‘Classics in comic form easy to read’

[1]

Two of Ruskin Bond’s most read titles The Blue Umbrella and the Angry River were recently adapted to comic book form by Amar Chitra Katha. And the author appreciates the work done by the scriptwriters and the artists.

“I saw the cover and the artwork a couple of weeks ago and found them really good. The cover is very colourful and attractive. The script follows my story without any deviation or changes. In fact, they had showed me the script beforehand,” he says.
But then doesn’t he think that his rather lyrical writing will be lost in the bubble format? “There have not been major changes. The dialogues have been simplified a little, that’s all. I see no changes in the storyline or the plot or the characters. In fact, the comic book is closer to my story than the film that Vishal Bharadwaj made on The Blue Umbrella,” says the author, who thinks that comic books have, many times, inculcated the reading habit in non-readers.
He says when he was a school-going boy he used to get the comic versions of many classics. “There were some books that I could never pick up — they appeared to be too difficult or remote, like War and Peace and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. I read them in comic form just to get an idea of what they were like. Ultimately, I found them so interesting that I went on to read the books,” he shares.
If these two are successful, the publishing house might want to publish a few other stories of Bond in comic form. “But till then, we will have to wait and watch the response that we get to these,” he says and adds that in the second round he would like his novel about the school teacher Mr Oliver — Mr Oliver’s Diary to be adapted into a comic book.
“That can adapt well to comic book form and even to a movie, as it’s humorous and full of incidences,” he says.