Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Boban & Molly
There was William Brown (read a William book online here), and then there was Dennis The Menace.But before them, there were Boban & Molly (chronology purely in terms of my discovery of these literary characters). In terms of pure cheek and ability to create unprecedented mayhem, these Mallu kids beat their American and British counterparts hollow. Every character in this series was just fantastic - be it the Panchayat President or the 'hip' Appi Hippie (what a name!).
The cartoonist - affectionately known as Toms - wove stories (dealing with, and satiring contemporary issues) around the daily adventures of these two endearing kids. Be it their exasperated mom who had to deal with the daily load-shedding & non-availability of gas cylinders in addition to the pesky kids, or the ever-busy-but-jobless Panchayat President constantly poring over the newspaper sitting at the teashop, each personality was artfully shaped. Apparently, the whole series was based on characters the author had observed (the real Boban and Molly were not even related, I remember reading off an interview of the cartoonist). All these characters were some of the first I ever tried to draw, and so I was delighted when I discovered some online strips by accident - I simply had to draw them and dedicate a whole post to them.
There were a lot of plans to make a movie on these characters - for once, good sense prevailed and they decided not to. Thank god for small mercies !!
# posted by Ranjit Nair @ 10:53 AM 
