Coming Home to Roost

My girlfriend (and later wife) was studying abroad during college in India and met an artist named Tejas. His father was a professor at the university our school was associated with in Pune, two hours outside of Mumbai. My girl sent me some of his drawings and shared with me his love of sequential art and comics, but also his annoyance that virtually no comics outside of Superman, Batman, and Spiderman were available.

I asked for his address and made my way from our bucolic college town back to my brother's place and my dusty boxes of early '90s comics and started sifting. I grabbed twenty or thirty books and started typing up explanations about the minor companies, the context of the artists, the art, the time period before the fall in the mid '90s, the trends during the time...I enjoyed the hell out of sharing the knowledge and history.

That was in early 2004.

My girl (now wife) let me know that she found the artist on LinkedIn and sent him a note, trying to refresh his memory of the trip fifteen ears before. He responded within a day, finding amusement in her attempts to refresh his memory: of course he remembered her, how could he forget? he said. Have you see the comic I made, he asked.

Um, no?

Don't worry, it's in the mail, he said.

And then it arrived.

Tejas wrote, drew, and watercolor painted a very expressive noir-ish private eye graphic novel based on a character he created while in graphic design school in 2006, a few years after getting the package of comics I sent him.

I enjoyed it very much, and especially the ability of the story to work for me, a westerner, but also a story that hit cultural mores that would make sense for to an Indian.

Thanks Tejas! And thanks for the kind note of recollection.