(Work still in progress)
I'm putting together the work done during the one-month I spent in Fort Kochi, as a part of the Non-fiction Comics Master Practice Workshop with Orijit Sen, sponsored and supported by Kochi Biennale Foundation & Pepperhouse.
The primary task at the workshop was to go around Fort Kochi, find a single character with a story that fascinates and document it as a comic.
My heart was drawn to spend time on the fishing trawlers docked along the shorelines of Kochangadi and that's what I did. I went to different docks every day, spent time sketching, talked to people (mechanics, fishermen, trawler owners). And all that while, I was looking for a single fascinating character with a story that I could make into a comic..
(Click each image to view the text better.)
"600 alam? Does that mean 600 meters? or 600 feet?"
.. and suddenly I realised that instead of finding one story to document, I'd collected a whole lot of fascinating little stories and details!
What fascinating names!
The more time I spent at the docks, more I felt that the fishing boats / trawlers were the main characters of my stories and the people just the background. Just look at all those boat names!!
So I went on and documented a fishing trawler (named Khajah) in all detail..
..and made Khajah as a 3D model on SketchUp!
(Be patient. The GIFs below takes some time to load.)
I continued to recreate a whole dock of trawlers in 3D.
Using these models of trawlers as a base, I'm working on my final comics to be made into a small book. This is still a work in progress. Below are snapshots from it.
Update in October 2021:
In The Captain, published in the first issue of Comixense magazine, Anupam Arunachalam features me as a character, recounting my conversations with Darvin, a boat captain from Kochangadi.
While the narrative traces my interaction with the captain, the 3D models of the boats helped Anupam draw out the panels of the comic in great detail and with technical accuracy.
While my own comic is still a work in progress, the boat cutaway details and 3D models were used well in the making of the comic by Anupam.
Hope to update this project soon.
Hope to update this project soon.