Saad Akhtar, techie and web comic, takes his work seriously and his humour even more seriously.
Being a true-blue techie, it isn’t very surprising that Saad Akhtar finds an affinity for his computer even beyond work. Especially if it’s for a regular dose of humour at the end of a long day at Naukri.com in Delhi, where he works as senior manager, interaction design.
After dinner and on weekends, he finds himself glued to the computer screen, fashioning comic strips as an outlet for humorous observations at the workplace, in traffic, and, why not, even next door. Put together on his five-month-old website www.flyyoufools.com, Akhtar’s work is one of the few good Indian webcomics available today.
While the majority of Net regulars prefer to type out their thoughts on blogs with relative seriousness, Akhtar considers his writing not good enough for that medium. “I used to blog when I was working in Beijing, because at that time I had interesting things to relate. I don’t think I write that well, to be honest,” he confesses. Having subscribed to over 100 webcomics over the years, he believes that in this medium it is far easier to find an audience, especially since comics are a quicker read.
“When a funny idea floats in my head, I like to reduce it to a comic strip that can be read in 20 seconds,” explains Akhtar. And comics really click, he believes — Google’s new Chrome Internet browser being a case in point, most recently. “Scott McCloud, one of my favourite cartoonists, created a comic book as the press release introducing Chrome. That really worked,” he says.
For this student of visual communication, storytelling has been a big part of his life. Being a “new media” graduate from National Institute of Design, he has been able to create a platform for it. From governmental inefficiency to reality-show frenzy, Indian food absurdities to software industry idiosyncracies... At its core, it’s precisely about the world we live in — but in a refreshing format. And his love for capturing strange expressions on his camera, caught in number of different angles, quite completes the picture. From then on, it’s Photoshop at work.
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For a few hours almost every day, Akhtar chops, crops and colour-corrects, de-emphasising the faces, giving the strip an ambience and, finally, adding bubbles with dialogues. Working on a six- or seven-panel strip, he avoids playing on overly controversial, especially political, subjects, lest he cheese off too many people. One of his most popular strips was the one which made light of a few admittedly amusing advertising campaigns — something along the lines of “Ordinary, not me” and “Next is what?”
The tough part, he says ruefully, is finding the right pictures to go with the dialogue. “A lot of people do not like to be photographed. In fact, I prefer taking pictures in Bombay, then at least I’m too far away for them to come after me,” he chuckles. But it takes all kinds — “There was a guy who mailed asking me to use his picture in my comics,” Akhtar recalls.
An easy read through his webcomics reveals a trick: Akhtar reuses many of the photographs in his comics. While he admits it makes things easier, the process has also helped the characters develop a personality. He points out an example: “The strips with these two guys. One has something stuck on his foot which he’s trying to inspect, while he talks — or rather, rants — to the other guy sitting next to him.
Over time, you just know that he’s the one who rants about everything while the other one is the agony uncle.” In any case, he observes, graphics is not the selling point of a comic strip, it’s what the strip has to say. From the golden age of comics in the 1960s and 1970s, Akhtar has incorporated the style of minimal detailing, basic lines and shading.
Comparing webcomics to comics in the newspapers, Akhtar relishes the complete freedom of speech cyberspace gives. “How are comic strips like ‘Bringing up Father’ and ‘Garfield’ funny? In fact, there is a webcomic ‘Garfield’ without Garfield, which is so absurd that it’s funny,” he says. The generous use of profanity in his own strips is highly reflective of everyday frustrations, and it comes across almost as means to soothe his own nerves. Though that, of course, is left to interpretation. “Abusive words is never a problem in webcomics — no one has taken offence, and when such liberties can be taken, why not take advantage of them?”
As his site gains in popularity, with a happy, steady rise in traffic, there are advertisements coming in. But making money is not his intention. “It won’t be fun any more if I look at it from that perspective. So I prefer to keep doing it off-hours,” he says. And why the name Flyyoufools.com? Well, weird names are so much more clickable.
