SERIOUSLY COMICS

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.

Comic art and realism? “If you look at it, a graphic novelist has to be visually authentic. If you are showing the world through images, you cannot but be true to the world,” says V. Karthika, editor, HarperCollins. Fernandes had sat down to write an essay on how Bandra’s Hill Road had changed in 90 years (his grandmother’s lifetime) from being a rustic road “without a spot of tar to an address of urban chaos” when he realised his story was much better told through pictures. “Sarnath’s idea of converting it into a graphic novel made sense. Hill Street, with its mix of quirky characters, jazz musicians, old firms, Mehboob Studio and old Russians was just the vehicle for this form,” he says.

Editor of West Land Books Nilanjana S. Roy sees more possibilities. “The graphic novel is definitely not a flash in the pan. Look at the possibilities. The 9/11 report was turned into a graphic narrative. What if we do the same with the Godhra commission report? Imagine the number of readers you will be reaching.” West Land Books, besides bringing out two more novels in the format, is considering translating Indian classics into graphic novels.

Accessibility is one the things going for the form. When much of our life fits into the four corners of a screen—TV, computer, cinema, video game—when youngsters grow up on a diet of multimedia gluttony, a story told in images and text is a familiar template. A warning: this is not for the dumbed down reader reluctant to dive into pages and pages of type. The graphic novel is not light reading—it is determinedly unfunny. Once you open the book, there are no concessions to pulpiness or short attention-spans. Sacco’s Palestine was based on the time he spent at war camps and shelters in Palestine as a journalist. Closer home, Kashmir Pending and The Believers have been explicitly political, with far less success. “There is something about this genre that is against the grain, against populism. It tends to dwell on urban angst, on marginal characters,” says Pinaki De, an illustrator in Kolkata who is working on his first graphic novel.

Theme apart, graphic novels are laden with visual clues that demand alert leaders. In Maus, the shadow of a swastika falls imperceptibly on a panel depicting a conversation between father and son. Some of Amruta Patil’s images in Kari, a story of an ad copywriter unmoored in Mumbai, for example, are conscious allusions to artists like Frieda Kahlo and Gustav Klimt. The best of graphic novels—and we still have not produced one—are not to be skimmed through. All graphic novelists spend a lot of time thinking about how the panels are best arranged to depict a given amount of narrative. Most start with the script. The tango between the text and the image, deciding how much text should go with what image—or as Patil says “see how much text and how much image works with a given story, and with what kind of breathing pattern.”— is the most difficult part. “For the sum total of text in Kari (the script runs to about 10 typed pages), the amount of time spent has been a lot. The rationale is simple. There is no simple select-delete of text. You redraw a great deal,” Patil said over an e-mail interview. “It’s not as if once the script is in and the images are drawn, the novel is done,” says Banerjee. “The real work begins then. That’s why we at Phantomville say we are in the business of curating books. We transform the texts and images into storyboards and graphic narratives.”
The consensus in the industry is that this genre has a future here, despite criticisms of the few existing novels being “mannered and contrived”. Only, says Roy, a bad story should not be told through pretty pictures.
Scottish artist Eddie Campbell once said the graphic novel refers to a movement rather than a form. Let the movement take off, we say. Or as Patil would have it, “let all good stories stand on their own feet.”