Comic relief

Express News Service

BENGALURU: At a time when there is a lot of debate around religious topics, illustrator Falal Faisal is looking at serious and sensitive subjects through a light-hearted lens. Faisal, who is popularly known as the creator of Musalman Comics, has come up with his latest digital series on the hijab issue. His latest strip is called Begum Badass and looks at how the hijab row could possibly end.

“The point of my comics is to give a voice to those who do not get called on by news channels. Those who are liberal, can actually joke about themselves and their religion, never get heard,” says Faisal, who never intends to be preachy through his strip.

“I was trying to make sense of the world around me. And I felt there were other people who were also thinking along the lines as I was,” says the 29-year-old. However, he agrees that his work also receives a lot of criticism. “It’s a very thin line. You can’t please everybody. Sure, there will be criticism. That’s expected when you are doing something like this,” he adds.

Faisal had also created an Indian superhero, Musalman, a fighter of social injustice, which has been quite popular. From filmmaking to working on YouTube channels, Faisal has tried out various mediums of comics. “I have done stand-up for 7-8 years, then I wanted to be a filmmaker. But for the kind of stories I want to tell, I don’t have the budget.

Comics were like a compromise between telling the story in a grand way without spending too much money. If I could, it would have been a film,” says Faisal, adding that his true push for getting into comic writing came when he watched the movie American Splendor. “It’s about an American writer called Harvey Pekar. He is a clerk in the hospital but writes underground comics. That got me thinking that if he could write comics, then what was stopping me,” says Faisal.