The Art of Re/designing Bakar

Our books are fuckable (metaphorically)

Dec 22, 2023

Hello, our lovely Substack Janta,

I’m Mukund, the assistant editor at Bakarmax aka your regular coward. You might have seen me at Comic Con holding a signboard that says “Buy comix to free us from slavery” Yes, that’s me.

So the privilege of writing(typing) this year’s last substack has been given to my beautiful & seductive hands (this is not a joke I have beautiful hands. If you have a hand fetish, DM me for pics here. so let’s end this year on a Bakar note.

If anybody asks me what’s the one thing you are proud of doing this year. A job which was creatively challenging and fulfilling. A task on which you collaborated with a bunch of super-talented people, I would pick the re/designing of our Bakarmax graphic novels.

Bakarmax primarily is a webcomic and animation studio. Most of our comics and animated sketches are published on our website but every year during the Comic-Con season we print our best-performing comics and this year we did the same, you will ask what is so challenging or new about it. This year we took a call to re/design our graphic novels.

So this re/designing of the books took time to happen but what exactly happened? In July when we were planning to finalise this season's book collection, we thought of making our books a little better and in deluxe form but printing and designing the books are not cheap and this is where a friend of Bakarmax stepped in and helped us by investing in our 2023 Book print run for a small return. We call him Chacha Chaudhary of Mumbai Comic Con as he cosplays as Chacha Chaudhary every year.

Now we didn’t have to worry about the money, so we put all our focus on the books. We started with The Itch You Can’t Scratch and Amar Bari Tomar Bari Naxalbari, both books have been in the market for more than 8 years. The Itch You Can’t Scratch was launched at the first comic con in 2011 as a cheap paperback and Amar Bari Tomar Bari Naxalbari which initially started as a webcomic on Newslaundry was published in 2015 as a book. Our first job was to come up with a reference. Sumit Kumar (Author), Nandini Singh and Harshit Taneja (Designer) got onto the job of finding the reference and finally arrived at The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse as a reference for The Itch You Can’t Scratch and The Penguin plays rough book of short stories for Amar Bari Tomar Bari Naxalbari.

After the reference was finalised, Nandini and Harshit got into the detailing of designing the books whereas my job was to find a printer who could use our vision and print the books in the most perfect way possible and we found Sudarshan Graphic in Chennai (Thanks to Blaft publication for the reference) After 1-2 print samples and feedback we achieved its final form.

Now, when it comes to designing the Karejwa, The process was a little long. Karejwa written by Varun Grover was initially published as a short story in the Children’s magazine Chakmak in 2015 and then launched as a webcomic in 2020 which was illustrated by Ankit Kapoor, The webcomic got a lot of love and after that wherever we went everyone kept asking us “Karejwa ki hard copy kab launch kar rahe ho?” In 2021 we started working on karejwa - A graphic novel. We did lots of sample runs, From A4 size to Accoridan style book.

In the process of turning a webcomic into a print graphic novel - we took the approach of making a suit. We did trials before we made the final. Even while doing his short film and feature - Varun stayed involved and that helped resolve many conflicts between Sumit and Ankit. And at Delhi Comic Con 2023 we finally launched the book.