Second, I consider Virgin’s attempt to render the comic book a fully fungible medium, which facilitates the development and exchange of intellectual property across entertainment platforms.
By bringing the vocabularies of Nehruvian developmentalism to bear on this popular cultural form, Virgin signals that in post-liberalization India the aesthetic has outpaced the industrial as the byword of global modernity. First, I trace how Virgin’s chief “visionaries” sought to “modernize” the Indian comic. Paying particular attention to the series Devi (2006-), this article situates Virgin’s comics within several discursive and institutional conjunctures. In 2006, Virgin (now Liquid Comics) began marketing titles that remobilize Hindu mythology for the global entertainment market. Virgin Comics, a transnational corporation with offices in India and the U.S., has tried to put its chosen medium-the comic book- to novel use. Fashioning a similar set of symbolic oppositions, these pictorial stories link light-skinned femininity to beauty, wholesome family life, and happiness, whereas dark-skinned femininity manifests through embodiments of grotesque physical appearance, anger, promiscuity, and deviance. Comic book illustrations code dark-skinned masculinity through the semiotics of violence, brutality, stupidity, bestiality, and low caste status.
Our analysis shows that Amar Chitra Katha’s stories of gods, goddesses, kings, demons, and historical events associate light- skinned masculinity with divinity, strength, virtue, compassion, and upper caste status. We draw on the concept of colorism as defined by Black scholars in the United States to explore the lessons on gender and skin color that these comics may communicate to Indian children. This article examines representations of skin color and its symbolic affiliations with discourses of gender, class, and caste in the Amar Chitra Katha (immortal pictorial stories) comic series, the first indigenous children’s comics to be published in postcolonial India.
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