New Delhi, Aug. 5 -- What kind of young person would want to read an old-fashioned comic book these days, when life is filled with a million visual stimulations. Going one step back, why would creators take the trouble to write, draw, colour and make panels with painstaking effort, when many tech and AI tools can do a decent job with much less heartache?

As I opened the latest volume of Longform, an anthology of graphic narratives, I was intrigued by these two thoughts. Founded by a group of four illustrators, writers, scholars and comic-book aficionados a decade ago, the Longform Comics Collective has been working at the forefront of discovering unknown talents in this space. The original founding team of Pinaki De, Sekhar Mukherjee, De...