KOLKATA, March 8 -- "Baba (Satyajit Ray) used to love reading Tintin. He also loved reading Disney comic book series, especially Uncle Scrooge," revealed his son-filmmaker Sandip Ray, when he visited Comics in Bengal, a one-of-a-kind comics exhibition in Kolkata, recently.

Can you imagine growing up without comics? In today's world, smartphones seem to be taking over everything kids used to love. But comics have always been a big part of childhood and even adulthood. A month-long exhibition in Kolkata, which concludes on Saturday, is showcasing the evolution of Bengali comics from the 1920s to now, offering a nostalgic journey for visitors. It is difficult to trace the beginning of comics in Bengal. Many comics scholars point out the influence of patachitra and the panels on the terracotta temples as being the forerunner of comics. However, the focus of the exhibition is comics in print. In that respect, 'Kirkwood Bilas', Chittagong Plantain, published as a sequential narrative in pictures in Basantak on January 31, 1874 in their issue 12, had all the makings of a comic. From such humble beginnings, Bengal comics have come a long way.

The exhibition has several rare comics of Narayan Debnath, Mayukh Chowdhury, Mayukh Chowdhury, Sailya Chakraborty, Sufi, Pratul Bandhopadhyay, and Tushar Chatterjee.

The brilliant social satires by Kafi Khan will surely enlighten the comic lovers. Generally, published in periodicals like Sandesh (which was first published in 1913 with Upendrakishore Roychowdhury as the editor), Mouchak, Sochitro Bharat, Nabakallol, Suktara, Kishore Bharati and others made the Bengalis more aware of comics.

The exhibition has prints of rare newspaper strips, magazines, comics' books, and some original artworks on display thus giving the audience a comprehensive idea about the dissemination of the genre and the manner in which it made its way to the popular imagination of the readers, especially from the 1960s onwards. Of course, the exhibition has Gablu, which was a Bengali translation of a famous comic strip Henry by Carl Anderson, Nonte-Fonte and Bahadur Beral, which will take us back to our childhood.

Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.