Here's the second strip of the second Comic Konga!. Click on the image to see the full strip.

This was actually the first strip drawn but I wanted to post it after the single panel from yesterday. Tomorrow's strip has been penciled; I only have to ink and scan it, perhaps shade it in like this one. Like I said yesterday I think I'm not going to do full colour versions (Today's strip is done in shades of desaturated blue). For no other reason than, like most Indians, I have a bit of a lenient hand with colour and it always ends up gaudier than I would like (strangely this is only a problem with my illustration work; my colour sense works fine when I'm doing design).

V

So begins the second Comic Konga! I think I'm starting to like doing the first one as a single panel gag; it's a format I never otherwise use, and it's a challenge to distill something down to one panel and one line only. Like most writers I have a tendency to ramble, and something like this could easily have been a three or six panel piece.

The anatomy and line-work is all over the place, and I did try to colour it but decided just to keep it to black and white (perhaps that can be a theme for this time's CK). Hope your own comic endeavours are fruitful. Can't wait to see what you lot have come up with.

V

Director Duo Abbas-Mustan (not otherwise known as 'The Brothers Burmawalla') have been steadily putting out pulp thrillers since their early 90s hit, Khiladi. The brothers' latest offering, Race, hit theatres a couple of weeks ago, and since then has gone on to do unexpectedly good business. Some of this success can be attributed to the fact that it's the first truly 'Bollywood' movie to come out for months; whether we admit to it or not, posh city folk like nothing better than an indulgent entertainer now and then. The last one that fit the bill -- Om Shanti Om -- was released last October. If only someone would tell our filmmakers, who are increasingly shifting their attention towards an output of macho noir violence-fests, epic historical snore-a-thons, Oscar bait (and always failing that, Filmfare Critics award bait) and trendy urban train wrecks distinguished by their characters calling each other 'Guys' a lot and knowing what ribbed condoms are.

In this age where the term 'Pulp Fiction' is more synonymous with an overrated art movie than the vibrant genre that supposedly inspired it, it's nice to see that someone, somewhere at least isn't trying to reinvent the wheel or make a genre of pure entertainment 'relevant to this post 9/11 world.' Wielding the twin cannons of amoral pulp and bollywood exuberance (with both genres' devil-may-care attitude to realism as their car's engine) the brothers have came out with a winner.

Dubai-itis is the term I use for that low, frustrated feeling that sets in almost immediately after I return from vacation, to suddenly realise that I live in a flat, hot, congested city where people dress up to go to shopping malls. Any place that makes me miss even the most tedious aspects of a city like Bombay (the chaos, the infrastructure or lack thereof, the garbage and the idiots) is noteworthy.

My escape often comes in the form of a trip to the movies. I begrudgingly overlook the snip-snip of the censors and the twenty minutes of brain-killing advertising, and do enjoy myself. The pre-fab box multiplex model that cinema has transformed into doesn't damper my spirits (I am, in fact, thankful that for now at least the projection and sound quality is better in multiplexes), and once the lights go down I'm a sucker for the experience.

Oh my.

Steven Brust, he of the magnificent Vlad Taltos books, has just released a Firefly novel.

The best thing is, My Own Kind of Freedom is a fanfic. Yup, completely unauthorised, and released under a Creative Commons licence. Apparently it 'demanded' to be written, which always results in the best stories, I find.

Your moral and religious standpoint on Fan Fiction may preclude you from greeting such news with joy. Me? New Steven Brust work. New Firefly work. For FREE. How can that be a bad thing?

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The good thing about living in a country with a Friday/Saturday weekend is that movies release a day earlier than other places, and because of the extra day an early evening screening can still be relatively empty (most people are still at work). Not that I expected a huge turnout for Sudhir Mishra's latest, Khoya Khoya Chand, but in multiplexes Hindi films are shown in the smaller screens, and those hundred odd seats can fill up quickly.

Starring a bunch of well regarded actors who aren't quite stars yet (and one wonders why), Khoya Khoya Chand is a gorgeous, quirky and ultimately satisfying movie about Indian movies. Om Shanti Om from a couple of weeks back also was an homage, but while it was a loud and tongue-in-cheek pastiche of 1970s potboilers, Mishra's film is a subversive, adult drama set in the fifties and sixties, the transition era from black-and-white melodramas to technicolour kitsch. It does so with class.

Comic Konga has begun!

I figured I'd start out simple with a one-panel. My first idea was to have the same idea done over three or four panels but I think the joke doesn't really need anything more than one.

This was done in pencil, coloured in inkscape and put together in the GIMP. Word balloons in Inkscape. It's a bit of a fractured process, I know, but I prefer the quick flexibility of laying down colour shapes in a vector program but need the layer manipulations of a bitmap one like GIMP to keep it looking natural.

(Yes, I know it's 4 am. Still technically Monday, though)

Well, folks, less than 24 hours to go before Comic Konga! begins! I hope you're excited and if you're participating, I hope you've got a bunch of ideas (or better yet, finished comics) already! Truth be told I haven't begun work on my finished comics yet. I do have a few of the ideas chalked out and I know what tomorrow's comic will be... now I just have to do it!

In case you feel so inclined to announce your Comic Konga! participation on your blogs, I've provided a couple of versions of the logo for you to use:

The one on the left is a transparent background PNG, 240x240. On the right is a GIF of the same dimensions with a white background. Feel free to right click and 'Save as...' (or your browser's equivalent) and put it up in your site's sidebar or into your Comic Konga! posts. Feel free to resample or resize it to fit your blog (I kept it large so that it would shrink down well).

Comic Konga! Logo (Plain SVG version)

If you like, I've provided a plain SVG version of the logo. You can use Inkscape to view it, but I think even other programs like new versions of Adobe Illustrator support this vector file standard. With the vector version you can export the image at higher (or lower) resolutions, or even put the logo into the comics themselves.

In case there were any doubts, you can begin to post your comics whenever Monday is in your timezone. Just putup one every day until Friday. I'll also be collecting links to all the participants's daily entries the next day(so Monday's comic will be collected on Tuesday afternoon GMT), and of course there will be a final list of links after Comic Konga concludes on Friday, 02 November.

I encourage all of you to check out the other entries; to comment on, link to and pick your favourites. Mostly, don't be disheartedned if you haven't begun... there's still a while to go and a great comic doesn't need to worked on forever.

Good luck!