Harshveer Jain, the brain behind the Instagram handle @storysellercomics, always has a story to tell or a message to share. It could be just about anything that's happening around him or about life, in general. The things he draws about in his comic strips are mostly driven by his own life experiences. "I have learnt a lot of things in life. When I was a teenager and even a few years later, I had my flaws — the average mould of person who hasn't gone out or explored the world," he begins, "After that, I met a lot of people, who taught me important things in life. Now, what I try to do is, what has made me a better person, I try to distil them into simple stories and analogies in the form of comic strips. I hope they eventually help others like me to become better human beings," the 28-year-old comic strip artist and doodler tells us.
Since July 2018, Harshveer decided to make the comic strips more regular and that's how his Instagram page took off. If you scroll through the @storysellercomics Insta page, you cannot miss but immediately notice the minimalistic but aesthetic stick figures against simple backgrounds. Harshveer is quick to add, "I am not quite an artist. I wouldn't say I picked up any kind of art techniques or even learnt drawing. I was never good at it as a child, I only used to scribble and doodle at the back of my notebooks. On Instagram, you can't just write, you have to have pictures, drawings, videos to say something. The best I could do was doodle or draw stick figures and also write some amount of text in the posts."
His posts have minimalistic drawings that even a two-year-old would manage to draw in their initial days and it provides a simple reminder to humankind during these testing times - imparting important life lessons.
Dwelling a little on how he goes about choosing what topic or what theme to draw or write on, Harshveer says, "I haven't ever consciously thought of sticking to a specific theme or topic, it's quite simple as taking inspiration from life or things around me. Belonging to a middle-class Indian family, I have lived with several stereotypes since my childhood. The overarching theme is that be nice to people because you can never understand what they might be going through until you are in their shoes. My final motive is when people go through my strips or read what I have written, they wish to become a better person and be kind."
This, however, is not what earns the 28-year-old his daily bread. Harshveer runs his own content marketing business from Indore, where originally hails from. So, how does he manage? "The stories are always churning inside my head, whenever I meet someone new, see something out of the regular, it is stored at the back of my mind. The actual drawing doesn't take much time," he adds. Harshveer also is pretty clear about the fact that he doesn't want to turn this into a full-time career, he's satisfied with the freedom he enjoys currently.
