Jatin Varma remembers the neighborhood bookshop. The one where you could walk in as a kid, and the guy behind the counter would hand you a Tinkle or an Amar Chitra Katha, or maybe steer you toward something new. That shop got him started. From Tinkle, he moved to Tintin and Asterix, then to the Hindi comics, Chacha Chaudhary and Nagraj and Doga, and finally, when the pocket money allowed, to DC and Marvel.
The shop doesn't exist anymore. Neither does the world it represented, one where discovering comics in India was easy, almost accidental.
"You really have to try to understand where to start if you want to get into comic books," Varma said during a recent interview on Outlook Respawn's Respawn Point. "What to pick up, what to buy. You might get them online, but you don't know where to start."
That problem, the gap between creative energy and actual infrastructure, is what Varma has spent the last 15 years circling. First, as the founder of Comic Con India, the country's biggest pop culture convention. Now, as the person trying to build the institutional plumbing that Indian comics never had.
The Comic Con Years
Varma started Comic Con India in 2011, partly because nobody else had done it, and partly because he was selling comic books at the time and needed a better venue than the World Book Fair. His ambitions were modest. "No one had done it before. If it fails, Wikipedia will say I did it first. Second, I could sell my comics. Third, I think we'll all have a lot of fun."
It grew. Eight cities. Over 200K visitors a season. A community that kept coming back year after year, not always for the merchandise, but for each other. "Some of my closest friends are people I met at Comic Con India," Varma said.
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Six months after that first event in 2011, Varma visited San Diego Comic-Con for the first time. He came back depressed. "It can never happen anywhere in the world except that place," he said. "It is an overload of all senses, and it cannot be matched."
So he stopped trying to match it. He built something that suited India instead. And then, in January 2024, NODWIN Gaming acquired Comic Con India for INR 55 Cr. Varma and co-founders, Karan Kalra and Sonal Varma, stayed on briefly, then stepped into advisory roles by early 2025.
End of chapter one.
A Community, Not Yet an Industry
Chapter two started in February 2026, when Varma launched The Comic Book Trust of India, a non-profit seeded with INR 1 Cr. of his own money. The idea, he said, grew from a realization that Comic Con, for all its success, was a stage. It brought fans and creators together for a weekend. What it could not do was fix the structural problems underneath.
And those problems are real.
India is not in the top 10 markets for comic book readership. It is not in the top 10 for book readership across most categories. The country produces maybe 30 or 40 comic titles a year, most in English. Most are self-published, and discoverability is poor. There is no equivalent of Japan's weekly manga serialization pipeline or America's New Comic Book Wednesday at local shops.
"We are sort of in a vicious circle," Varma said. "There is a lot of talent and interest. There are potential people who would consume that content. But we are not able to crack it."
The 1980s and 90s had something closer to a functioning ecosystem. Tinkle, Amar Chitra Katha, and the Raj Comics characters had genuine mass-market reach. But when the internet and e-commerce arrived, the old distribution model collapsed.
The characters were products of their era. Adapting them for a new one required investment that the market's size could not justify. Varma pointed out that even Iron Man was an obscure character before the 2008 film. Adapting IP for a new generation takes serious money, and the Indian market has rarely offered enough of a return to attract it.
So What is the Trust Actually Doing?
The first and most immediate event is an awards program. The Indian Comic Book Awards ceremony is scheduled for May 9 in Mumbai, with categories including Best Writer, Best Artist, and Best Webcomic. The jury includes International Emmy-nominated animator Vaibhav Kumaresh and Archie Comics veteran Dan Parent. Submissions for titles published in 2025 closed March 31.
Varma picked this as the starting point because, as he put it, "this was the easiest thing for us to do and we need to do it." There used to be industry awards before the pandemic wiped them out. Nobody revived them.
Beyond the awards, the Trust's first-year agenda includes a digital hub where anyone can find and browse Indian comic creators, and a research project, in partnership with an unnamed firm, to produce something the industry has never had: actual data. How many titles come out each year. Where they are distributed. Who is reading them. "We don't really have real numbers on how people are consuming it," Varma said.
Legal aid is also planned. Independent creators who want to register trademarks, protect their IP, or understand contract negotiations will have somewhere to go. Further out, Varma described a possible central distribution network so that indie creators who are legitimately publishing can get their books to market. He also wants to push for comic book content in college and school curricula.
The advisory council he assembled includes Ashish Kulkarni from FICCI's AVGC Forum, Akshat Rathee of NODWIN Gaming, Manoj Satti from Penguin Random House, and entertainment editor Mayank Shekhar.
He is candid about the timeline— five or six years before the real structural impact shows up. "This is my first time trying to dabble with something which is a completely not-for-profit effort. So I'm also learning on the job."
The Government Shows Up
The government, meanwhile, has entered the conversation in a way nobody expected.
In the February 2026 Union Budget, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman placed comics alongside animation, visual effects, and gaming under the "orange economy" banner. The budget proposed AVGC Content Creator Labs in 15K secondary schools and 500 colleges, backed by the Indian Institute of Creative Technologies in Mumbai. The government projected the sector would need two million professionals by 2030.
Varma admitted he did not initially believe the "C" in AVGC was serious. "I was like, I don't believe it," he said. "Then over a period of six months, a year, I was like, okay, they are serious about this."
What gets him most excited is the possibility that comics could become part of school and college curricula. The single biggest barrier to readership growth in India, he argues, is the persistent assumption that comics are for children. Formal inclusion in education could change that.
He points to Canada as a model, where the government provides arts grants specifically for comics publishers. "Even something on those lines would go a long way," he said. But he is realistic about the pace of government machinery. "They can call it orange, red, blue, whatever economy, as long as they really give that money out to institutions and creators to make an impact."
Where Should Creators Go Now?
In the absence of all this infrastructure, where do creators actually go right now?
Online, mostly. Varma described a creator who launched a series called Little by Little during the pandemic, built a following on social media, sold self-published books at Comic Con, and was eventually picked up by a publisher. That, Varma said, is the model. Publish online, be consistent, build an audience.
"Maybe it's not even a book," he said. "It's going to be an animated series. And you never know where it leads."
He is also building his own creator-led publishing label, modeled on Image Comics in the US, where the publisher provides the platform and the creators retain ownership. He described it as an Indian version of Image, though much smaller. For now, he scouts talent by going through what people post on Instagram and reaching out.
When asked about AI-generated art, and the viral Ghibli-style images that swept social media earlier this year, Varma was direct. "I didn't like it, I didn't share it." While he is fine with creators using AI to improve their workflow, he draws a hard line at replacing human artists. When asked about an AI-generated Mahabharat by Jio, he dismissed it flatly.
His broader view: AI in creative fields is inevitable, and the tools will only get more powerful. "All we can do is figure out how we can navigate this and keep adapting and evolving." But he does not believe the technology, in its current form, can replicate genuine creative originality. "I just cannot imagine someone going out and saying, you know what, the AI is going to come up with a character called Chacha Chaudhary."
At the end of the interview, Varma was asked what one thing he would change about the ecosystem. His answer was directed at creators.
"Put it out, share their content, be more active with it. I think they'll make the breakthrough that they really want."
And his personal motivation for all of this?
"If I can just get the number of titles that come out in a year to double, I'll just have more comics to read."
Submissions for the Indian Comic Book Awards and more about The Comic Book Trust of India can be found at tcbtindia.org.
