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When I came to MICA, I knew I wanted to create work that related to my personal experience of having lived in India as a gay man. The turbulent dynamics of the LGBTQ community in the country were exacerbated by the passing of Section 377 in the Indian constitution, that criminalises any sexual act ‘against the order of nature’. The marginalisation of the queer community, combined with my own need to be open about my sexuality in my work warranted a need for what shaped the idea for my thesis. Moving to the United States gave me a sense of community and I have fostered new connections with the queer community in Baltimore. However, in my time here, I’ve faced a lot of ignorance regarding my culture.
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The Sikhs at large face a lot of hostility for being mistaken for other communities. And I think creating contemporary content with POC characters is a great way to acquaint people to queer people from all over the world. I think it is imperative to get these stories out through accessible mediums, and for me comics have been the perfect medium to do that. Through the project, I felt motivated to put my story out in an effort to contribute to queer representation in Indian as well as global media and comics.
Over the past 10 years, I had come across various comics and graphic novels that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. Some of these were books that built on personal narrative, or reimagined someone else’s life experiences. In most cases these books employed humour and self deprecation as means for the reader to empathise with the character. And that is something that I found very successful. My mother always says that the most successful work employs a strong sense of human connect and empathy. In some way, I believe this always influenced my work and the content. My selfcaricatures and personal work often come across as funny and cute, so I wanted to use that to my advantage and create a similar visual language for the thesis project.
Clockwise from top left: Unlovable by Esther Pearl Watson, Fantagraphics 2009 Big Kids by Michael Deforge, Drawn & Quarterly 2016 Snackies by Nick Sumida, Youth in Decline, 2015
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I also realised that a lot of the projects in my first year were trying to build on themes I wanted to take forward in my thesis. For Image Harvest, I worked on Sneaker Porn, a series of posters about iconic sneakers and short personal narrative comics around these shoes. Reflections, done as part of a bookbinding exercise, became a small project about looking inward, and a constant battle with oneself and one’s body. I also worked on a zine in a similar format called Body Type about body ideals in the world of gay cruising apps and trying to find a way to fit in.
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Although these projects touched upon themes that were new to my work, it seemed to only reach the surface of these subjects. I wanted to dig deeper, and create content that pushed these ideas further, whether it was building on the humour in the work to its highest impact or being more direct about personal experiences. I knew before I went on to the drawing board, I would have a lot of writing to do.
Facing page: Top: Trials for zine format and navigation. Bottom: Reflections Zine by Jasjyot Singh Hans
Below: Sneaker Porn Personal narrative posters of iconic sneakers by Jasjyot Singh Hans
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Body Type Zine exploring gay body ideals by Jasjyot Singh Hans 11
I started writing the stories for my thesis as part of my selfdirected project in semester II in an attempt to test the waters. In my practice, I have always been comfortable with expressing myself in pictures. Since I had never written personal content before, it was an extremely challenging process for me. Also, having read so many successful comics over the past few years made me feel extremely intimidated about my writing. However, I started with getting all the stories out. Similar to Image Harvest, our first project at MICA, it was helpful to do a ‘mind-dump’ of all ideas, and be able to choose and build on certain ideas later. It also made me realise that the only way I would get better at writing would be to write honestly and write more. As I refined my writing, I started to get clarity in the tone of voice I wanted my comics to have and became more confident with my content.
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On getting done with a substantial amount of writing, I realised that all stories had a common thread that tied them together, that they all felt like they fit under the overarching theme of relationships. These could be about family or romantic relationships, ones I have had for a long time or trying to forge new ones. As I built on these stories, technology became a huge part of the narrative itself. Since we are living in a digital age, the stories also reflected how technology has become an important tool for keeping in touch with people you know, as well as a device to find people you want to know. I have always been interested in taking screenshots while video chatting, and how they become an index of memories that represent a particular moment that happened at that very instant. I was also interested in taking some of these moments and using them as metaphors that define some relationships.
Family screenshots as part of project research and proposal.
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As I started to lay down these different narratives, I realised that their respective scope varied greatly. Some stories lent themselves to a more traditional comic book size, while others fit a more imagefocussed large format or feel more like an intimate zine. So as part of the thesis proposal, I expressed interest in working with different book formats, and matching the right content with a format that would suit it best. It was interesting for me to understand how the varying formats also vary how much time the readers would spend engaging with the books, so there could be something for everyone. Mainly I put these stories in three broad categories,
These would be closer to a traditional comic size. Each comic would focus on one relationship and explore themes of masculinity and queerness.
The content would dictate the format, which could be variable. These would mainly explore relationships with people via devices such as earphones and phone screens.
These would be newspaper sized comics, that would be predominantly image led, and could also be used as posters. The content would be based around everyday queer experiences.
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The first comic I started writing was focussed around my relationship with my father. Having been a sportsperson throughout his life, his life revolved around cricket. However, I felt like I have always known him as my dad. I knew it had been a struggle for him to be able to pursue his dream of playing professional cricket, and that has been part of the reason why he respects what I do, even if he is not familiar with what it entails. My parents have been extremely supportive of my dreams of becoming an illustrator, and I wanted the book to reflect that ease of our equation. Having been raised in a joint family, we had very little space growing up. This meant we almost never had our private space, and that we were literally always ‘close’. On looking back, it is clear how that closeness really held us together and shaped our dynamic as a family. One turning point in the story was to be about my coming out story. And gauging how that has affected our relationship. These themes of masculinity,
family, nostalgia and queerness were what I wanted to address in the book. Since this book was directly from my personal lived experience, I wanted to stay as close to the actual events , but also understood that these life events needed some minor tweaks to fit the comic book format, and use it to its maximum advantage. As important as this realisation was, it made me doubt the validity of the narrative itself, and I fell into a slump.
Introduced to Lynda Barry as part of a class, I recalled how she describes her book v as an ‘autofictionography’. This made me feel like it was perfectly normal to filter life events through a personal lens, and maintain a balance between reimagining some parts to increase impact and staying as true as you can to the story and the experiences.
One Hundred Demons by Lynda Barry, Sasquatch Books 2002
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Here’s some of the writing I did, with the intention of getting the stories out as instinctively as possible. Though most of the writing wasn’t really done in a specific script format, I did visualise some of these passages in visual panels already and added that in the writing itself.
TO BABES WITH LOVE: DRAFT I Once there was a boy who wanted to play cricket for a living. On day he decided to tell that to his dad, who worked in the armed forces. He told him to shut up and go back to studying on his desk. This boy grew up to be a record holding left arm spinner for the Ranji Trophy, for taking 7 wickets in an inning, a record unbeaten till very recently. Yes, he went on live his dream, and I’m proud that he’s my father. However, him being a sportsperson all his life and coaching boys into becoming sportsmen had little to no effect on me. There I was, screeching markers on my sketchbooks (which we then called ‘art files’) and asking for a new set of pens every other week. 16
It didn’t help that I have always been fat too. Every time I met my father’s friends, they’d look at me, smirk and pass a remark they’d think was either funny or clever . Let me take this moment to also tell you that in India, if someone thinks there’s something that they feel may not be right about you, THEY WILL TELL IT TO YOU. TO YOUR FACE. IN FRONT OF YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS AND NEIGHBOURS AND THEIR PETS. IN THE MOST BLATANT AND POLITICALLY INCORRECT WAY EVER. And then they will continue to NOT MIND THEIR OWN BUSINESS BUT MAKE IT A MISSION TO ALWAYS BE UP YOUR ASS. That’s just the way it be. Welcome to life. ‘Oh, so your son doesn’t play cricket?’ *smirking* ‘Hey, why don’t you take him also out for a run?’ ‘Hey there kid, you should also play cricket like your dad!’ ‘You should exercise. This isn’t good.’ AND YOU SHOULD MIND YOUR OWN FUCKING BUSINESS AND GET OUT OF MY FACE.
For a family with a cricketer in the house, we were pretty hopeless. My mum would make my dad change the channel during the world cup sometimes, to watch her soaps. *close up panel of a dramatic TV Soap* *shudder: 3 frame close up* For a sportsperson, one would think my father would shove cricket down my throat till I bowled in my sleep. But really, my dad never forced it on me even once. He surrounded me more with what I loved. And he, along with my mother have always been the biggest support system. Being in the cricket industry all his life, my father was used to being surrounded by an air of masculinity. A humble man, he had no hang-ups of doing the household chores at home. He would straighten the bedsheet if he saw a crease. He would help do the laundry. He would help wash the dishes pretty much all the time. Actually we would just go ahead and compulsively wash all of them. And then have my mum yell at him for doing the maid’s work.
A simple man with very simple needs, if he sees something needs getting done, he just goes ahead and does it. It doesn’t matter who it is for, or the effort it’ll take to do it. He has also been instrumental in spoiling me silly as a kid. In fact it is a joke in the family that I’m the daughter. Oh well. I remember this one time we went out to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. The restaurant was full, but we managed to get a table soon. It was our first time at the place, so we were all really excited. As we ate, we saw a woman enter the restaurant for a booking. As I turned and looked, I noticed that she had way too much make-up on, and was wearing an unusually small dress that was unusually glittery. As she began to speak to the Maître d’, I realised she sounded like a man. In the next ten minutes all her friends came in. They all seemed to behave in a (then) strange effeminate manner. This seemed enough for a lot of the people in the restaurant to feel
uncomfortable. I saw my own parents rushing to finish their food, refusing to look up from their plate or talk. As we finished, I asked if we were going to get dessert. It was clearly out of question. We paid our bill quickly and left the restaurant. ----We’ve always been a tight knit family, my father has made sure of that. When I went for my undergrad in Ahmedabad (my first time away from home in Delhi), people found it strange that I spoke to my parents everyday, maybe even multiple times in a day. Yet we had little to talk about, just the same old stuff. (how are you? What did you eat for dinner? How’s work? Oh, Ok, take care, goodnight.) At some point I found it difficult to imagine us saying anything more to each other. I was still in Ahmedabad when my dad was one of the appointed junior national selector for the Indian Cricket Board. A prestigious job in a field that was his own, this was his pride. One day he text
messaged me the news that a new panel was chosen to replace the selectors. Even via the message, I could tell he sounded defeated. I was just not prepared to say the right words back. He has always been my strength, what could I say to make him feel better? I wish I would have said something. ---------My father has given me so much love, that sometimes I wonder what to do with it. It is the kind of love that sometimes suffocates. I’ve always been scared of doing something that lets him down. And not in ‘a model Indian child who will prove his worth for his parents’ kind of way. I consider myself far from model. In spite of all of his support and his unconditional love for me, I didn’t know how he would react to my sexuality. When I came out to my parents at 2 AM, having woken them from their sleep, the night before he was to leave for a South Africa Cricket tour for two months. I remember the look on his face. It was the hollow expression where you process what one is saying but are 17
constantly battling it in your head, allowing you to not respond. And the next morning, it seemed like nothing had changed. I later learned that my parents didn’t sleep that night. Or the next two nights.
As I further refined my writing, I also started to work on character sketches. Finding the right balance between realism and a toony style became important, but I veered more towards the latter because it seemed to convey the tone of the narrative clearly and added buoyancy to the words in places where the narrative felt more serious.
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BABES
Below: Character design sketches, trying to find a loose style for final treatment
The next step was to be able to convert these passages of text directly into images. At this stage I realised how much back and forth the whole process would require. So I started the thumbnailing process, going from word to picture in the tway that seemed most natural to me.
Above: New thumbnails for the restructured story.
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After the thumbnails were ready, it was time to translate them into clearer roughs. Although I was getting the hang of working quicker, I was still unsure about how the story would end, and what I really wanted the narrative to convey. In writing about singular events, the overall story seemed to lack direction. The story didn’t have a flow, and there were time jumps that readers found distracting. A solution to this was to restructure the entire comic based on chapters. Restructuring the comic was one of the biggest challenges I faced. I felt like I had a long
piece that was already done, and that it was impossible to see the story worked any other way. I completely disposed the initial draft, and focussed more on what the structure of the story would entail. Each ‘chapter’ would correspond to an object of significance from my childhood. And the chapters would anchor back to the object in some way, or use it to carry the narrative forward. As I started to flesh out some parts of the structure, many pages from my older draft worked their way into the new structure seamlessly.
A flow was beginning to emerge, and I was finally happy with the pacing of the book. However, I also realised that the page count of the book had gone way beyond I had planned, which meant I was losing time on the other components of my thesis. I took a call to cancel the large scale comics component of the project, and decided to focus on this comic. Having started out with a 12 page story, the final comic came out to be 48 pages!
Thumbnail to a more refined rough transition.
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I wanted the comic treatment to have a strong element of being hand drawn. Having used a condensed charcoal pencil for my previous small zines, I decided to go ahead with it. About two boxes of pencils and a lot of smudgy stains later, I finished drawing out all the final panels. I wanted the colour palette to be soft and supplementary, and went instinctively with a pale yellow and pink, with a deep purple overlay on the inked pencil lines.
Page progress from initial thumbnail to the final coloured version.
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The initial idea for the production of the book was to get it risograph printed. They were able to saddle stitch a book with this page count, and the limited colour palette would translate well in the printing process. After running into complications with the cost of getting it printed, I decided against it and considered getting the book digitally printed. After contacting two digital printers for the quote, I was told they wouldn’t be able to saddle stitch a 48 page book, even with the thinnest paper weight. I was already running out of time, and decided to source paper myself, and print it with the studio resources. After going through a lot of different print sizes over four previous drafts of the book, I settled on a 7 x 10 inches, because it felt closer to a standard format comic, and would help me minimise waste when the spreads are printed on standard 11 x 17 inch sheets, which could be easily used on the studio printer.
Top: Dummy books printed in various test sizes. Above: Digitally printed pages from the comic.
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Finishing the book felt like a huge relief. However, I still wasn’t sure what the cover image for the book would be. I wanted the cover to be suggestive of the treatment and maybe have a subtle introduction to the character of my dad, but still be pretty ambiguous. At home, my dad loves sitting on the desktop computer. Since our computer chair broke, we have been using a jute stool with a faded orange cushion on top of it.
The visual of him perpetually seen from behind, clicking away while booking his plane tickets during his time as a senior national cricket selector became an image that recalled an idea of something constant and of being at home. Since I am extremely comfortable with the process of screenprinting, I decided to print the cover in three layers. I was extremely happy with the result, and how the final bound product looked as a whole.
To Babes, With Love Left: Front cover Above: Back cover
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Left: Printed and scored covers. Below: The final bound comics.
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Overall, this comic helped me really find my voice as a comics creator, and also gave me confidence in my craft as a storyteller. Although the process for To Babes, With Love was organic, and I had the liberty of time to go back and forth with my writing, this book made me aware of how long a comic book of this extent would take. The hick-ups I ran into for the production of the book challenged my problem solving skills and forced me to make decisions. It also helped me get better at making books. This will definitely inform my future sequential and bookbinding projects. At this stage I want to pitch this comic to various publishers, and am open to expanding it into a fully realised graphic novel.
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This book started out as an impulsive idea that I decided to take forward. Having been in a long distance relationship for about two years, I realised how much of our time was spent by just looking at the phone screen, sending kisses to the camera and untangling earphones. Being physically far apart, it is easy to give in to personal insecurities and feel a constant sense of paranoia. The untangling of the earphones almost started to feel like a ritual and echoed this sentiment clearly. It felt natural to use it as a metaphor for the relationship itself. The title of the book can be read as something that is temporal, something that might not last. This fleeting sentiment has been a strong part of a phase in our relationship, and I know it is a gnawing feeling that a lot of others go through. It may not be a feeling people are proud to admit, but I felt like a frame of mind worth capturing in this body of work. The tone of the book was also completely different from the other books I planned to work on as part of thesis.
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We’re Together Now Dummy book variants
I worked on the rough dummy book on a 4 x 4 inch format. The content of the book felt extremely intimate, so it made sense to stick to the same dimensions for the final book. The entire book used only images of earphones, with no suggestion of any human figure. I have always felt extremely comfortable drawing human bodies and characters. Although little changed from the initial draft to the final book in terms of content, I did not anticipate how much effort would go into drawing the visuals itself. I wanted the earphones to look convincing as real life objects, but for the lines to have a manic quality. The smudges in the creation of the visuals were not erased because they added to the chaos that the book intends to build. This was also the book where the original-to-print size ratio was the most. I drew each of the visuals on an 11 x 11 size format, and reduced it to the final 4 x 4 inch size.
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Since the book had no colour, I digitally printed the inner content as well as the cover. The cover was printed on coloured cardstock. As I developed the final product, something felt missing. I wanted the printed book to have a more sacred quality about it. After some trial and error, I settled on a bright orange cardstock for the cover and added french flaps to weigh the book down a bit more. The final cover was screenprinted in two colours.
Top: Initial digital printed covers. Right, below: The final screenprinted version of the zine.
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This is the most personal piece I have done as part of the thesis because it still makes me feel extremely vulnerable. Even though it doesn’t employ humour like the other components, I’m always surprised by the positive response I get on it from other people. This also made me look at my own work differently, and gave me confidence in creating work that was different from what I was comfortable with.
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When I first came out to my friends in India, I was still unsure about how to meet other people like me. It was difficult to be too public about homosexuality, so I took to what seemed like the most easily accessible way to find other gay people around. After downloading a barrage of gay cruising apps, I was hooked. It was fascinated to see so many gay people actively looking for others, and I felt like I was a part of a community. This image was shattered quickly, as I realised people only log into these apps for sex, and are usually extremely discreet about what they decide to put up. There’s obviously a lot of different kinds of people online, who are looking for different kinds of people. However, in my interaction with people, I often found that people’s idea of attractiveness was based on body ideals that belonged to American gay subcultures. And the idea for the perfect body was of someone who looked like a Greek god. Frustrated with being labeled a chub, unattractive and even revolting at times, I started to document these encounters through chat screenshots.
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When I moved to USA, I found a more welcoming community, both online and in person. However, that didn’t stop people from judging me based on my ethnicity, and making incorrect assumptions. In hindsight, these encounters seem nothing more than hilarious, but are telling of the gay online experience that can often be degrading and negative. For the final book, I mostly used conversations I’ve had with people in the States. As I collected these conversations, the final product became a conversation about body ideals in the gay community and a search to find out where one fits within that spectrum. It was easy for me to look back at these encounters in a fun way, and playing up the humour is what made the book more accessible for people who wouldn’t otherwise pick up a book about gay cruising. The pacing of the book was extremely important to make sure the jokes landed at exactly the right moment.
Baby Let’s Cruise dummy book
Top: Spreads from dummy book Above: Sketching out all the pages Right: Attaching the cover to the perfect bound book.
I wanted the book to feel like one was literally navigating through the app itself, with a voiceover/ commentary in the adjoining pages. The book lent itself perfectly to a phone format as the printed product. However, I ran into a lot of trouble for the production of the final book. For the Image Harvest fall show, the final printed copy was 128 pages in extent, 2.5 x 5 inches in size. The idea was that the book be exactly the size of the phone.
The only problem with it was that the book was not wide enough to open properly, and could fall apart if not handled carefully. Also, for lack of resources around me, the round corners for the edges had to be rounded one sheet at a time, which was an extremely tedious process. In terms of content, I got amazing response from people and they all seemed to relate to an underlying comment about body image. 45
For the next prototype, I increased the book dimensions to 3.5 x 7 inches, and screenprinted the cover on bright yellow cardstock, with a gloss overprint on the screen area. The round corners still had to be done one sheet at a time. But the final book came out great, which made it worth the effort. For ease of production, I also made another version of the book without the rounded corners, which looks much cleaner trimmed, and didn’t affect the impact of it looking like the phone.
Top: A size comparison between the two prototypes. Extreme left: The final book. Above, Left: Spreads and inside cover of the final book.
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Baby Let’s Cruise helped me speak about extremely personal encounters in a lighthearted and fun way. I was initially worried whether people would relate to the subject matter, but I was surprised to see how many of them related to the body image dialogue in the book. Additionally, people spoke of their own experiences in their dating lives. Watching people laugh as they read the book validated all the care that went into pacing the book. Baby Let’s Cruise is also a recipient of a silver MoCCA Award of Excellence 2017 in the short comics category! In addition to the award, the book will be archived in Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
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Having worked on comics throughout the year, I was completely flustered when it came time to think about installation for the thesis show. My main concern with exhibiting the work was to be able to translate the artwork inside the books into a space. After going through a lot of different ideas, I realised that the goal was for the books to shine in the display.
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I wanted to create a complimentary body of work displayed on the wall that would supplement the book, and help people make more connections with these stories. It made sense to exhibit the larger piece To Babes, With Love on one end of the wall, and We’re Together Now and Baby Let’s Cruise on the other together, with the wall text in the center.
For To Babes, With Love, I wanted to take some old family photographs and newspaper clippings of my father and create a collection that was reminiscent of him in his days as a cricket player and as a family man. I was interested in the idea of addition and omission of some elements of these photographs. I added fields of colour on some monochrome pictures to create points of focus within the visuals. I added scribbles and used newspaper clippings
as background textures and screenprinted them in small editions. The resultant body of work became a supplementary set of visuals to the comic, and a special family portrait. For the final display I installed them in various kinds of photo frames to signalled a domestic space and a warm feeling of being home.
Top: The original picture. Above: the screenprint file. Left: The framed screenprints for the family portrait
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To supplement We’re Together Now and Baby Let’s Cruise, I wanted to have a field of small images patched up in succession that related to ideas of body image. I wanted this messy arrangement to mimic a bulletin board, and also reflect my relationship with my own body. The drawings were of my body stretching and squishing in shape, in a quest to forcibly change my own form. In between there are moments of acceptance and being able to love myself. This portion of the display would also stand in contrast with the framed images that accompany To Babes With Love, the arrangement of which suggested stability and structure.
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My worry with the display was that most people would walk past it without opening the books themselves. But it was fascinating to watch people engage with the work, and even ask me more questions about it. It felt extremely fulfilling to know that people were able to relate to the books.
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The past two years have given me confidence to create work around themes that are extremely personal to me. In my work, I have been able to unlearn and loosen up in terms of visual style. Through ILP, I have honed my voice as a storyteller, a printmaker and a comic book artist. After receiving the MoCCA award, I feel validated for my sequential work so far and am motivated to create more content. I am already in conversation with comic book stores in Baltimore, Chicago and New York to stock my zines and comics. I have also spoken with Robyn Chapman, the Associate Editor of First Second Books, and will pitch my comic in an effort to expand these stories into a full length graphic novel. Additionally, I would like to pitch the zines to several small press publishers.
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To my parents, for boundless love, support and strength. To Whitney Sherman, Kimberly Ellen Hall and all the guest critics for sharpening my vision, believing in my ideasand guiding me through my journey here at ILP. To Soheila Ghaussy, Aaron McIntosh, JosÊ Villarrubia, Piper Shepard and Alain Corbel for being an essential part of my growth here at MICA. To Sena Kwon, Tiffany Lin, Emily Joynton and all my Illustration Practice cohort, without whom these two years would have not been the same. We’re a wonderful, happy and dysfunctional family!
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