New anthology of graphic narratives puts lesser-known comic artists in limelight

Maps Take You Nowhere by Amritah Sen

As a visual form of storytelling, comics have at least one clear advantage over motion pictures. In the latter medium, images flit past the eyes of the viewer, in the way that cars zip through on the street outside your window when you are sitting there watching the world pass by. This means that there is limited time for the visual representation of a particular moment to imprint itself on your mind. Comics, on the other hand, allow you to linger. You can rest the book when you come across a striking image, absorb the details in its artwork, and commit it to memory before turning the page. And this makes it easier for you to recall that image at will, long after you have finished the last page and life has moved on.

Garpa, by Pema Tshering

But the way things stand in India right now, the comics format is still in a phase where it's only learning to crawl, as opposed to surging ahead with long, confident strides in the manner of countries like Japan and France. At least that's what Pinaki De tells us when we talk to him about Longform: Volume 1 (HarperCollins), a new anthology of graphic narratives that he's co-edited with Sarbajit Sen, Shekhar Mukherjee and Debkumar Mitra. "Sure, there are some people who have become really big names, such as Sarnath Banerjee, Amruta Patil and Orijit Sen. But we remain in a situation where you will come across maybe three or four exceptional comics in one year. And it's only when we can produce at least seven or eight works of true quality in a month that we can say that the format in India has learnt to stand up and walk," he tells us.

That being said, De is clear that what the country lacks in terms of output, it makes up for with potential. This is evident from the works that have been selected for Longform. It's a riveting collection of narratives where the plot lines oscillate between everyday issues to something absolutely fantastical. In Upamanyu Bhattacharyya's The Delta, for instance, a young child and his mother are no match for the machinations of an evil corporation that seeks to usurp a tribal community's land (it is up to you to draw a correlation here with recent incidents at Tuticorin). Or, take Sarbajit Sen's Dodo and Food Fetish, where a man is so helpless about his gluttony that when making love, his partner turns into a chicken, lobster, etc, right before his eyes.

Buli - The Unfinished Interview, by Debkumar Mitra

There are other stories of note, such as Anirban Ghosh's Swamped. It tells the story of a man who is ridiculed and castigated for his long locks, with his hair eventually engulfing the cruel city in a massive flood before it can be forcibly chopped off. But are there any common threads that the editors came across while going through the submissions? "One recurrent strand," De reveals, "is how each of these narratives was deeply personal in nature. There is also a common concern about urbanity, apart from a tendency to touch upon social and environmental causes. But let me be clear that we never had one particular theme in mind because variety is what we wanted to celebrate all along. The more diverse an anthology is, the better it works."

(From left) Pinaki De, Shekhar Mukherjee, Debkumar Mitra and Sarbajit Sen

He adds that the four editors are already sitting on such a wealth of material that the second and third volumes won't take much time. And whenever they are complete, it would possibly be the first such series of comics anthologies in India. "We have made a conscious effort to move away from the established names. All we want to do is bring lesser-known artists under the spotlight, and we look upon ourselves as comics crusaders of sorts," De tells us, using a term - crusaders - that is an apt description for them, given that they are on a campaign to ensure that the comics format in India grows from being the toddler it is right now.

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