Defining Corporeality: Close-Reading the Star-Body as A Dynamic Icon in Indian Comics

Abstract Book of the 13th International Conference on New Findings in Humanities and Social Sciences

Year: 2026

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Defining Corporeality: Close-Reading the Star-Body as A Dynamic Icon in Indian Comics

Dr. Debarghya Sanyal

ABSTRACT:

This paper proposes corporeality as a conceptual framework for analysing how the human body acquires meaning, power, and recognisability as it circulates across multiple media forms. Focusing on India’s Supremo comics (1982–87), the study defines corporeality as the visual, affective, and narrative labour through which star-images, mythic templates, and popular iconographies are consolidated into a single multimodal body. Supremo offers a uniquely generative site for shaping this concept: its protagonist is modelled directly on Amitabh Bachchan, yet transformed into a superhero through stylisation, repetition, and transmedia adaptation.
Edited by Gulzar and illustrated by Pratap Mullick, the comics stage an unusual fusion of cinematic realism and comic-book abstraction, where Bachchan’s recognisable gestures, stillness, and physical presence are reconfigured into a mythic-hyperbolic form. The paper argues that this process exemplifies how corporeality functions across media—by stabilising a body’s visual coherence while allowing it to mutate aesthetically, generically, and ideologically.
To illuminate this process further, the paper situates Supremo within the broader genealogy of Bachchan’s Angry Young Man persona. The AYM functions not as the primary object of study but as a key precursor whose cinematic corporeality—ritualised poses, muscular moral authority, and episodic reappearances—serves as raw material for Supremo’s superheroic reconstruction.
By tracing how corporeality enables this transformation from star-body to superhero-body, the paper demonstrates that Indian superheroism emerges not by imitating Western models but by reconstituting existing visual traditions—cinematic stardom, Amar Chitra Katha–style heroic iconography, and postcolonial fantasies of masculine sovereignty—into a newly coherent frontier of transmedia embodiment.

Keywords: Corporeality; Angry Young Man; Indian Comics; Transmedia Visual Culture; Semiotics; Iconographies