somebody or something: September 2013

Monday, September 30, 2013

The first stint


My first stint. At trying to build something **officially**.

In the summer of 2001, my friends and I dabbed at the artists within. We tried our own comic series. This was no ordinary comic book series. There were three superheroes, not one. Venom, created by Sai Krishna, inspired from the Batman by Bob Kane. The Dark Knight, origins unknown, created by a friend(who unfortunately got mixed up in the mandatory class sections change of '02). And the Black Scorpion, the self-taught superhero, created by me.

Venom - in a doodle by Sai
But truth be told, Venom had the deepest back story and set of villains than any other. So the other two became natural selections to form a trio of superheroes. I promise to upload more pics as and when I get them.

Our first release came after the class shifting, and thats how Rex And Yellow Cloud was born. Co founded by Sai Krishna and me, co-chaired by Sai's brother Sai Prasanna. The moment was christened with a marble in which was written "SAI ARAVIND" for our club in Sai's terrace, till date the headquarters of our foundation. We even had a flag and a emblem of sorts flying high on the terrace.

I think we successfully published three editions under our new club. The comics sold like hot cakes. Classmates, section-mates were starting to hear about us. But unfortunately we couldn't scale to the demands of printing out comic books for 50p a side to many people. So we went in with our next idea which was rooting in our minds.


Dragonball Z. Nuff said. That was a fanatic pull for any kid. Still is for many. Luckily for me, Sai already knew the whole storyline and knew the characters by heart. So obviously, I made Sai tell me the whole storyline before the show was aired, in India that is. Till date, I have no clue how he had access to that and more important remember every single detail. Literally. Sai was the artist. I was kinda sloppy at art.(Still am, not good, not bad, just sloppy ;))

We started off with simple trading cards with ever-"green" characters :) - Goku(obviously), Gohan, Piccolo, Vegeta, Krillin, etc. We started with original proofs. Then photocopied and colored and did the finer details. From our earlier experience from the comic strips, each cards was priced 50p. So this time, each work paper resulted in 6 * 50p in earnings. We had an awesome formula! Our standard card had one artwork, details like name, power level, power ups and ki waves. Each special power came in a smaller card which can be combined with the standard card to get increase the power level of the attack chosen. Yup we had a game plan :D

Next, we brought in our next wave of characters. Characters kids hadn't heard of yet, but seen on their prized Dragonball Z pencil boxes. Yes Frieza, Cell, Trunks from the future, older Gohan, Goten, baby Trunks, Gotenks, Vegetto, Gogeta, Buu, every one! Hot cakes to smoking meteorites. The demand grew so high that we spent most of our weekends and evenings getting the cards ready.

Soon we had packs to make it easier to buy the cards. I don't remember the numbers, but the club was busy almost everyday after school to satisfy its customers. Then we wanted something more challenging, and new.

Candles. Play dough. Figurines. We had a stock of original Dragonball Z character figurines. we thought we'd share them with the world. For a nominal price of course ;). So the three of us, under the water tank built up an assembly line. The "business process" is as below :)
  1. Take the dough, make it flat
  2. Press the figurine against the dough to get a deep and clean impression
  3. When enough impressions were ready, light the candle. Hold it over the dough until enough wax has melted into it. Then let it dry. 
  4. Once dried, carefully apprise the wax figurines out of the dough using a compass or divider. Clean as necessary.
  5. Ready for sale!

Note: I tried to replace the play dough with real dough(the ones you make roti with). Failed. Real bad. The consistency of the dough was not good enough. Probably not enough water. Plus it starts to get fungus in a few days :(

The figurines gave Rex and YC the biggest ticket to fame. There were kids who couldn't believe such things were possible. They came to me looking to verify what they heard about our "product". Kinda of flaring, but we showed them. Those were good times.

Our operations came to a halt when I had to move in '04. But till then it was one adventure after the other. There were lots of skills acquired, negotiations made, new avenues explored and a whole lot of accidents!

We had a lot of accidents The worst accident I can remember of,
On a work break, we decided to play some basketball. And we broke the water pipe in the terrace. The whole building's water went dripping away. Soon we did build our rep enough to get the terrace permits back. But that was one loong day.

Why Rex? - Ask my co-founder. Why Yellow Cloud? Clouds in yellow color are rare and close to impossible to find. What did we do? We tried to channel our passion and creativity to make some moolah so that we can buy stuff! Financially, our books were bad. We didn't know where the capital had leaked off to. The profits, if any, were hidden behind a veil, so don't know if it existed even.

Looking back, one might feel that sometimes things are bad, other times things are very bad, most of the time things are extremely bad, a little time they are tolerable and a very fractional amount of time things are agreeable. This was about one such agreeable period. I have to thank Sai a million times over, and it still won't be enough.


P.S: The post is full hyperbole and "business", I know ;). Possibly contains many historical inaccuracies, thank you for bearing with that.