Singapore headquartered Comic book publishing house Illustrated Orchids which has two development centres in India, has announced the India launch of three big titles, Bollywood, Santa, Banta & Trendy and the extremely popular Beyblade.
While Bollywood and Santa, Banta & Trendy have been launched under the Illustrated Orchids brand name, the kids cult brand Beyblade has been launched by Chuang Yi Publishing Pvt Ltd which is a joint venture between Singapore based Chuang Yi Pte Ltd and Illustrated Orchids.
Speaking to Animation ‘xpress, Illustrated Orchids Creative Director Sudhir Sehgal remarked,”We are very strong on developing Indian content and Indian themes and we are extremely confident that our comics Bollywood and Santa, Banta & Trendy will do very well in India. We have also tied up with Chuang Yi to bring the very popular Japanese comic book art form Manga into India with the superselling brand Beyblade”
Chuang Yi Director Rony Neo shared,”With the partnership between Chaung Yi & Illustrated Orchids we have incorporated a joint venture called Chaung Yi Publishing Pvt Ltd with the objective to publish and do sales and marketing of Japanese Manga comics in India. The first Japanese Manga which will be out in May is Bey Blade. We hold license from the Japanese owner to publish and sell Beyblade in Singapore, India, Phillipines and Australia”
“Already for the past two years we have been publishing the comics in Singapore, Phillipines and Australia and now finally we have the India launch” he added.
Bollywood and Santa, Banta & Trendy are priced at Rs 35 with a fresh issue (48 pages) being published every month. Beyblade comic book sets shall be priced at Rs 95 and will be available in 14 sets of 192 pages each of pure Japanese Manga style. The comics would be in black and white and would read from right to left.
All the three titles will be distributed by Delhi based Om Books. Talking about the kind of volumes that Illustrated Orchids anticipated from the comics, Sehgal said,”Intially we are targeting 30,000 copies of SBT & Bollywood which will hit 50,000 monthly in 3 months time. And For Beyblade we are expecting 5000-8000 for each of the 14 sets”
Illustrated Orchids is also parallely working on developing a subscription based system. Elaborating on the model of the subscription based system Sehgal shared,”We are again applying this new idea which is more popular for news papers. This bascially means insptead of giving the books only to the distributor we will also approach kids and ask them to buy subscription of 12 issues. TO PROMOTE this we are giving free gifts. 12 issues subscription is Rs 410 and we are giving gifts worth more than Rs 400 with each subscription”
“These subscriptions will be booked through road shows and events that we are going to organise across the country. At the moment we are booking subscrptions by visiting the schools and some of the parent teacher meetings (PTM)” he added.
The comic book major has also been involved in the making of Hanuman comics. The rights for the Hanuman comics belong to Diamond Pocket Books which have outsourced the design and layout work to Illustrated Orchids.
“We are also working on developing comics around a few major Hindi movie titles that are under production, deals for 2000ad, Winx and Witch are also just in the final stages” remarked Sehgal.
On being asked about the advertising deals that the comic book publisher had got for the titles? Sehgal replied,”For Bollywood and Santa Banta & Trendy we have got Action Shoes .. For next issue we have few more brands but as there is limited space for advertisments we are being careful about the brands we work with”
“For Beyblade we have lots of advertising offers but again we are negotiating with them” he added.
“We are grooming talent at our end as well. At Illustrated Orchids we have pending orders for 5000-7000 pages of illustration every month and 500 minutes of storyboarding and animation for the next one year provided we would have the sufficient amount of human resource. But not much talent is availble and we are visiting major institutes such as Lucknow College of Arts, Banaras Hindu University and in next three months we will cover all the Indian cities for a talent hunt” concluded Sehgal.
