Darkness in pictures

[My latest Forbes Life column. Earlier columns are here]

When I think of the graphic novels I have read – especially the ones with dark subject matter – it sometimes happens that a single image, just one panel among hundreds, stands out and seems to represent the tone of the whole. For instance, in Saurav Mohapatra and Vivek Shinde’s Mumbai Confidential, a noir thriller set in Mumbai’s underworld, this image would probably be the wordless “aerial shot” of two people – one of them a sweet little girl selling flowers – sprawled on the sidewalk on a gloomy night, after having been hit by a car. In Gautam Bhatia’s angry satire Lies: A Traditional Tale of Modern India, it might be the deliberately exaggerated drawing of a luxury plane that contains a swimming pool, a golf course and a shopping arcade, among other diversions. (The plane is being used by a minister who is flying over a drought-stricken area and making obligatory sympathetic noises. Poor man. Imagine having to make do with a six-hole mini-course.)

It would be hard to perform a similar exercise for Art Spiegelman’s magnificent memoir Maus, which was written as an attempt to record his parents’ experiences in the Nazi concentration camps – this is too multilayered a work to be reduced to one emblematic image. But there is a panel I noticed on a recent rereading, which reminded me of how closely sadness and humour, despair and affirmation run together in this story about human endurance in extreme situations.

The drawing shows Art’s father Vladek, having been incarcerated in a ghetto with his family and waiting to be taken to Auschwitz, coming across the dead body of the Jew who had turned informer and betrayed the Spiegelmans to the Nazis a few weeks earlier. “Hey!” Vladek tells a passerby, “This is the rat that turned my family over to the Gestapo.” It turns out that the informer had been shot after he was no longer of use to the Germans, and now Vladek is the one who ironically has the job of giving him a decent burial.

This situation in itself is a testament to shared suffering and how easily oppressors can become victims and vice versa, but the image might also make you laugh out loud, because it includes a little wink at the book’s chief stylistic device. Throughout Maus, Art Spiegelman depicts the Jews as wide-eyed mice and their German persecutors as smug, predatory cats. And so, in this panel, we have the use of the word “rat” to describe the dead man even as the drawing itself portrays both Vladek and the corpse as rodents. When people extol the virtues of the written word (text-only literature) over visual forms such as cinema or the illustrated book, it is often pointed out that great writing enables you to use your imagination, while visual depictions make it too easy. There is some truth in this, but I’m not sure how text alone – even when created by a very skilled writer – would be able to replicate the effect of this one drawing (which, as mentioned earlier, is among dozens of searing images in Maus).

The really dark graphic novels can be unflinchingly gruesome in what they do show, but they might equally achieve their effects through the power of suggestion – as the Japanese master Osamu Tezuka repeatedly does in his medical thriller Ode to Kirihito. One of the most devastating scenes here concerns the fate of a young woman named Reika, who plays the part of a “human tempura” in a crowd-drawing show involving a large vat of oil, but there is so much else to shudder at and sympathise with in this manga epic. Ode to Kirihito, is about a disease that is transforming people into dog-like beasts in 1970s Japan – the protagonist Dr Kirihito, who has been afflicted, lives in the countryside, trying to cure himself and others; meanwhile, in sophisticated city hospitals, doctors take part in corporate power struggles. In Tezuka’s hands, this premise becomes a way of exploring exactly what words like “humanity” and “morality” mean (something he achieved in a different way in what is perhaps his best known work, an eight-volume rendition of the Buddha’s life).

Some people find it hard to come to terms with sexual explicitness in illustrated books – not least because “comics” often get dumped in the children’s sections of bookstores – but there have been works, ranging from Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries to Chester Brown’s Paying for It, which do this exceedingly well, concealing subversive content beneath minimalist, placid-looking drawings. Satrapi’s story centres on teatime conversations between a group of Iranian women, who use this private time to air their troubles and use humour as therapy, and the talk progresses from relatively innocuous matters to the need to fake virginity for one’s husband if necessary. Brown’s book, set in a very different society and from a male perspective, is about his years of experience as a “john” – someone who regularly pays for sex with prostitutes – and the glimpse he got into the inner lives of these women, as well as the less savoury side of his own personality. It veers between personal epiphany and philosophical musings about love, commitment, power and control, and includes a series of endnotes where he discusses the ethics of prostitution.

It would be hard to imagine a non-pornographic film being made out of Paying for It, but one of the most gripping graphic novel-inspired films is David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, about a man named Joey who escapes a life of violence to live a quiet existence as a Regular Family Guy in a small town – and then finds his past pursuing him to the degree that his own wife and children no longer know who he really is. John Wagner and Vince Locke’s book, which the film is adapted from, can be viewed as pure pulp – it lacks the finesse of works by Spiegelman or Satrapi – but in its scratchy, black-and-white drawings there is a raw, menacing quality that fits the subject matter perfectly – not least in the hard-to-look-at scenes near the end where Joey, having returned to confront his enemies after 20 years, finds that his childhood friend Ricky had been kept imprisoned and savagely tortured for all that time, while Joey had been peacefully leading his new life hundreds of miles away.

When he stares at the battered, maimed body of his friend, Joey is in a sense looking at a distorting mirror that shows what he might have easily been if things had turned out just a bit differently. In my mind, there is an odd but resonant link between this image and the Maus one of Vladek Spiegelman gazing down at the body of the comrade who had betrayed him.

[For thoughts on another dark vision from a great graphic novel, see this post. And a long post about Chester Brown's Paying for It is here]

Favourite illustrations: a coach from hell

[Was originally going to write this for a publisher’s website as part of an “Illustrations I love” series I had been invited to contribute to – but I procrastinated with such fierce determination that the series winded up before the piece could be done]

Page 24 of chapter 5 of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s stunning From Hell ends with this wide panel, which holds me in thrall whenever I look at it – though there is also a tiny fear that I will be sucked into the scene it depicts.

As you can see, these are the main elements of the drawing: a woman walking along a dark, deserted road, a coach coming up behind her, the silhouettes of two men visible in the driver’s seat– the coachman holding his whip, sitting next to him a man wearing a top hat. Most of the light in this scratchy black-and-white image is behind the coach, giving the impression that it has emerged from some great mist. (Or through a magic portal. There are concentric circles in the portion of the drawing that frames the carriage – swirling fog, or a vortex to hell?) The woman’s features are indistinct but her face is lit up as if by the coach’s lamp, enough for the reader to register that she has only just noticed the vehicle and is looking up at it with childlike curiosity.

The scene could be from fairytale or myth, a version of the Wolf stalking Red Riding Hood, but it is a fictionalised depiction of an encounter that really did take place around 3 AM on August 31, 1888 near the Whitechapel Road in London’s squalid East End. Purely at the level of narrative, this is a crucial panel in From Hell: the first meeting between the serial killer widely known as “Jack the Ripper” and one of his victims (the prostitute Polly Nichols). A full 130 pages (and at least 800 drawings – I’m not counting) into a graphic novel that uses the Ripper murders as a sharp dissection of the Victorian Age, an unveiling of London’s architectural secrets and a foreshadowing of the 20th century, this is the first time we see killer and victim together in the same frame. (No spoiler alert needed – this book is not a whodunit.)

Thematic importance aside, I love the image on its own terms. There is something almost impressionistic about it – no real detailing, just light and shadow used so skilfully (see how the right side of Polly's dress is partly illuminated while the left remains in darkness) that one gets the gist of what is happening without being able to describe the specifics. Elsewhere in the story, including in the panels that neighbour this one, you can see Polly’s features clearly, but that isn’t necessary in this drawing, which has a symbolic function and is also a sort of punctuation mark – dramatically ending a page that has, over the previous six panels, shown us this poor woman staggering along the road, looking for a customer so she can earn the “doss money” she needs to sleep in a boarding house at night, singing a song to herself while the light of the coach slowly, slowly creeps up behind her...and then.

(“I want this to be dramatic, with the coach a large and dark engine of the apocalypse,” wrote Alan Moore in his panel description to Eddie Campbell; you can see the whole page and Moore’s script for it here.)

To really appreciate the drawing, you have to see it not just in the context of the rest of the page, but the rest of the chapter, and finally the whole book taken together. In the scenes that follow this image, the Ripper – cast here as the royal surgeon Sir William Gull – will invite Polly into his carriage, offer her opium-laced grapes and direct the coach to the nearby London Hospital, in the gardens of which a lonesome figure – the deformed “Elephant Man”, Joseph Merrick – can be seen from a distance. After asking Polly to say the words “Salutation to Ganesha”, Gull will strangle her, thus commencing – with the blessings of the elephant-headed God – what he sees as a sacred mission. Sir William’s delusion is that by killing these women according to Masonic ritual, he is performing the divinely mandate task of suppressing the “irrational”, feminine side of the human consciousness. In this view of things, the coming together of killer and victim is a moment with cosmic significance: as Gull puts it elsewhere, they are to be “wed in eternity”. (Note: this is true of the Jack the Ripper story even at a more mundane level, beyond the colourful conspiracies involving the Royal family and Freemasons: a never-identified assailant and his destitute victims are entwined for all time in the popular imagination.)

The coach image is also an arresting one given the overall visual language of chapter 5 (titled “The Nemesis of Neglect”). Early in the chapter, there have been a series of pages that have contrasted Gull’s privileged life with Polly’s hand-to-mouth existence. Thus, the doctor wakes and stretches languidly in his plush bedchamber, while the unfortunates of the East End sleep in the cold, sitting up against a wall, with a rope stretched out in front of them to prevent them from falling forward. And Campbell employs different drawing styles to emphasise the divide between the two settings: water-colour drawings make Gull’s world lush, while Polly and her friends are drawn in the gravelly black ink that is more typical of the book.

This juxtaposition continues for a few pages. And it is apt that the drawing which finally unites ("weds") the two characters has an abstract quality: it definitely isn’t the smooth water-colour style employed for the earlier Gull scenes, but it is dreamier, more poetic than the deliberately coarse style that Campbell uses elsewhere.

Choosing this image to discuss here doesn’t mean it is my favourite drawing in From Hell – there are dozens of others I could just as easily have cited. When I first read this book years ago, I concentrated on the story – on the brilliant wealth and depth of detail Moore brings to his central conceit, and how he fits the facts of the Ripper case to his own speculative fiction. But as I revisit it these days I find myself looking ever more closely at the images and discovering new things in them. (This is even more rewarding if you have the book on DVD and can look at large versions of the pictures – though that is a time-consuming process since there are thousands of them.)

P.S. As a From Hell obsessive, I can't believe I didn't know about this new companion volume. Put together by Campbell, it includes (among other things) many of the detailed scripts Moore wrote for each of the 500 pages - a fascinating insight into the writer's incredible mind, as well as into the process of creative collaboration.

Sensitive alien discusses romance and prostitution: on Chester Brown’s Paying for It

My friend Ajitha – fearsome Harper Collins editor, scourge of established and aspiring writers everywhere, grammar pedant who, even during drunken conversations, grabs at faulty sentences as they issue from your mouth, rips them asunder and watches their innards drift to the carpet – gifted me Chester Brown’s graphic memoir Paying for It a few months ago. It has been one of my favourite reads of the past year and I have wanted to write about it for a while, but it is a difficult book to articulate one’s feelings about (plus the thought of having to write a grammatically flawless post was too much jittery-giving and imbroglio-making, as a Srishti author would put it before Ajitha manicured his typing fingers with red-hot pliers).

Still, here goes. Paying for It is Brown’s no-holds-barred, warts-and-all account of his years as a “john” – a man who regularly visits prostitutes. This phase of his life began in 1999, a couple of years after his girlfriend Sook-Yin ended their romantic relationship and shifted her new boyfriend into their flat, a situation that, to Chester’s own surprise, didn’t make him feel jealous or negative at all (it even improved his relationship with Sook-Yin in some ways, causing him to wonder why people idealise romantic love over other forms of love). But he had his sexual needs to think of too. Initial diffidence, nervousness about risks and dangers, and uncertainty about how to even contact sex-workers were soon overcome, and such trysts became a regular part of his life. What follows is a dispassionate, almost anthropological record of his encounters with all the women he paid for sex over the next few years.

Given its subject matter, this book can easily cause indignation or offence. There is no skating around the objectification of women, for instance – that’s what a john does when he scans advertisements and decides whether he wants someone with big or small breasts on this particular day, a brunette or a blonde, an 18-year-old or someone more experienced. Or when he gets online and reads “reviews” of prostitutes written by other johns. In most of the panels that show Chester’s first meeting with a woman, his thoughts are along the lines “Not as beautiful as Gwendolyn but still attractive, and what a body – she is stacked!” or “A bit on the chubby side – bad teeth – not ugly but not really good-looking either.” Some of this will be unpalatable if you think there’s something inherently wrong with paid sex or that it is synonymous with exploitation, but none of it means that Chester treats the women as rubber dolls rather than as human beings with feelings. (On one occasion, when he comes close to doing this, he is told off and is quick to acknowledge his insensitivity.) They talk at length, he develops an emotional connect of sorts with the women who are warm and friendly to him; there is a clear reciprocity in the relationships. And over the course of this book he repeatedly makes the point that most johns are regular guys, not the violent or psychotic caricatures you see in films (or at least no more violent or psychotic than most guys in conventional relationships are capable of being).

The drawings themselves are minimalist, always in compact rectangular panels, and usually little more than “pictures of people talking” (to use a phrase that often describes formally unambitious films or graphic novels). This has mixed results. At a practical level it allows Chester to preserve the anonymity of the prostitutes by not showing their features in vivid detail. And it encourages the viewer to focus on the text – Chester’s constant introspecting, his discussions with the women (which add up to a wide-ranging view of the prostitute-john relationship) or with his puzzled friends (including fellow cartoonists Joe Matt and Seth: the conversations between these three make up some of the drollest bits). But the style is sometimes almost too low-key. I get that this wasn’t intended to be an erotic book, but on occasion there is a disconnect between images and text, as when Chester tells us a particular encounter was amazingly good yet the pictures are silent, faraway views of seemingly impersonal coitus, and the page as a whole has all the soberness of a Pinter play. “She is adorable! This is going to be great!” he thinks to himself when he meets an attractive prostitute; another panel has him sitting on a bed, thinking “I feel all giddy and excited.” Yet in these drawings and elsewhere his face is a straight line, there is no more expression on it than on Dilbert’s face during a boardroom meeting.

Much of this probably has to do with Brown’s unusual personal traits, his apparent ability to have a good time (however he defines it) while simultaneously dissecting his own feelings and reactions: even right in the middle of sexual intercourse, a part of him appears to be observing, analysing, filing things away. (In one particularly funny scene, Chester, sitting alone at his table, feels a “tiny twinge of happiness” and later sifts through his recent memories to try to understand what caused that little twinge.) Perhaps this quality is also what allows him to matter-of-factly make revelations that may gross out some readers; at one point he gets the impression that he is hurting a woman during sex and mulls that this is a slight turn-on for him (but then decides to get it over with as fast as possible). Such passages can be discomfiting but they are truthful too, more truthful about people’s dark impulses – and about the relationship between fantasy and reality – than many writers would care to be, especially in an autobiographical work.

But then, as Robert Crumb writes in his Introduction to this book, “Chester Brown is not of this planet. He is probably the result of one of those alien abductions where they stick a needle in a human woman’s abdomen and impregnate her.” The photo of Brown at the back of the book shows someone who might be well cast as Mr Spock’s much smarter big brother in Star Trek. It is a face that suggests unfathomable reserves of wisdom as well as emotional impassivity. The head is oval, the features smooth and effete (you may be reminded of REM’s Michael Stipe or the actor John Malkovich), the thin lips are curved in a way that could mean he is amused or profoundly sad or both at the same time.

A further observation, from Chester’s friend Seth:

I often jokingly refer to Chet as “the robot”. In posing a question to him I might quip “Perhaps I should ask a person who has actual human emotions instead.” The truth is, Chester seems to have a very limited emotional range compared to most people. There does seem to be something wrong with him. He’s definitely an oddball.

(At which point I began wondering why Ajitha had so pointedly given me this book. But I’ll let that pass.)

By the time you’re halfway through Paying for It, you’ll gather that Chester is capable of examining very complex issues with a robotic objectivity that doesn’t come easily to most of us (and in the process perhaps he oversimplifies some of those issues too, not fully accounting for how tangled and messy human emotions can get when it comes to such subjects as love and sex). In a series of end-notes and appendices, he lists and addresses the arguments against prostitution, makes the case that it should be decriminalised but not legalised (the latter would make the profession subject to regulation and lead to the uncontrollable growth of the black market, with the result that some prostitutes won’t have legal recourse if they are abused or exploited) and discusses related problems such as human trafficking and sex slavery. In a particularly provocative appendix that may have you alternately agreeing and disagreeing with him as you read each new sentence, he argues with the definitions of “choice”, “consent” and “violence” presented in Sheila Jeffreys’s book The Idea of Prostitution. And he often draws on the libertarian view of property rights and personal freedoms.

What allows him, ultimately, to be clear-sighted about these things (whether or not you agree with everything he says) is his view of romantic love as something that is not in itself an ideal to aspire to, and his disapproval of the institution of marriage. Consider this exchange – which I think is one of the most central in the book – with a prostitute who calls herself “Edith”:

Chester: Love is about sharing, caring and giving. Romantic love is about owning, hoarding and jealousy. I think it’s the exclusionary nature of romantic love that makes it different from other kinds of love […] I think it encourages a certain type of thinking: the desire to own another person.
[…]

“Edith”: But there ARE some couples who are right for each other.

Chester: Yes, but people change over time. I’m not the same person I was 10 years ago, and I’m VERY different from the person I was 20 years ago. So, yeah, there are romantic couples who are absolutely right for each other at this moment in time, but those two people are going to change, and it’s tremendously unlikely that they are going to change in exactly the same ways. It’s much more likely that they’ll change into people who are unsuited to each other … no matter how compatible they were at the beginning of their relationship.

“Edith”: Yes, but you can TRY to continue to understand your partner. And if you love him or her, you’d be willing to make that effort.

Chester: Yeah, effort. Romantic love is work. Call me lazy, but I don’t want to do the work.

“Edith”: If I met the right guy, I’d be happy to do the work. It takes work to get anything worthwhile in life.

It may be notable that Brown gives “Edith” the closing word in that exchange. He comes across as rigid at times, but if you look closely he is constantly revising or reassessing his own views over the course of this book: for example, he goes from proclaiming that “the romantic love ideal is evil” to discovering that he isn’t against romantic love in itself, he has a problem when it leads to what he calls possessive monogamy. And the theme that people change over time, and that those changes must be acknowledged, surfaces in other contexts too. Take this conversation between Chester and Seth:

Seth: If you could have looked into the future [as a teenager] and seen that you would become a whoremonger, wouldn’t you have been horrified?

Chester: Oh yeah, definitely. So?

Seth: Well, don’t you owe it to the person you were then to live the life he would have wanted you to lead?

Chester: I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was a kid. Do I owe it to my younger self to drop my career as a cartoonist and go to university to study paleontology?

Extending that thought, perhaps he will feel differently about these issues in a few years from now, and write another book that contradicts this one. Even if you conclude that Chester Brown is an extraterrestrial, the signs are that he is a sensitive, thoughtful extraterrestrial with a larger capacity for self-examination than many so-called humans have. That in itself makes Paying for It well worth reading, and reading again.

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[Some earlier posts about graphic novels: Alan Moore's Watchmen, the Pao Collective anthology, Jotiba Phule the Gardener in the Wasteland, the Obliterary Journal, Ambedkar in Gond art, Tezuka's Buddha series, Craig Thompson's Blankets, Marjane Satrapi's Embroideries, Kashmir Pending, and a story about the Indian comics industry]

Stupid Guy Goes Back to India (the bewakoof chronicles contd)

The cover of Yukichi Yamamatsu’s Stupid Guy Goes Back to India has a “Hey Bewakoof!” in large font above a drawing of an irascible old Japanese man glaring at the reader, yelling that since this is a translation of a manga, we have to turn it over and read it from right to left. Both the drawing and the bad-temperedness will be familiar to anyone who experienced Yamamatsu’s graphic novel Stupid Guy Goes to India, to which this is a sequel. On the jacket of that earlier book, he gave us the same instructions with a simple “Hey!” minus the “bewakoof”. Perhaps he feels like he knows us better now, and can take more liberties. Yukichi first visited India in 2004, hoping to sell his comics, and his love-hate relationship with the country continues here, though there is a little more khandaani “love” in the mix than there was in the first book (where he was often scornful – or just brutally frank – about India, and honest about his own insularity).

The sequel begins with the artist – now in his 60s – surviving a bout with cancer. “What a waste of a life it was!” he grumbles to himself when he thinks he is dying; the self-deprecation is so mixed with genuine peevishness that the effect is funny rather than maudlin. At various points in both these books, Yukichi appears annoyed at himself and at the world in equal measure, and his exaggerated self-portrait is closer to the worlds of Noh theatre and the medieval Samurai than the reserved placidity we associate with modern Japanese culture. In any case, having lived on, he decides to rejuvenate himself by – what else? – returning to India, having finally earned some money through the earlier book.

This time he is more immune to culture shock, which is not to say that new misadventures don’t present themselves – and he often invites them with his ambitious but not particularly well thought out schemes for making money. He is routinely cheated by people who, when confronted, stare into space as if nothing has happened (or twitch their heads in that ambiguous Indian way that so fascinates Yukichi). He confuses an air cooler with an air conditioner, screams “Do you have any idea what the word PROMISE even means?!” after being let down by someone who had committed to helping him. (“VACHAN?!!? Do they not exist in India or WHAT?!”) But there are gentler passages too: he allows himself to get reflective about growing old, and there is even a tiny bit of social commentary when, after a set of public-toilet-related mishaps (this bit is not for queasy readers), he wonders how women in India must get along.

A notable difference between Stupid Guy Goes Back to India and its predecessor is that a much larger number of the conversations here take place in stilted Hindi (written in the Roman script, of course), reflecting Yukichi’s growing familiarity with the language over his two trips. The results are often very droll – “Sir ke andar theek nahin!” shouts a hysterical Yukichi, trying to explain to a married couple that their baby might have an undiagnosed mental problem; “Kya mazedaar hai AAPKO tay karna nahin!” he shouts, when someone suggests that his stand-up comedy routine might not appeal to local slum-dwellers – but this also means the reader needs basic acquaintance with Hindi to fully appreciate what is going on (and to see the humour in the mixing of the shuddh and the profane).

The narrative itself - in its original, untranslated form - probably held some appeal for Japanese readers who don’t know much about life in India’s dustier, poorer crannies and might therefore be able to read this as a novel set in a fantasy world. For the Indian though, it can become repetitive and over-familiar after a while. The novelty value of the earlier book – which I enjoyed – has abated. Like the badly made Udon noodles that Yukichi tries without success to sell at a roadside stall (he belatedly learns that there is only one type of flour in India), the jokes can only be stretched so far before they wear thin and leave a rancid taste in your mouth.

A running theme through this book is Yukichi’s struggles to publish and sell a slim manga titled “Cycle Rickshaw Wallay ki Dukaan”. He includes that comic at the end of this book (“by “end”, I mean the first pages of a left-to-right publication, bewakoof), so that Stupid Guy Goes Back to India finishes on a note of grace, with a short story that doesn’t feature Yukichi at all but is about a gruff man whose path crosses with a group of orphaned children. Perhaps this is a sign that Yukichi did, after all, develop affection for life in this noisy, messy, complicated country. Or perhaps he is trying to tell us that like the cycle-rickshaw wala, he has always had a soft heart under his cold and self-absorbed exterior. Whatever the case, it makes for a warm ending to a book that otherwise has too many slack passages and too much forced humour.

[Did this for the Hindu Literary Review. My review of the first book, Stupid Guy Goes to India, is here]

Legends of Halahala - silent pictures from another world

[Did this piece for the magazine Democratic World]

What people are willing to consider literary, or even literate, is highly variable. Often, one hears the casual remark “This mass-market/popular novel is not literature” – a statement that, apart from being inaccurate at a purely definition-based level, also suggests an elitism that runs against the long, complex history of art and popular culture. However, even the most broad-based definitions of literature are sure to contain the word “writing”. It is taken for granted that words, made up of those tiny shapes we call alphabets – so intimidating when we can’t decipher them, and so empowering when we can – are involved. And this may be why, when asked about my favourite Indian novels of the past year, I hesitate for a second before mentioning Legends of Halahala.

But only for a second. This is a work of graphic fiction by the hugely talented artist Appupen (the pen name of George Mathen), his second after the extraordinary Moonward. Like that book, Legends of Halahala is set on a planet that resembles our own in many basic ways. It employs different drawing styles to tell five stories set in separate periods, each presenting a perspective on love, obsession and its effects. There is conventional, youthful (some might say foolish and impetuous) romance, but there is also the cutesy idea of two oddball, parasite-like creatures – from the remote “Oberian” era – being each other’s forever-companions. There is a man pining for the super-heroine he encountered as a child, and another man – a swarthy, motorbike-riding daredevil – who is the rescuer of, and then the abductor of, a supermodel’s absconding left breast (!). And in the bleakest of these tales, titled “16917P’s Masterpiece”, there is the love of artistic creation as a form of self-affirmation.

Most intriguingly, the book is almost completely wordless. This is not a minor achievement. Last year, the Chennai-based publishing house Blaft produced an anthology of visual storytelling titled The Obliterary Journal. The name came from the book’s tongue-in-cheek mission to “obliterate” conventional literature – and yet, most of the stories in that collection, though beautifully drawn, did use text; words and images worked in unison. And this has been true of the majority of international graphic novels too, even the ones that do spectacular things with pictorial form. Alan Moore’s Watchmen – about an alternative America where costumed “superheroes” are becoming irrelevant in the face of the world’s biggest problems – is one of the most intricate works of storytelling I have ever seen, in its use of visuals that echo each other, and an intense narrative within a narrative. But it is also a book that you read – the first time, at least – in the normal way, since the story is propelled by dialogues and by stream-of-consciousness musings from a journal maintained by one of the main characters.

Reading a narrative made up entirely of drawings involves a different cerebral process, but within a few pages of Legends of Halahala I was hooked; so adept and fluid is Appupen’s artwork that these stories don’t need words. The few bursts of conversation there are take the form of exclamations and are depicted in a droll, almost cheesily visual way: when a king’s servant has to announce that the royal dinner is ready, the speech bubble issuing from his mouth contains a picture of a plate and cutlery; when the king and queen realise their daughter is missing and shout out her name, we only see her image in the speech balloon (we never learn what she is called); and after a dragon-like creature is sternly instructed to stop setting things ablaze with his fire-breath, we see a “no smoking” sign emanating from his head as he crawls sheepishly away. In a cheeky touch, most of the written words that adorn the book’s back-cover are fake blurbs such as “Book of the year!” by a publication called The Halahala Observer.

But it is the true silences that are most impressive. The first story – about star-crossed lovers whose fathers rule rival kingdoms – is the most straightforward one, linear and very easy on the eye. It is also bright and vividly coloured, which is central to its purpose: the kingdoms are represented by green and orange respectively, and this distinguishing colour scheme runs through the story, right up to a cheeky last panel where the two lovers are finally united and the picture of a heart on a flag brings the two colours together. Contrast this look with that of the next story, drawn in deliberately gloomy black and white, where a child and his parents – walking the streets of what looks like a Hollywood noir film from the 1940s – are rescued from a monster by Ghost Girl. (When we seen the grown up version of the boy years later – a depressed-looking man still haunted by the memory of his saviour – the panels acquire a neon yellow tinge.)

Just as interesting as the differences, though, are the similarities – the visual motifs that subtly connect the tales. For instance, the opening illustrations for three of the stories involve a chasm that has to be bridged: in “Stupid’s Arrow”, it is the valley that divides the kingdoms, a tenuous rope bridge stretched across it; in “The Saga of Ghost Girl”, the skyscrapers of a metropolis are drawn in a slanted way so that the gap between them becomes another sort of valley, and we see the small figure of the super-heroine swinging from one building to another. And there are many other touches that you might properly register only on a second or third read. (Isn’t the image on the opening page of the first story – the silhouette of the valley and the rocky hills – akin to the bottom half of an India map, complete with a little Sri Lanka tapering away at the bottom? And if so, could the kingdoms stand for the politics associated with the western and eastern extremes of the country? Or is this over-analysis? Decide for yourself.)

Three of the stories in Legends of Halahala end with clear heart symbols, but if you squint at the final pages of the other two you might see distorted heart shapes in them too: in the rings of cigarette smoke floating across a city’s dark skyline. Or in the broken pieces of a plaque on which a man banished from a machine-run land has inscribed “16917P was here” as he uses his art to battle oblivion - by building a monument to assert his presence in a world where he is an outcast. On the evidence of his two books so far, Appupen’s own tryst with literary fame is well underway, and happily graphic novels are not as marginalised as they once were.

[A few earlier posts on graphic novels and visual storytelling: the many faces of the Indian comics industry; Jis desh mein manga bikhti hai; the Pao Collective's anthology; Ambedkar in Gond art; the maali who weeded out myth; Kashmir Pending and The Barn Owl; on reviewing a graphic novel]

Tinkle tinkle little store

[A nostalgia piece I did for Kindle magazine's issue on book-stores and book spaces]

The first bookstore in my life – and the only one I can claim to feel really nostalgic about – had two wheels and a nasal voice that called out “Maga-zine! Maga-zine!” late in the evening. This was a thin man on a bicycle, bearing an improbably large selection of glossies tucked into a small space behind his seat. He would come to our house in south Delhi’s Panchshila Park each day – my mother being a compulsive renter of movie magazines – and it was through him that I discovered Amar Chitra Katha’s Tinkle comics. I was five years old; I know this because the oldest of the comics in my carefully maintained stack is dated July 1982.

Tinkle was a fortnightly then, and one could expect the latest issue to arrive anytime between 12 and 15 days after the previous one. I suspect my earliest understanding of the passage of time developed during those days. On most evenings I wasn’t too interested in the kitaab-wallah uncle’s comings and goings, but a little calendar in my head told me when nine or ten days had elapsed since the last Tinkle, and then the next few evenings were filled with anticipation. The sound of the bicycle bell, the dash to the door, the disappointment when I realised that today wasn’t the day, or the thrill when I saw the cover of a fresh issue for the first time (and quickly flipped through it to check if the final story was Kaalia the Crow, which I loved, or Shikari Shambhu, which I only mildly liked) – these things became a part of the daily routine. He sometimes played teasing games, claiming with a sad face that the latest issue was going to be delayed and then unveiling it just as I had turned away balefully.

It may seem like pushing things to designate this slender herald a “bookstore”, but I should stress that we bought every one of those Tinkles. I was just starting to learn that the books one found interesting were to be kept and hoarded and revisited and fussed over, not merely read once and returned (like the magazines that my mother exchanged every day). It’s a lesson I have never unlearnt; as I write this, a number of bookshelves, makeshift bookshelves, tables, racks, bed-boxes and bed surfaces in my house are creaking in confirmation.

It didn’t take me long to learn that Bicycle Uncle was the mobile arm of a tiny shop – more like a stall – in the nearby Malviya Nagar market. Today this market occupies a low-rung position in a south Delhi filled with mall complexes, but even back then it was mainly a muddy, winding maze of vegetable stalls, shops selling groceries and trinkets, artificial jewellery and countless packets of bindis – most of this of very little interest to the child that I was. However, at some point during our walk through the back-lanes, we turned a corner and there the book stall was with its egalitarian display: Amar Chitra Kathas sharing space with Archie comics and digests, Jataka tales in one corner, Jughead Jones in the other. I have no idea now what the stall was called, if it was called anything (quite possibly it was only informally referred to by the owner’s name) or if it still exists. But I recall many happy times spent there on cold winter evenings and on rainy days when one had to wade through slush to reach it.

The Malviya Nagar byways wouldn’t have done for the “proper” books, though – the sophisticated publications by Enid Blyton and suchlike. For these, one had to travel what seemed to my child-self a very long distance – a 20-minute drive to South Extension, the home of Teksons.

It feels strange now to think of how central Teksons was to my early life: the shop is still around, in the same location, but I haven’t been to it in years, or felt the slightest desire to do so. In the same way that one doesn’t get to choose one’s relatives or one’s earliest nursery-level friends, it became the bookstore of my childhood by default, only because my family so often went to South Extension. As a young adult my preferred haunt would be the Midlands in Aurobindo Market, mainly for its round-the-year, unadvertised 20 percent discount on all IBH prices and its efficient display. And there would be many other fortuitous encounters: locating a much-sought-after graphic novel in London’s Foyles, for example, and picking it up despite its price and weight only because I knew there was no hope of getting it in India. Or a clearing-up sale in a shabby Connaught Place store, where I chanced upon a rare film book that is still one of my most prized possessions: Danny Peary’s Cult Movies, a collection of warm and informed essays that had a huge influence on me as a writer and movie-watcher (and which, incidentally, is not available anywhere today, even online).

But it was in Teksons that I formed most of my early reading habits, moving over the years from Blytons to Agatha Christies, and thence to Maughams, Wodehouses and Hemingways. Each visit was an encounter with new possibilities and changing tastes: becoming aware of a world outside that of the Famous Five’s macaroon-and-scone picnics; working out what type of book to turn to next; reading descriptions on back jackets, flipping pages to see if a stray passage of text struck a chord or revealed an interesting conversation or idea. It was here that I bought my first Christie, Murder in Retrospect, which would chill the summer afternoons I spent in Ludhiana during a family trip. Here it was that I felt indescribably proud lugging a copy of Maugham’s Of Human Bondage to the cashier’s counter: it was such a bulky book with such a grown-up title, it was so much more respectable to be seen buying something like this rather than another in the Hardy Boys Case Files series (which I may also have smuggled across to the counter). It was at Teksons too that I bought my first proper dictionary, a pleasingly heavy Oxford publication that made me feel much empowered as a reader. (Today, in the Internet age, physical dictionaries seem laughably unnecessary – but that only makes the memory even more precious.)

All this said, I am not sentimental about book-stores as physical spaces. Certainly, I don’t fetishize them like some of my friends do. This might seem odd coming from someone who has been an eager reader since a young age, worked professionally on the literary beat for years, never used an electronic-reader to date, and been a late convert to online buying (my first Flipkart purchase was as recently as early 2011). But perhaps it has to do with the fact that for much of the past decade my job has entailed receiving unmanageable quantities of books, more than 90 percent of which I will never read. I can understand the attraction a good bookstore holds for a keen reader who doesn’t work professionally with books – and who perhaps only gets to indulge the reading habit for 20 minutes at the end of a tiring day – but take it from me: when one’s own room starts looking like a particularly messy publisher’s warehouse, some of the romanticism associated with entering a store and smelling thousands of new books (or thousands of old books in a second-hand store) wears away.

What doesn’t wear away is the memory of early discovery – of the browsing rituals that become a gateway to new knowledge about the world and about oneself. Or simply hearing the sound of a bicycle bell tinkling and knowing that 30 pages of fresh stories await a reader's immersion.

Art, craft and orange tones: a mouthful of Pao

[Did this review for the Hindu]

In the Q&A session that introduces this dynamic comics anthology, Parismita Singh – one of the five members of the Pao Collective – gives a wise answer to the question of how one should “read” a comic: “Quickly, greedily, racing to the end. And then a slow return: go back to the beginning, savour it, read only the orange or the grey tones. The next time pick another element...and so on.”

Any comic buff will know how rewarding this process can be – assuming that it is applied to rigorous, well-integrated graphic stories, as opposed to literal-minded comics where each panel is a drab illustration of the text accompanying it. Pao, which brings together many skilled artists and writers, is anything but drab. And so, after you have raced greedily – to use Singh’s formulation –through each narrative, it is possible to scrutinise the stories more closely and appreciate how text and visuals inform or bounce off each other. You might pause to take in the striking use of the colour pink in two unrelated stories (one about anonymous “helmetmen” in a world afflicted with terrorism and suspicion, the other about an insurance agent who transforms into a flamingo). Or the sinister patches of red amidst black-and-white drawings in the gorily deadpan “Hindus & Offal”, credited to Ambarish Satwik and Pia Alize Hazarika but just as likely the result of a partnership between Hannibal Lecter and a theology student. Or you might note, in a panel where a distracted mother fails to register what her son is telling her about his US trip, that the brand-name on the matchbox in her hand is “Tube Light”. Little delights like these ensure that this book has plenty of repeat value.

Understandably, some of the best work here comes from the “Paoists” themselves. Orijit Sen’s “Hair Burns Like Grass” – a story in progress, done mainly in charcoal – is a gorgeous-looking account of the life and work of the poet Kabir, interspersed with the memories of an old man living in our times; on this evidence the complete book should be one of the major achievements in Indian graphic novels. Singh’s “Sleepscapes”, with its shape-shifting forms, is equally mesmerising in a different way, as an emaciated dog resolves itself into a cloud and the laws of physics are made subservient to the logic of a nightmare-world (where a blabbering, Arnab Goswami-like newsreader threatens to “protect” viewers from jihad with his news-channel).

In his inventive take on cultural confusion in “RSVP”, Vishwajyoti Ghosh uses a classical, sepia-like style to depict a milieu where cellphones and gramophones coexist, and where the workings of a colonial mindset are revealed through the use of quaint, old-world spelling and phrases (“Fab Indies”, “Hindoo”, “Nayi Dehli”) in an otherwise modern setting. Sarnath Banerjee brings another form of nostalgia – and infectiously droll humour – to “Tito Years”, an account of a boy growing up in pre-liberalisation India and hankering for foreign-brand shoes. Banerjee makes characteristically funny use of mixed media: an image of Subhas Chandra Bose performing a salute represents the much-anticipated arrival of a US-based cousin on an India visit; a Nike is obscenely superimposed on Bruce Lee’s feet in a page-length photo; a boy unwrapping a box of precious shoes is depicted as a surgeon gingerly wielding his tools. But the last panel, which has the narrator drily calling his dad a “cheap bastard”, also has a poignant quality – what the father is doing should be instantly relatable to anyone who has ever known a middle-class parent trying hard to meet a child’s impractical wants.

Some stories read like fragments torn from a more sprawling project: Sanjay Ghosh’s “Print Screen”, about a dreamy wannabe artist with Van Gogh on his mind, has an incomplete feel to it. Others work as stand-alones: the minimalist but effective “Tattoo” (Lakshmi Indrasimhan, Jacob Weinstein) has men opting for primitive tattoo designs like snakes and scorpions but soon graduating to plush multi-storeyed buildings in what may be a sly comment on the egoistic and competitive urges that build what we call civilisation. And though “The Afterlife of Ammi’s Betelnut Box” (Iram Ghufran, Ikroop Sandhu) is laid out as a text-driven story with smatterings of images, it would be a mistake to only read the text and dimly register the drawings; Sandhu and Mitoo Das’s artwork, some of the most intricate in the book, is vital to the full effect of this tale about an old lady and her djinns.

Finally, what would an Indian graphic-story collection be without a retelling of a well-known mythological tale? In “Chilka” (Vidyun Sabhaney, Shohei Emura), the Mahabharata war is filtered through some of the more hysterical tropes of manga, such as characters yelling dramatically at each other (if a revered artist like Osamu Tezuka could do this successfully with the Buddha’s life, why not?). There are lunatic twists in the tale: grand epic tragedy meets slapstick comedy when Karna’s chariot wheel is undone not by an ancient curse but by a vagrant banana peel. However, you won’t find many other slip-ups in this wide-ranging book.

Nothing comical about it

[Did this for the Business Standard's "Eye Culture" column. Incidentally I wrote this alongside my review of the Pao anthology, which I will - reluctantly - put up here in a couple of weeks]

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On certain occasions, mostly drunken ones, I get asked what sort of book I find most difficult to review – “literary fiction”, “genre fiction” and “non-fiction” usually being the proffered options. “Comics,” I reply, and watch the questioner sidle away uneasily. “Or rather, graphic novels,” I add if I’m in a kind mood, and then sometimes he shuffles a step and a half back, still looking nervous.

But it’s true. It is much easier to write about a book that is all text than one where drawing and writing operate together in complex ways. Critics make lots of noise about form and content – as well we should – but in a text-only novel, both form and content are expressed purely through words. And words are the reviewer's stock in trade too. This makes for a happy marriage: among other things it is possible to indicate what an author is trying to do by quoting passages and commenting on them. But it's a very different business reviewing a book where words and images act in conjunction (or in contrast) to create a particular effect, or where multiple narratives converge in a single panel. The lazy way out is to discuss the work purely in terms of “what happens” or in terms of its “themes”, but that doesn't begin to do justice to the whole sensory experience.

Little wonder that the reviews I have sweated the most over in the past year – and the ones that I have been least happy about – are reviews of comic anthologies. Recent months have seen the publication of two very good Indian books in this category, Blaft’s The Obliterary Journal (with its mission to "obliterate" conventional literature) and Penguin India’s Pao (put together by The Pao Collective, a group of comic-book artists). These are ambitious, honourable projects and there are few weak links in them – a considerable achievement given that they bring together so many disparate artists, writers, styles and plots. But how does one meaningfully write – in an 800-word space – about a collection of 15 or 20 exercises in visual storytelling, each of which has its own idiom? Invariably, one is reduced to summarising plots, or making a perfunctory observation (one that sounds more knowledgeable than it is) about a drawing style – charcoal, oil painting, mixed media, whatever – being atmospheric and well-suited to the story.

Single-narrative graphic novels pose this problem too, but to varying degrees. Some, like Joe Sacco’s journalistic Palestine, Marjane Satrapi’s coming-of-age tale Persepolis or Art Spiegelman's Holocaust-centred memoir Maus, are driven more by the writing (and the “ideas”) than by the art; but the more rigorous a comic is – the greater the symbiosis between text and drawings – the more difficult it is to write about. Alan Moore, for instance, is a great comics writer who specialises in making fascinating visual and textual connections between seemingly unrelated things: running two or more ideas together, intercutting sequences so that the dialogue from one scene might spill over to supply commentary on another event, casually incorporating phrases and images that acquire a deeper resonance later in the story.

One of my all-time favourite books is the Moore-Eddie Campbell opus From Hell, a dark, multilayered historical fiction that examines the late Victorian era – and the approaching terrors of the 20th century – through the prism of the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888. It is more than 550 pages long, adding up to well over 3,000 panels that range from deceptively scratchy, formless drawings to incredibly detailed and vivid depictions of the squalor of London’s East End. The meters of intensity shift continuously and nearly each image succeeds in conveying exactly the mood required at a particular point in the story: I can open a page at random and feel a cold shiver as I gaze upon a dialogue-less panel showing a poor, ailing prostitute – one of the Ripper’s future victims – leaning against a wall after a scuffle, gasping for breath, an unspeakably desolate expression on her face. Or the mild disappointment, tempered with fatalism, on the visage of another woman when she realises she has to earn another two pence late at night if she is to get any boarding-house accommodation. And here I'm mentioning only two panels that are relatively easy to describe in isolation from the larger narrative.

To do a satisfactory holistic review of such a book, I would probably have to write a book myself (and going by Jean-Luc Godard’s proposal that the best way to review a film is to create a new film in response, it might have to be a graphic novel). And even that may not be enough. As a professional reviewer, nothing can make you feel more emasculated or irrelevant.

The Obliterary Journal, an anthology of visual storytelling

[Did this for the Hindu Literary Review. Also see this story about the Indian comics industry]

The publishing house Blaft has earned a cult following for its offbeat choices, high production quality and an inventiveness that is just right for its material. For anyone familiar with their earlier work – notably the Tamil Pulp Fiction anthologies and the picture book Kumari Loves a Monster – it's no surprise that the comics anthology The Obliterary Journal (co-published with Tranquebar) is a good-looking book that establishes a playful aesthetic sense right at the outset. The Table of Contents is a wall mural done by a Chennai-based artist named S Venkataraman, who gets a credit at the end, and there is an amusing two-page Foreword in which three pictorial symbols discuss the need to “obliterate” text-driven literature. (Of course, they are then branded “infidels” and destroyed by angry alphabets. It’s enough to make one feel guilty about attempting a text review of this book!)

A strident view of things has it that an anthology is only as good as its weakest link. I don’t quite subscribe to this – two or three brilliant pieces and a few good ones can give a book abiding value. The 20 pieces in The Obliterary Journal represent a fine array of drawing styles, themes and ideas; the techniques range from atmospheric black-and-white charcoal images to brightly coloured comics to classic manga; and there is usually something to appreciate in even the hit-and-miss inclusions.

Since it isn’t possible to write comprehensively about them all in limited space, I’ll mention some of my favourites. In “Memories of the Nayagarh Incident”, the Odiya style of pata chitra is employed for a straight-faced account of extraterrestrial sightings in Orissa in 1947 (among the depictions are a “yantra-purusha” with pincer-like hands and a space-suit wearing alien raising its palm in the “ashirvad stance”). Somdutt Sarkar brings visual life to mathematics problems posed by Bhaskacharya in the 12th century. (“Arjuna used four times the square root of the number of arrows to kill off all Karna’s horses ... How many did he shoot in all?”) The excerpt from The Hyderabad Graphic Novel (an ambitious project about the city’s history, written by Jai Undurti and intricately drawn by Harsh Mohan Chattoraj) reminded me of passages from the great Alan Moore-Eddie Campbell comic From Hell. And Amitabh Kumar’s piece (which obliterates text in its own way by having a title made up not of words but a symbol – an image of a plane inside a bisected heart) is a stark, minimalist tale about an ill-fated goat on a gruesome journey.

  
There isn’t a rigid emphasis on storytelling or on narratives: two of the most enjoyable pieces here are really collections of individual artwork that come together under an overriding theme. “One Dozen Dangerous Food Items” (written by Rashmi Ruth Devadasan, drawn by B Anitha) has a cast of characters including a kleptomaniac okra named “Villain Vendakkai” and the gruesome gourd “Psycho Sorakkai”. And “Twenty Three from the One Gross” (illustrated by Malavika PC) is made up of a series of clever juxtapositions (“Lemur rhymes with femur”; elephants wait on a helipad) that are hard to describe but pleasing to experience.

Some of the simpler stories do experiment with form too. Bharath Murthy’s “A Kovai Gay Story”, for instance, has an intriguingly meta-textual component: it begins with a panel where Blaft editor Rakesh Khanna commissions a story from an artist named Surendran, and ends with a close-up of Surendran’s email account as he sends the final PDF (and we note that this gay man’s chat status is set to “Invisible”). Marginalised figures also dominate Roney Devassia’s “Karuna Bhavanam”, which presents conversations in an old-folks’ home in austere black-and-white – or rather, in moody shades of grey. The content here is reportage-driven, but the drawings make these forgotten old people seem like ghostly figures, which is of course what they have become.

I was less stirred by the inclusion of vehicle art – in “Autoraj”, about an enterprising Bangalorean rickshaw-driver – and pictures of street art from the tiny South American nation Suriname (which has a highly eclectic population, including Bhojpuri and Javanese people). These images make the book more colourful than it would otherwise have been and several of the pictures are entertaining in their own right, but cut off from their context and confined to the pages of a print publication, they seem sapped of vitality.

A case can therefore be made that this collection is too wide-ranging. Most (text-only) anthologies are built around a theme or the work of a single person, which carries appeal for a specific readership. But here, the only “peg” is visual storytelling, which accommodates many varieties of drawings placed at the service of different types of narratives (or anti-narratives). The ideal reader for this book, therefore, will be someone with hugely eclectic tastes – which is a good quality, of course, but also a rare one.

[Earlier pieces on Blaft publications: Tamil pulp fiction and Ibne Safi's Jasoosi Duniya]

Of creative heads and delivery boys - the many faces of a growing comics industry

[Here, somewhat belatedly, is the full text of the essay I did about Indian comics for The Caravan. Have added a few images here, as well as links to some of the comics mentioned in the piece]

The crafts bazaar Dilli Haat is spacious and conveniently located, making it a good outdoor venue for a cultural event in wintertime Delhi. But it’s a good setting for an annual comics convention on another count too. In a place defined by its variety — handicrafts from across India on sale, food stalls plying cuisines from different regions a few paces apart — it doesn’t feel quite so strange to turn a corner and find Suppandi, the simpleton from Tinkle comics, walking about with Rorschach, the embittered vigilante from Alan Moore’s Watchmen, while Jughead Jones and Supergirl pose for photos nearby. Anyone familiar with these characters will know that they belong to very different fictional universes, but at the second annual Comic Con India those universes and many others met.

At this point, let me confess to not being any sort of expert on the comics industry, though I am a fan of some of the medium’s masters—Moore, Eddie Campbell, Art Spiegelman, Osamu Tezuka, Craig Thompson among them—and have followed developments in Indian ‘graphic novel’ publishing in the past few years, particularly the work of fine artist-cum-writers such as Sarnath Banerjee, Amruta Patil, George Mathen and Vishwajyoti Ghosh. Stepping into Comic Con 2, I knew very little about the current state of Indian comics – at least the ones that usually take the form of a continuing series and aren’t typically brought out by big-name publishers. The result was something of a sensory overload.

Arrive an hour before the official opening of the event and it looks busy enough: groups of publishers, editors, writers and artists unpacking their wares and setting up stalls. By the time the first set of visitors begin trooping in, it’s hard to keep track of everything that is going on. As you’d expect, hundreds of comic books are up for sale at stalls run by long-time players like Amar Chitra Katha and Diamond Comics as well as by relatively new companies such as Campfire, Level 10, Pop Culture Publishing (started by Twenty Onwards Media, the company that organised the convention), Rovolt and Libera Artisti. A small indoor stall houses Sufi Studios, which has on offer a book of benevolent spiritual teachings (with some faces depicted featureless in keeping with the Islamic tradition of not representing holy persons pictorially). The Chennai-based publishing house Blaft, known for its offbeat and imaginative publishing of pulp fiction, has a terrific-looking anthology of graphic stories titled The Obliterary Journal (the title comes from a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that visual storytelling should “obliterate” conventional literature). Sporting a green mohawk and a shiny red jacket, Blaft co-founder Rakesh Khanna looks very much into the spirit of things.

Comics aside, there is plenty of merchandise—T-shirts, bags, mugs, posters—as well as workshops, impromptu drawing sessions and magic-trick demonstrations. And, in true lit-fest style, a programme of events—book launches, discussions—held on a small stage, though they rarely last for more than 15-20 minutes each, and microphones routinely malfunction. Over the weekend in particular, there are large crowds, and much of the visitor interest is in the side-attractions: a stall noisily running round-the-clock promotions of the forthcoming film John Carter, photo opportunities with comic characters, or just the fun of walking around, gawping at things and being part of something unusual.

It’s one thing to have an outsider’s view of the Indian comics industry—to be told by people in the know that it is at a fledgling stage, roughly where comics in the US were 70 or 80 years ago. It’s quite another thing to see it up close and realise just how much work is being done by scores of enthusiastic writers and artists all over the country. When I did online searches for the people and companies I had encountered, nearly every writer’s blog or publisher’s website led to a dozen other links about projects in various stages of completion (or abandonment). As you’d expect, there is plenty of depressingly mediocre work as well as some that is highly promising.

There are large variances in quality, a range of subjects and styles, and completely different attitudes about what comics can or should be. To understand this, it is important to remember that comics is not a “genre” (which is how graphic novels were frequently described by reviewers when they first became popular in India) but an expansive medium, throbbing with ideas, ideologies and objectives.

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Sipping coffee at a stall, I have a conversation about form and content with Suhas Sundar, creative director, Level 10 Studios. Many readers new to the world of comics tend to be literal-minded, Sundar points out; they have no real understanding of an abstract narrative where (for instance) text flowing across a panel might not function as explicit commentary on what is being depicted. “Comics as art are not … where you have a panel of a man looking out of a window and the text that goes with it is, ‘He looked out of the window’.”

As a reader, I endorse this view; the graphic novels I admire most are the ones with layered narratives, where text and drawings work with—or against—each other in complex ways; and where it takes two or three readings before you can fully appreciate the many levels of storytelling. But a short while later I come to the World Comics stall where a much more egalitarian philosophy is being expressed. “Anyone can draw,” Sharad Sharma is telling reticent visitors. “Your experiences and opinions are more important than your illustrations.”

For about 15 years now, Sharma and his movement, Grassroots Comics, have been holding workshops in small towns and villages, encouraging people to use drawings to express the issues that are troubling them. Reading the bulletin A Tool for Democracy, which collects some of these narratives—simply told chronicles of injustice and discrimination, a few of which show emerging visual flair—one is reminded that comics, like any other artistic medium, can have a strictly utilitarian function as well, especially in places where underprivileged people don’t have a voice of their own. It doesn’t just have to be about artists honing their talents, practising fine lines and shading for the love of creativity. Something similar might be said about Zubaan’s recently published Our Pictures, Our Words: A Visual Journey Through The Women’s Movement, which collects pictorial representations of the many issues facing women across the country. Though this isn’t primarily a book of comics, it is a reminder of the power of pictures—even unsophisticated ones—to spread information about important issues. As a Zubaan representative told me at an exhibition of posters included in the book, these weren’t made by trained artists, “they were put together by ordinary people who were moved by a cause”.

There are just as many conflicting approaches to content as well. At the Vimanika Edutainment stall, company head Karan Vir Arora talks in a way that make me feel like I’ve stepped into a time machine (perhaps the creaky thing in the sci-fi story I flipped through at the last stall) and travelled back to 1967 and a key incident in Indian comics history: Anant Pai being disturbed to find that youngsters knew more about Greek myths than Indian ones. Pai went on to establish Amar Chitra Katha (ACK), which introduced at least two generations of Indians to their mythology and history (and permanently fixed in their minds images of what gods, rakshasas and apsaras should look like). Companies like Campfire and Vimanika have been revamping many of these stories for newer readers. “We are confused about our past,” Arora says, sounding older and wiser than he looks. “Discovering our heritage is a way of instilling pride in our country.”

Personally I feel some of us have too much pride in our ancient culture and in the fantasy of a rosy past. Vimanika’s website proclaims that each story in its comics “will have a moral in it” and refers to “virtues that were considered common during that era but which are now looked upon with amazement and fear in today’s world”. In these comics, mythological figures like Shiva are given a look that draws on Western fantasy while not straying too far from the template established by ACK. Bright colours are the norm, but as Arora points out, “We are careful to make sure that the proportioning of the figures—the body and head sizes—are true to life. We don’t want to give it a cartoonish, anything-goes feel.”

Other artists and writers take a different position on mythology. “Many of us are tired of doing the same old devotional stuff,” says Harsho Mohan Chattoraj, one of the brightest, most prolific artists currently working in Indian comics, while Pratheek Thomas—a former engineering student who co-founded the independent publishing house Manta Ray two years ago—says his company isn’t interested in turning mythological characters into new-age superheroes. “We’d prefer to produce new material and become a platform for original creative talent.”

There is another, more practical consideration in shying away from the mythological-retelling bandwagon: since you don’t have copyright on these characters, someone else with a better design and more money could make a couple of minor tweaks to your Hanuman and usurp your space. “The downside of working with original characters is that it takes longer for readers to become familiar with the stories we are telling,” says Level 10’s Sundar, “But the payoff can be big with a new concept that really catches on.” Everyone in the industry is familiar with those international fairytales about entire franchises built around one little character. Everyone can dream it might happen to them one day.

The attempt to create fresh, contemporary content often means inventively juxtaposing the real world with the supernatural, so that the latter becomes a commentary on the former. “If you look at our festivals and crowded public events, this is a country begging for a zombie apocalypse,” deadpans novelist Samit Basu, who has written the online series Unholi (about a zombie infestation during Holi) for Graphic India. An early passage in The Hyderabad Graphic Novel (a work about the city at various points in its history, intelligently written by Jaideep Undurti and drawn with fine attention to detail by Chattoraj) shows a time-travelling autorickshaw in the Cretaceous period, the driver telling a potential passenger “Jurassic Park mein savaari nahin milta”. Another auto-driver becomes Yamaraj’s chauffeur in the Trivandrum-based company Libera Artisti’s Auto Pilot: Meter Down, one of the most impressive new comics I saw at Comic Con (and the first in a 10-volume series).

There are, of course, explicitly realist (and creatively illustrated) scenarios too: vignettes from an old-folks’ home presented in austere black-and-white (Roney Devassia’s ‘Karuna Bhavanam’, included in Blaft’s Obliterary Journal); Charles Sobhraj’s escape from Tihar Jail, told in rich colours in Manta Ray’s ‘Year of the Snake’ (published in Motherland magazine’s ‘Prison’ special). Manta Ray’s goal of “amplifying the voices of interesting people” is being played out in the forthcoming ‘Twelve’, a black-and-white 12-part series about young Indian adults and the choices they make. They have also been producing a witty weekly strip on current affairs, ‘The Small Picture’, for the newspaper Mint.

Elsewhere, tropes from Indian pop culture—especially cinema—recur, as in Widhwa Maa, Andhi Behen (Widowed Mother, Blind Sister), about a crime-fighting duo who get their names from staple characters in melodramatic Hindi films of the 1970s and 1980s (and who try to stop Bollywood from “losing its soul” to cerebral, new-age directors like Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee!). Or Munkeeman, conceptualised by Abhishek Sharma (director of the film Tere Bin Laden) about the Delhi-menacing ‘monkeyman’ who wants to lose his bad reputation. While the writing in some of these strips is uneven and the narrative leapfrogs all over the place (perhaps in imitation of a masala Hindi movie), they do provide a sense of what a good home-grown comic series might look like.

There is, in any case, a natural relationship between movies and comics—not least because of the large number of creative people who work in both media—and this sometimes translates into graphic stories being used as inexpensive advertising. For his still-to-be-released thriller The Blueberry Hunt, starring Naseeruddin Shah, director Anup Kurian developed a strip that was published in instalments on the film’s Facebook page. More often than not, film-based comics are shoddily assembled works that end up dying quietly on the movie’s website (try Googling “Ra.One official comic” and you’ll see what I mean). A rare example of an official film comic put out by a major publishing house is the 80-page Agent Vinod strip for the yet-to-be-released Sriram Raghavan-directed Saif Ali Khan-starrer. “We are treating it seriously, as a publication in its own right,” says Westland’s Paul Vinay Kumar. “It’s based on the characters and script, but it isn’t slavishly faithful to the film.” If the strip does well, more such tie-ups can be expected in the future. But of course, the movie-comics relationship can flow in both directions: director Anurag Kashyap has given Westland the go-ahead to turn his unfilmed script ‘Allwyn Kallicharan’ into a graphic novel, after which he might consider filming it.

Understandably, given the rich global history of comic storytelling, many Indian illustrators, even the really talented ones, are strongly influenced by the drawing modes of the international comics they grew up with. “Many artists become skilled copiers of other people’s styles and don’t push their own idiom,” says Sarnath Banerjee who (along with other established comic artists like Orijit Sen and Parismita Singh) co-founded the Pao Collective to help promote originality and independence in the field.

But there have also been pleasing instances of indigenous art being used to tell stories. One of the pieces in The Obliterary Journal, ‘Memories of the Nayagarh Incident’, uses the Odia style of pata chitra to present an apparently straight-faced account of extraterrestrial sightings in Odisha in 1947 (among the depictions are a “yantra-purusha” with pincer-like hands and a spacesuit-wearing alien raising its palm in the “ashirvad stance”). This is the work of Sri Pachanana Moharana, who runs his own workshop in the Puri district and specialises in palm-leaf engravings. The Rajasthani miniaturists Shankar Lal Bhopa and Birju Lal Bhopa didn’t get the canvas they deserved in the satirical Lie: A Traditional Tale of Modern India (a book that prioritised ideas over artwork, to its own detriment), but the Gond artists Durgabai and Subhash Vyam brought a distinct vision to last year’s Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability—their surreal flourishes (a water tank given the shape of a fish; train wheels drawn as serpent heads) turned what could have been a textbook-like account of BR Ambedkar’s life into a richly imaginative work, one where strangeness of form created its own commentary on social injustice.

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Given all this variety—and the strong sense of an industry on the brink of big things—an event that brought comic creators and aficionados together was long overdue. Jatin Varma and his team at Twenty Onwards Media have reason to be happy about the success of the convention’s first two editions. “There has been definite progress from Comic Con 1 to Comic Con 2 in terms of smaller players taking more initiative,” Varma says. “Everyone was a little uncertain last year, but this time they have shown more promotional savvy and have come up with some good ideas to draw in readers.”

Most of the mainstream publishers and bookstores did not participate, which may have been a missed opportunity. One of the exceptions, Random House India (RHI)—which has distribution rights in India for DC Comics, Vertigo and Archie comics—found itself in the happy position of having to replenish its stock four times. “We were left with fewer than 400 titles of the 1,700 we stocked—it was a huge success,” says a thrilled Ritesh Singh, who manned the RHI stall. To put this in perspective, though, most of the comics sold at this stall were works by international superstars such as Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore. That doesn’t necessarily say much about the prospects of the indigenous comics industry, which is still trying to build awareness and find a foothold.

Speaking with participants, the chief impression I got was of small start-ups with not more than five to 10 employees each: groups of artists, writers and entrepreneurs (including people who are some combination of all three) on the fringe of mainstream publishing. There was an appealing artlessness to many of these conversations. As a literary journalist, one is used to hearing self-aggrandising spiel from editors at big publishing houses who are convinced they know what they are doing (even if the quality of many of the titles they produce every month suggests otherwise). It’s refreshing, then, to hear young comic publishers admit that there is a shortage of good content, and that it’s pointless to expect profits in the near future. “I tell people, don’t think you’ll do five comics and then find an investor” says Level 10’s Sundar. “You have to be in it for the long haul.” Similar sentiments are echoed nearly everywhere else. Even Varma, who has worked hard to make the convention a reality, candidly admits that for all the footfalls so far, there is a basic lack of awareness. “Robert Crumb [the renowned American comics artist] was at our awards show the other night, and some people didn’t know who he was.”

Here, then, is a world of people—including those with important-sounding designations like “Content Manager”, “Creative Head” and “MD” printed on their business cards—who haven’t yet learnt the self-assured language of the marketplace. Speaking of visiting cards, I saw one (for the founder of the company Bombay Merch) that read: “Founder and MD. Packaging Boy. Delivery Boy. Chai-Coffeewala.” That isn’t just wry humour—it reveals something important about the workings of an industry where young entrepreneurs don’t expect to sit in high-backed chairs ordering minions about. Most participants at the convention manage companies, and are here strategising and trying to strike publishing and marketing deals not because they went to B-schools but because they are essentially comic-book geeks pursuing a passion.

“I spend much of my time at events lifting jute bags filled with our comics, because we don’t have labourers to do it for us,” one of them tells me. While dignity of labour is always a good thing, this points to a larger problem faced by the industry: the fact that too many of its young talents have to constantly multitask instead of focusing on their field of specialisation. “We need a culture where writers have the freedom to do their work without worrying about things like marketing,” says Sundar, citing the example of leading Japanese manga companies, where the division of labour is as neat as the arrangement of food items in a bento box.

But lack of finance and sponsorship makes this difficult: the advent of the Richard Branson-founded Virgin Comics a few years ago seemed to have heralded a new era of professionalism—good production values and decent salaries—for the industry, but Virgin pulled out and the company now operates in a more low-key avatar as Liquid Comics. Meanwhile, indigenous companies—including the ones that run small studios with their own contracted artists—know that the future lies in digital content, but that much work needs to be done. Internationally, the major comics are available online and on Apps—for a price. But in an industry where creating awareness is the first step, companies must put some free content on their websites (such as Level 10’s Odayan series) to gauge interest levels. Print versions are brought out subsequently.

A running theme in nearly every chat I had at Comic Con was that the artists and writers working on comics were not in it for the money. But how far can passion alone take you? The savvier and more talented freelancers earn a living by working on multiple projects (and across media) simultaneously, but this raises another question: should a serious artist spread himself so thin? “We receive portfolios all the time,” says Blaft’s Rakesh Khanna. “But we haven’t met enough Indian artists who are fully committed to one big, continuing story, which is how the comics industry really took off in the West. We need more nutcases who will spend ten years just drawing and trying to realise a grand, integrated vision.” This creates a circle: quality can suffer when artists, to avoid sinking into a financial pit with a single long-term project, either keep day jobs or have their fingers in many different pies.

Other problems include lack of proper distribution and display, and the chariness of big publishers to deal in comics. “I approached a major newspaper group five years ago with an idea for starting a comic,” says Chattoraj, “but they have been reluctant to take the initiative even though I said I would bring my expertise to it.” There is a feeling in the industry that big publishers are more open to doing stand-alone graphic books than to commissioning a full-fledged comics series.

But there are also signs that this is changing. Westland will soon be publishing a Local Monsters series (written by Samit Basu, featuring a yeti and a rakshasa, among other characters) and is also partnering with Level 10 Studios to bring out print versions of the latter’s online comics. At the International Comics Festival at Angoulême, France last year, Jaideep Undarti and the team behind the The Hyderabad Graphic Novel struck a deal with a French company to publish the book in translation—which means the French version will probably be out before the English one. The Obliterary Journal has an optimistic ‘Volume 1’ on its cover, suggesting that there will be sequels. This summer, Penguin India is publishing an anthology of graphic stories put together by the Pao Collective. Also in the works is a Partition-themed graphic anthology edited by Vishwajyoti Ghosh and published by Yoda Press. “The stories include contemporary and historical reportage and political documentary,” says Ghosh, “and the visual style is diverse too: from notebook doodles to photo comics and comics out of film grabs.”

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Prominently represented at Comic Con this year was the popular online store Flipkart.com. Many in the industry agree that with physical bookstores reluctant to set aside much space for comics, Flipkart has been a boon for publishers and fans. (“Their display is the best too, because every book gets its own page!” says Varma.) Fittingly, the very first ad in The Indian Comics Journal—an industry magazine launched by Twenty Onwards Media—portrays the online store as a caped crusader for the comics world: “Whatever the Comic. Whatever the Odds. Flipkart Man will deliver.”

It’s a silver lining to be sure—one of a few that are beginning to reveal themselves—but one can’t help feeling that the Indian comics industry will need more than one superhero to pull itself into the mainstream. For now, they can only help their own cause by carrying on trying to strike that all-important balance between good artwork, inventive content and intelligent writing—and hoping to get lucky along the way.