One of the new entrants in the Indian Comic Industry, Holy Cow Entertainment has quickly built up a promising library of titles with many more on the way. Launched at Mumbai Film and Comic Convention, their latest book ‘Aghori Book 2’ too seems to be another notch on the block.
Aghori is Holy Cow Entertainment’s First “flagship” offering which represents the comics debut of fantasy / sci-fi writer Ram V, featuring art by Industry Heavyweight Vivek Goel ( Ravanayan, Phantom – The Ghost Who Walks ), Colorist Yogesh Pugaonkar ( Ravanayan, Voltron ) and rising talent, Gaurav Shrivastav.It follows the journey of a man to the depths of hell, to save that which he holds dear.
Before the launch, Comic Con India had recently presented A Special Workshop With Holy Cow Comics in Association With Leaping Windows. The workshop was conducted by Vivek Goel, Founder & Lead Artist, Holy Cow along with Ram V, and Writer of the Aghori Series.
Speaking more on this, Vivek Goel, Founder & Lead Artist, Holy Cow Entertainment stated,” Aghori is basically HCE’s 1st flagship character, Its writer Ram V who pitched me with the with the idea at the 2011 Mumbai comic con, we later exchanged some mails and then he showed me the synopsis in the meeting. I quite liked it and saw a good potential in it and then him and I started building the aghori universe with him as the writer and myself as the artist.”
“Aghori is a totally uncharted and unexplored territory, most of the laymen does not even have an idea that in order to become a successful aghori and to practice A-GHOR one has to go through 12 “kriyas”. We consider this topic/ book as more educative then entertaining.”
The Aghori Series is priced at INR 140/- for every 56 pg book (each book is a compilation of 2 issues )
“I believe that people need at least a matter for half hour to read for which I decided to fatten the format and compile 2-2 issues of aghori into 1 book and so we ended up with a fat 56 pg each book. Everything changed after that, more investment, more manpower resulting into more risk! But hard work always pays.”
The Aghori series would also be launched on the digital platform soon. The second part of the series was launched at the second annual comic convention at Mumbai, with over 250 copies sold in two days.
Adding more to it he said,” The experience was tremendous, the response we got was overwhelming and surpassed our expectations. We had got a positive response at Bengaluru for the Aghori Book 2 and Mumbai was just the icing on the cake.”
“We are a very small team of 4-5 people for the Aghori series but our commitment and dedication is no less than 12 people. I feel India is a perfect ground for comic series , they need something to hang on, a great cliffhanger that will make them wanting for more and they all love that . You need to plan things in a proper manner when it comes to a series, we are happy that people have given a thumbs up post reading book 2, we have roped a 3rd artist to do cover 3 and the biggest surprise will come with book 4, The cover is already done and its done by the top comic book artist India has ever produced, I am unable to reveal his names but it will be a crazy shock to every one. So, you see HCE will be witnessing a major artistic boom in the first half on 2013.” he concluded.
Their upcoming books include “The Skull Rosary” based on the dark side of Shiva and a 5 issue mini series on the adventures of 2 Bengal tiger cubs stranded on the serengeto plains of Africa.
The Aghori series are now available with flipkart.com and homeshop18.com.