Creating a Comic Strip for Toyota India
Cue the Coronavirus Pandemic, Year 1. While most industries suffered the wrath of the pandemic, the automobile industry in India was fortunate enough to see a rise in sales.
The good fortune of the automobile industry, in this case- Toyota India, had a sort of domino effect; of trickling down to its marketing agency – Dentsu, and eventually me, for getting picked to create a comic strip for their new car
Toyota India, in collaboration with Maruti Suzuki, was on track to launch their new car – Urban Cruiser, with Ayushmann Khurrana as the brand ambassador. All they needed was a way to announce their new car, pre-launch and lucky for me, Toyota wanted to create a manga inspired comic strip to do so.
“Mridula Panda, loves all things Manga and Anime inspired”, reads my bio on most platforms. Probably what drew Dentsu to my Instagram profile, before they approached me to work on this project. The project required three digital comic strips, with different storylines, to accentuate the features of the car. The idea behind the comic strips was to show Ayushmann Khurrana as the hero and The Urban Cruiser as his trusted sidekick.
Team Dentsu and I worked on creating the storyline and roughly storyboarded the three comics.
After which I created sketches of Ayushmann’s character and the car, to help the brand finalise on the art style and colour palette. From there I had 2 months to create and deliver the comic strips, to be used on Instagram.
