Curated Indian comic depicts the cross cultural background of illustrators

Moments from The Tail by Alendev Vishnu. Pics courtesy/Penguin

If we were to pick up an anthology of short stories, we would most likely thumb through the book after scanning its foreword and contents. The thumbing through - even if it means flicking black cursive on white - derives from the muscle memory of using flip books as a child. As seasons slip into time, ‘flip' is dropped for wordy volumes. Thankfully, in a collection of graphic stories, the thumb exercise unfolds the elaborate delight of rolling over colours, textures, people and voices.

Longform 2022 (Penguin India) lands on that sentiment. It goads readers into dreamscapes wherein regular characters, doers of regular actions, share their extraordinary stories. Among 18 stories, our first favourite, Alendev Vishnu's The Tail, tells the tale of a boy who was born with six fingers on one hand. All goes well and his shadow birds continue to have more feathers until when it vanishes one day. While others don't think it's worth any fuss, the little boy has lost a part of himself forever. Stories such as Kallan by Milad Thaha and Storm Over A Teacup by Suman Choudhury say no words, yet move hearts through the sheer power of art. We realise the title was aptly inspired by Joe Sacco's essay on the diminishing space to narrate long pictorial yarns.

Debkumar Mitra

Editors Sarbajit Sen, Debkumar Mitra, Sekhar Mukherjee and Pinaki De wanted to create a platform for aspiring artists. "There was no specific theme for submissions. I encourage my students to work on their comics as it is. Many of the contributors are former students and artists I've known," Mitra, an artist and a teacher of comics at National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, says. He explains that their labour of love saw fruition with the support of trusting publishers and a few master narrators: "Curating a compendium as this one is difficult as nobody is paid. The addition of well-known comic illustrators helped us perfect a cross-cultural flavour."

Mitra identifies as one of the authors. His piece, Hunger, shows a round everyday face in progress. At first, the face asks for eyes, then, it asks for a nose, followed by a mouth. His wish for a mouth to eat some rice from the creator's share isn't granted, as it may "ask for more". Shaped in movement and detail, the compilation of contemporary Indian experiences of travel, gender, sexuality, struggle, fantasy, kinship, and life at large pours its heart out in every tiny visual.

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