<b>SERIOUSLY COMICS</b>

We can’t say it has arrived, but the graphic novel in India is walking down many interesting paths
In the beginning was the image. The word, if you think about it, came much after the cave paintings. The comic strip arrived and mixed up things; strung together the squiggles and dots to give you cheek (Dennis the Menace), philosophy (Peanuts), kickass action (Modesty Blaise) and laughs. Three decades ago, there came another innovation—the graphic novel, i.e., (with apologies to Calvin and Hobbes), the comic book with intelligence and an emotional quotient more sophisticated than Captain Haddock’s thundering typhoonous rages. And very few punchlines. India got a taste of this genre in 2004 with Corridor by Sarnath Banerjee. We still don’t have enough works to stack a shelf. But writers and publishers are smacking their lips at the serious stuff ahead.

First, what is a graphic novel? It is a story told in comic book panels; more layered and complex than a child’s fable, often located in a landscape of loss, longing and urban angst and meant for an adult audience. Art Spiegelman, one of the first creators in the genre, said he rebelled against the assumption that cartoonists should “keep a lid on their psyches and personal histories”. Spiegelman’s Maus (1986), blew the lid off, producing a personal memoir of the Holocaust as a dark Aesop’s fable, with Nazis as cats and Jews, the mice. In the 30 years of the genre’s existence in the West, it has, true to its genes, jumbled categories—stories of personal tragedies have been told in speech bubbles, reports from a war zone have filled pages of a comic book (Joe Sacco’s Palestine).

The realist strain of Sacco is being followed up here too. Phantomville, the publishing house set up by Banerjee in 2006 exclusively for graphic novels, is taking its first steps into reportage and contemporary history. Of the three non-fiction narratives it has commissioned for publication next year, one is an investigation into the Vidarbha suicides and the second a collection of ten photo-text essays on Pakistan. The third is a first-person account of the changing neighbourhood of Bandra as seen through the author’s—TimeOut editor-at-large Naresh Fernandes—eyes. The works will be collaborative. Once the text is in, Phantomville’s illustrators and editors enter the scene. Mainstream publishing houses are also keen to test the flexibility of the form. Harper Collins, which brought out Kari, a graphic novel by Amruta Patil, last year, has lined up three works for next year. One is a personal account of the Emergency.

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