study as well.

California College of the Arts, which has campuses in San Francisco and Oakland (US), is rolling out a unique course, MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in Comics, from February 2016. The course catalog promises to connect the prospective students “to the rich potential of this visual literary medium” so as to enable them to discover new ways to bring their stories to life on the page or screen. What’s more, those who enroll for the program can have a critically acclaimed graphic novelist as their personal mentor and will be guided by renowned artists in other disciplines, including graphic design, printmaking, and animation.

Earlier, in November 2015, in what was the first appointment of its kind in the UK, Lancaster University appointed Benoît Peeters, a French graphic novelist and literary critic, as the university’s Visiting Professor of Graphic Fiction and Comic Art. Describing Peeters’ appointment as “significant,” the university said that it demonstrated the institution’s “full academic commitment to placing comic book art not just in its creative writing and literature department, but also across its wider disciplines, including philosophy.”

A delighted Peeters remarked, “This professorship is a great honor for me. I’ve been fascinated for twenty years by everything about comics and graphic novels. When I began my research, I had hoped the medium would develop in an adult and sophisticated way, and this has been the case. We are at a very important and interesting moment for new possibilities for the graphic form.”

Interestingly, Peeters’ new faculty position as UK’s first ever Comics Professor had been reportedly conceived and created in “close working partnership” with the Lakes International Comic Art Festival (LICAF) held in October 2015 in Kendal, UK. LICAF was first held in 2013 and in its three years of existence has become increasingly popular and established itself as a major annual event, bringing together comics aficionados, creators, publishers, and readers from across the world.

One such event was organized by The Literary Seminary—a club started in 2006 by the Department of English of Dr M G R Educational and Research Institute University, Maduravoyal, Chennai, India—on September 2, 3, and 4, 2015. The event was an international conference on “Comics as Visual Literature,” conceived with the avowed objective of making comics a new standalone genre in Indian Literature. Papers were presented by participants from India and abroad on topics ranging from “theory and practice of comic literature” to “tradition of comics in India” to “comics in the classroom.” This special issue brings you an eclectic mix of the papers selected from those presented at the said conference.

Commenting on the appointment of Peeters as Professor of Comics at Lancaster University, Julie Tait, the director of LICAF, said, “This appointment emanates from a unique collaboration between LICAF and Lancaster University. I am delighted that the University is simultaneously recognizing and celebrating the intellectual contribution of comic art to British cultural life, putting the comic medium on a par with the status accorded to this form elsewhere in Europe.”

It is hoped that the initiative of The Literary Seminary and its convener S Padmasani Kannan in holding an international conference on comics leads to such collaborations and appointments in India as well

R Venkatesan Iyengar
Consulting Editor