Calcutta has at least one big American bookstore on College street. I know this because i went there nearly every day i was there. Not just for this bookstore, it was the street in Calcutta that most reminded me of New York and so when i would go for a walk i would more likely then not find myself walking towards this street of bookstores, coffee shops and universities. Finding local comic books in these stores is a lost cause however. The comics they did carry were in English and of internationally popular characters like Tin Tin or Asterix. To find comics in Hindi i search the book stalls on every street in Calcutta. The stalls are shops about the size of my bedroom here in brooklyn. They have just three walls lined with books. You enter where the fourth wall would be, often an older men is sitting on the floor ready to convince you to enter his shop in broken english, if you even slightly slo your pace while walking past. It was in one of these shop i found this, which i later found was by a Bombay artist.
In another shop i found an issue of Superman, entirely in Hindi, but the cover was so water marked and dust covered i decided not to haggle with the dealer and not buy it.
Below are pages from an artist i discovered through the help of my friend Saptarshi, whom i met while drawing in the Seldah Train Station in Calcutta. He told me about comic book artist, Debnath Narayana who is from Calcutta and very popular in India. according to wikipedia he is a bit of a recluse, which seems impossible to me in Calcutta.
border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5282787616317549986" />Finally i found this picture book in a bookstore in Sikkim.
It was one of many cool picture books made by G.S. Subrananyan. Like many of the things i bought while over there, i should have bought about 8 of these...
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