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For three days every year, in 11 cities, Indian comics briefly come back into view.
At last year’s Comic Con, which concluded its Delhi edition in December, creators stood behind narrow tables stacked with self-published books. Legacy characters reappeared on banners. Readers stopped long enough to browse, talk, and ask questions.
But outside such encounters, Indian comics remain largely absent from bookshops, libraries, and routine reading – a gap felt more keenly today because they were once commonplace.
For decades, comics in India were not a niche interest. They travelled through railway trolleys and were passed between siblings, discovered by accident rather than design. Chacha Chaudhary, Champak, Tinkle and Amar Chitra Katha were ubiquitous. That everyday circulation has collapsed. What remains is a smaller, fragmented ecosystem of creators, publishers, and readers, held together less by scale than by persistence. Indian comics today exist largely outside mass visibility, rebuilding slowly and often from the margins.
Holding it together
Comic Con is about survival.
Illustrator Saumin Suresh Patel, chief design officer at Indusverse, a studio creating original Indian superhero intellectual property (IP), has been attending Comic Con since 2011. He returns not for footfall alone, but for something the internet has not yet replaced.
“Online, everyone hits like,” he said. “Here, you get genuine reactions.” Indusverse was founded by a group of creators and media professionals who also included Arunabh Kumar, CEO of The Viral Fever (TVF), the digital content studio behind television shows such as Kota Factory and TVF Pitchers. The intent, Patel said, was to build contemporary characters rather than rework older archetypes.
Owning IP determines whether a comic can travel beyond print into other formats, something Indian comics have struggled to do at scale.
But for most independent creators, even modest print runs have become expensive. Printing 500 to 1,000 full-colour comics can cost anywhere between ₹120 and ₹180 per copy, pushing cover prices to ₹299-499 just to break even. By contrast, many legacy titles began at ₹20-50 a copy when distribution volumes were higher.
Today, creators say pricing is no longer a creative decision but a logistical one, shaped by paper costs, quantities, and the absence of shared distribution. You can’t afford to create without meticulous planning anymore, Patel said. “Every project has to be planned.”
Digital platforms have lowered entry barriers, but they come with glitches. Long-form comics struggle in algorithm-driven feeds, pushing creators to fragment storytelling simply to remain visible.
What survives online, Patel noted, is often what can be compressed or turned into a single image, not what takes time to read. Patel pointed to Japanese manga comics, where long-running titles are routinely adapted into animation, films and other formats. As a result, readers keep encountering the same stories in different forms. But Indian comics, he said, rarely move beyond the printed page.
A few stalls away, Ujan Dutta, illustrator of Zoraver and the Lost Gods, spoke about building a comic universe without inherited scaffolding. Rooted in Sikh history and set in early 20th-century India, Zoraver avoids familiar superhero frameworks.
“Marvel and DC have entire universes built over decades,” Dutta said. “Here, we have to build everything from scratch.”
Every print run is self-funded. What sustains the effort, he said, is not just sales but reader engagement that signals a deeper connection.
“When a teenager asks why a symbol is used or whether something connects to a real historical moment, it makes the effort worth it,” he said. “It shows they are thinking about identity and where they come from.”
The missing middle
Across the indie section, creators return to the same problem: The industry’s missing middle. Legacy publishers remain active and new creators continue to emerge, but the mid-sized segment that once sustained monthly titles has thinned.
Rising costs, shrinking print runs, and the collapse of distribution have made scale difficult. Self-publishing has become the default.
“You end up doing the work of a full publishing house and still have to draw,” said Mohammad Faisal, creator of Garbage Bin Comics. “Everyone prints, sells, packs, and dispatches their own comics.”
“Sustainability, not just money, is the biggest challenge indie creators face today. It also includes time, energy, and mental bandwidth,” said Rahil Mohsin, co-author of the bilingual Dakhni–English comic series Hallubol, pointing to the cumulative strain of creators multitasking.
The upside is creative freedom. Freed from the need to appeal to mass audiences, storytelling has become more focused. Regional folklore, political commentary, horror, autobiographical strips dominate indie tables. Volume has given way to intent.
“When readers are given context rather than simplification, they’re more than willing to engage with regional and experimental work,” he said.
“Meeting audiences year after year at events like Indie Comix Fest and Comic Con India has reinforced this.”
For Mohsin, that creative shift is inseparable from language itself. “Growing up in Bengaluru exposed me to multiple languages while my home language was Dakhni, a South Indian linguistic minority often mislabelled as Hyderabadi,” he said.
A snapshot from ACK’s digital comic Hanuman (Photo: ACK)
Pushed into corners
The consequences of this shift are visible far from convention halls.
At the Dr B C Roy Memorial Children’s Reading Room and Library in Delhi, the shelves are still stacked, but comics sit low in the pile, pushed into corners. At first glance, their frayed covers and softened spines suggest heavy use. A closer look tells another story.
The books have grown old not because they were picked up too often, but because they were not picked up at all. Issue date stamps on some volumes are months apart.
“Earlier, comics were everywhere. School libraries, homes, railway stations,” said Nandkishor Rana, librarian at the B C Roy Memorial Library. “Today, children hardly come asking for them.” Of the nearly 7,000 members at the library, he said, barely anyone picks up a comic.
Railway station trolleys once formed the backbone of comic circulation, carrying titles beyond formal bookstores. “When that channel went, discovery went with it,” Rana said. “Now, unless a parent introduces them to a child, comics don’t enter their lives.”
What disappeared was not just a sales point, but a habit.
Altered terrain
India’s older comic institutions are navigating similar pressures from very different starting points.
Sanjay Gupta, director at Raj Comics, traced the emotional logic behind its iconic superheroes. “In the West, they have superheroes,” he said. “Here, children recognise protectors through Ram, Vishnu, Mahakaal, Hanuman. We built Nagraj and Dhruv with that emotional frame.”
What has changed, he said, is discovery. Parents now have to actively introduce these characters. The casual routes that once brought comics into children’s lives have disappeared.
Small print runs push up prices even as weak distribution limits reach. “To keep prices within reach, some support is needed,” Gupta said.
Lower print volumes mean higher per-unit costs even for established publishers, making it harder to price comics competitively. Without scale or mass circulation, affordability has become one of the biggest barriers to discovery, Gupta noted.
Raj Comics has begun expanding beyond superhero arcs to reflect contemporary themes and reading preferences, acknowledging that the audience it once addressed automatically now has to be met consciously.
Amar Chitra Katha and Tinkle occupy a different cultural position. Deepesh Kothari, vice president at ACK Media, described the brands as living in “a space built on trust and familiarity.”
What the publisher now sees, he said, is a nostalgia-to-discovery cycle. Children build their own connections. ACK has invested heavily in digital formats, animation and regional language editions to adapt to changing consumption patterns.
Rewired reading
Educators link the decline of comics to broader shifts in how children engage with text.
Ridhima Tewari, associate professor at IIT Dharwad who specialises in children’s reading practices, including engagement with visual narratives, said changes affecting storybooks and nursery rhymes have reshaped comic book reading too. “Instant gratification and sensory overload leave little room for slow-brewing narratives,” she said.
Comics once offered a low-stakes entry point into reading. They inculcated the habit of finishing a story. When that rung disappears, children do not automatically graduate to longer texts. Many skip the ladder altogether.
“Phones have taken over everything,” Rana said. “That chain is broken.”
Seeking state role
Around Comic Con and beyond it, creators repeatedly return to the same question: what role should the state play?
India has begun acknowledging the creative economy through policy frameworks. The government’s AVGC push (Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming and Comics) has brought comics into official conversation alongside faster-growing digital industries. Several states have since announced AVGC and XR (extended reality) policies, largely aimed at skilling, studios and immersive media.
Animation and gaming studios benefit from scale, outsourcing contracts and institutional demand. Comics remain tied to physical production: printing costs, paper quality, storage, transport and retail access.
Creators pointed out that unlike animation or gaming, where incentives often flow towards digital production and employment generation, comics receive little direct relief on physical costs such as printing or circulation, despite these being the single largest expense.
“India built a world-class outsourcing industry, but not enough companies that live and die by original IP,” said Sharad Devarajan, founder of Graphic India, who has worked on properties including Spider-Man: India with Stan Lee, the
late American co-creator of the web-spinning superhero, and Indian mythological franchises adapted for animation and streaming.
“Access to long-term financial support would make the biggest difference,” said Mohsin. “Projects are frequently celebrated at the moment of launch, but rarely supported over time.”
India already powers a lot of the world’s animation and visual effects work. According to industry estimates, nearly 70 per cent of the Indian sector’s revenue is driven by international contracts. Comics, by contrast, are not tracked as a standalone industry, with no consolidated market data or institutional buyers.
As Mohsin argues, the absence of feedback loops linking comics, animation, gaming and film means policy recognition risks remaining symbolic.
Indian comics are yet to return to their former ubiquity. What is taking shape instead is a slower, more rooted ecosystem.
Creators are choosing depth over reach, regional narratives over universality, persistence over scale.
They no longer move with the crowd, but they continue — page by page, stall by stall, reader by reader.
