Comic strips bring icons close to kids

KOLKATA: Move over biographies of luminaries to teach your child the principles of life. National Award-winning animation film director Sukankan Roy is ready with a comic book series based on the childhood of legends like Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore , Gandhiji, Netaji, Akbar and many others.
The series, which will have 10 comic books on each leader, will illustrate real childhood stories of in a way that the children will be able to relate to.“Some of the stories are only found as one-liners and in that case, we have to add some details from our imagination, without tweaking the facts, to flesh it out. For example, there is a story about Swamiji that one day in class when the teacher stopped in the middle of the lesson to test if the students were paying attention, Swamiji could recall each and every word the teacher had spoken. Now, to glorify this trait of Swamiji, we gave names to the teacher, and the rest of the students and stretched the scene a little where the teacher is seen asking several students the same question before coming to Swamiji,” said Roy, who has won three National Awards this year for his animation film ‘Sound of Joy’ based on the adventures of Swamiji.
These books will have 32 colourful pages of gripping stories and 32 black-and-white pages where the children will be able to colour the characters. “Whenever we say ‘Vivekananda’, a child will distance itself from him. So, we thought that we should make them fall in love with the characters by presenting their childhood,” he added.
The project cost, which ran into a couple of crores, was funded by the production house co-owned by Roy and took around six years of research on these characters. A team of 33 comic artists have been roped in to do the artwork. The books will hit the bookstores by end-August.
It doesn’t end here. The characters will be converted into a TV series that will be broadcast during next year’s summer vacation in Doordarshan and some other channels. This 13-episode series called ‘The Sound of Joy and the adventures of Biley’ will take up the one story of Swamiji at a time where ‘Joy’, a little boy of about eight, will be seen refering to the stories of 'Biley' (Swamiji’spet name).
Also, Roy and his teammates have coordinated with the production houses from 26 countries to come up with an international version of the ‘Sound of Joy’ TV series. Here, each country will animate the childhood stories of one prominent character of their country and by end-2016, all the 26 episodes will be broadcast together under the name ‘Sound of Joy’ in the national channels of all the countries. “This November, the writers of these 26 countries will come under one roof in Delhi to discuss their stories,” shared Roy.