Indiagraphics

Today I'll be looking at other countries, in a non-World Cup-related way. First up, India, a country where things like movie billboards (although not much anymore), trucks, and even political graffiti is elaborately and garishly hand-painted.

My cousin Basil is a graphic designer in Bombay. Here's what he told me recently when I asked him about the influences on design:

"India is almost entirely influenced by Western graphic design and graphic art form. Floral motifs and vine vector patterns seem to have given way to grungy urban textures of dereliction. Rusty metal and concrete are doing really good right now. It's a strange phenomenon 'cause the entire world seems to be hung up on Indian culture. Go figure..."

In 2004 there was a graphic novel called The Moon Of Baroda being serialized in a daily Bombay newspaper called Mid Day. My attempts to find it published in book form was met with blank looks from book store owners. Later on I emailed Rohit Gupta, the author, to ask him about it. He didn't reply.

The Moon Of Baroda, along with two other stories Knife In The Water and Towers Of Silence were collected in Gupta's book Special Officer Savant, which he described as "mainly about a police inspector and Bollywood-style crime-fighting, robbery etc." Incidentally, he described his 2007 comic The Curse Of Pippilika as "a typical science-fiction, mytho-epical tantric sex fantasy" (!).

Anyway, here's a sample strip – the first one I saw. I like how they censored the word 'ass' but left 'bloody', 'shit' and 'bastards' as is. Enjoy!

(©2004 Rohit Gupta/Harsho Mohan Chattoraj)

Site Relaunch

The nonesuchdesign.com website has been redone in a new slimline version. It's basically just an online portfolio now, with a few galleries of images. Most of those images have already been uploaded to my deviantART page.

All the other stuff that was on the old site has been deleted, including the comic stuff. I was going to put some of those in, but Dreamweaver is being an arse as usual so for the time being it's just the galleries.

I'd appreciate anyone letting me know if something on the site doesn't function, is missing, or doesn't display properly.

Wallan

Thought I'd post this, as it's been on my desktop since May. Somewhere out in country Victoria there's a small town called Wallan that has signs like this in several fields. The heart in the sign is made of grass. It shows that the people of Wallan, unlike Melbourne, actually take pride in their small corner of the world.

I have no idea how to pronounce the town's name, which makes it more interesting.

Further north, the border town of Wodonga has a sign facing into New South Wales that says "I Hate Albury". Well, they don't. But they should.

Chalkface

Here's a couple of panels from Chalkface, the 16th chapter in the Airbury Academy series. The story is a series of flashbacks from a teacher's point of view, but it did give me the chance to include some real-life snippets from when I was studying graphic design. The last part takes place in a life drawing class:

The "model" that they're drawing isn't nude at all, so no need to worry. The above lines were overheard pretty regularly in my life drawing classes; I think I said it to the teacher at some point as well.

Erica's line in the above panel is taken directly from something a friend in design class once said to a teacher. I was sitting next to her when she said it, and she said it with such enthusiasm that I was laughing for quite a while. It still makes me laugh, so I just had to put it in.

It's actually funnier here because Erica's life-drawing is so bad.

ComicSpace Site Down

My computer decided to switch itself on (anyone else had this happen?) at 4:15 this morning. Scared the hell out of me.

Anyway, the recent demise of the ComicSpace website means the five galleries I uploaded are no longer online. ComicSpace will probably relaunch in a different format, but I don't have a profile page there. Which means this is now the only place you can see the comic stories as they unfold.