[comic strips]
Mere Man Se
This comic strip series is based on my college field trip to Ahmedabad, where we encountered our guide who made outrageous claims while visiting monuments in the area. Before he said something ridiculous, he always said "Mere Man Se" which means from my mind or as I know, hence the title.
The series consists of three short comic strips, incorporating the guide as the main character in all of them. The ideas behind each comic are individual real life stories or experiences from Ahmedabad.
The cover shows the guide taking control of Ahmedabad, which is satire to show how he was trying to convince us that his stories were what actually happened when it reality, its nothing but far from the truth.
.png)
This comic is based on my experience in the historic site Lothal, where I asked the guide on how the site was discovered and unearthed a few hundred years ago. His reply was someone with a third sense must've found it. I used this experience and exaggerated his reply to add a humor aspect to it.
.png)
This comic is based on the story behind the Rani Ki Vav stepwell monument in Ahmedabad. The story goes when the stepwell was under construction, the kingdom was invaded by another king who took over the land and killed the king. After conquering the kingdom, he wanted to marry the widowed queen of the kingdom, who only agreed if he would finish construction of the stepwell in honor of the late king.
Once the construction was over, the story goes that she jumped in the well and killed herself.
In this twist of the story, the new king is the guide himself, and once she sees that, she kills herself regardless.
.png)
In this comic, it shows our visit to the Sabarmati Ashram, Mahatma Gandhi's house which is now a museum. I wanted this last comic to be a plot twist where one of his outrageous statements were actually true.
When we visited Manek Chowk, a market in Ahmedabad, we encountered a shop selling fruit juice shots of a fruit called Jamun, and the guy was advertising his shop saying Gandhi used to drink juice from here. So this comic is a fusion of those two stories where he tells us that he used to take shots with Gandhi back in the day and we see an installation in the museum of the same.
Character Design
Creating the character for the guide posed a challenge as I had limited visual references. I aimed to adopt a creepy and repulsive caricature style, which would also add humor into his appearance.
I focused on his prominent features, such as his small always squinted eyes, his cheeks, his thin mustache, and his prominently showing lower teeth. My first few iterations had the idea, but failed to look just like him
After some more trial and error, I figured out a solid base and worked further on it and arrived at the final character. I believe it showcases his features properly and it looked most like him among all the iterations I had done
When sketching my character's body, I decided to have some fun with exaggeration. I made his belly stick out a lot from his shirt, making it look really big and funny. His pants were super bright white, which made them stand out even more. I also gave him a really weird body shape, kind of strange and eerie, to add to humor.