Publishing A Comic Book In India Chris Zielinski Cite as : Zielinski C. 1986. Publishing a comic book with health messages in India. Ideas and Acon, 167, pages 11-14. FFHC/Acon for Development, FAO, Rome, Italy. Introducon More than half of the world's people live in countries whose populaons exceed 90 million In these countries as soon as you stop aiming your publicaons at the few thousand specialists in a given category and start to move down the populaon pyramid the numbers in the target audience swell dramacally In India for example something likely to be of interest to entomologists will have a potenal audience of say 3,000 if it is of interest to physicians in general the potenal audience is over 200,000 and if you want just one copy of a publicaon to reach each village you need to prepare a print-run of almost 600,000 In considering the project of preparing a text on immunizaon for school children in India we had to decide what if anything we could do that would have any impact on such a large populaon. It was clearly beyond our budget to aempt to cover the whole of the enormous potenal target audience That would have called for an annual print run of around 2 million copies We concluded that our role was to harness the specialist skills available to us derived from experience gained in many countries to produce a good product We could test it and ensure and demonstrate that it was effecve in promong the behavioural changes desired And we could try to design it in such a way as to facilitate its use and adaptaon in the many different cultures and languages of India as well as in neighbouring countries The parcular socio-economic factors obtaining in India the large number but small percentage of literate people and the miniscule spending-power of the majority that has all the health problems speak in favour of cheap easy-to-understand publicaons such as comic books Indeed this medium is widely known and used in India both for entertainment and for disseminang serious messages especially on religion and history Methodologies In deciding to produce a comic book for school children in India we had to give some thought to the basic methodology of the publishing process In planning the project it became at once apparent for example that we were seng up a demonstraon an example of an approach to increasing the awareness of EPI concepts of a segment of the populaon We had to show that our approach was valid assuming that the project was successful and to do so we had to subject our product to rigorous tesng at every stage We had to demonstrate that we had a good example The funcon of an example or prototype is to serve both as a basis for translaon adaptaon and replicaon and as a model end-result It is clearly essenal to submit materials intended for use in prototypes parcularly those aimed at the grassroots to a rigorous cycle of pre and post-tesng Not only can tesng help to produce a good prototype but the results of tests carried out can be used to demonstrate the merits of the prototype to anyone who might be interested in adapng and replicang it With the above consideraons in mind the comic book project for India was devised to produce two outputs the first was a prototype of the completed text which would be pre-tested and evaluated thoroughly and the second was the prototype adaptaon kit which was a more abstract form of the prototype shorn of cultural and social characteriscs and giving detailed instrucons on how to adapt the first prototype and thus produce further local models Having concluded that publishing for the grassroots in India should consist of developing and demonstrang small-scale soluons to large problems it follows that once a soluon in this case the prototype comic book is demonstrated as being valid and good it must be promoted We felt that a good product would not