Chennai’s hidden manga community

Dikshitha Ramnath dreams of a distant dystopian world, set in medieval times, and plagued by never-ending politics. Imagine Game of Thrones , without the dragons. Already, in her mind’s eye, she can see the people who populate this world. She has been building towards this vision ever since she was seven, doodling away on any paper that she could get her hands on — school notebooks, diaries, rough notes.

“It’s my dream to create a manga web comic. I have the character sheets ready,” says the 22-year-old, who has grown up on a healthy dose of Animax, one of the few channels in the nineties that showed animes, and mangas such as Naruto and Bleach . Chennai-based Dikshitha, is always on the lookout for fellow amateur manga artists, or mangakas as they are known. The city’s manga community, though still underground, is budding like the sakura our favourite card captor is named after.

Not a cartoon!

The mere suggestion of putting manga in the same category of cartoons is enough to rile up 25-year-old Shalaka Prasad. “My initiation to anime was when I was about 12. My friend and I would watch Inuyasha at home, and then discuss it at school. Soon after that, I started reading whatever manga I could lay my hands on,” she says.

“I began admiring the art and trying to replicate it,” says Shalaka, who got deeper into manga culture as she joined college. “But others around me wouldn’t understand what the whole fuss was about! They thought it was childish that I still watched ‘cartoons’.” Manga is not just Doraemon , says Shalaka, “You have kiddish ones to really complicated ones, from all genres, ranging from slice-of-life to action-filled, to science fiction, all with beautiful stories,” insists Shalaka, passion colouring her voice.

Dikshitha further describes the skills needed to draw manga, “If you read manga, you will notice that the focus is greater on visuals. Western cartoons, on the other hand, have a lot more text in the speech bubbles.” Though she started out with drawing on paper, she now draws mangas digitally, to save time and money. But the most important part of drawing manga, is knowing what story you want to tell. “A lot of people break their head over getting the style perfect. But more than that, you need to be able to portray expressions, which comes when you have a well-written main character, and a gripping story,” she says.

Sense of a community

“The manga community in Chennai is very disconnected,” says G Anjali, a nineteen-year-old visual art student at Stella Maris. “I know about five to six people who are into manga drawing.” The rest, she meets online.

Social media, Instagram in particular, has erased boundaries of cities, even nations, to foster Chennai’s budding manga community. “There are international manga artists who host collab projects, so the sense of a community strengthens,” says Shalaka. However, as Anjali points out, an online group doesn’t compare to having a real-life community. “Social media is just a start, it should facilitate more meet-ups in real life. It’s only then that you attract more attention,” she says.

Chennai Anime Federation, a group on Facebook, is quite often credited with encouraging such meet-ups to discover fellow artists. “We meet at each other’s houses for a chilled-out drawing session, or to discuss the new anime series… We encourage ourselves by posting each other’s work as well,” says Shalaka.

Interestingly, the rise of the K-pop scene in Chennai is also responsible for bringing together manga artists. “There’s a lot of intersection in these areas. People who cosplay, may also like K-pop, and some of them may also like manga, so that’s how we meet,” she says.

Shalaka has higher hopes for the younger generation. “There are so many different ways in which you can get hold of manga now. The exposure they have is much greater.”