My childhood had little room for comic books, and my weak grasp of Phantom and Tarzan has been exposed more than once. But a new series of comic books emerged in the 1970s, respectable enough for the most strait-laced households. They were the Amar Chitra Kathas, stories from Indian history and mythology. We first saw them when they were sold to raise funds for the Hindu Temple of North America in New York. The price was $10, steep, but in an unquestionably good cause.
Our first one was Savitri. The cover showed the beauteous Savitri seated under a tree with Satyavan's head in her lap, watching Yama approach. We read that book over and over, and if I saw it today I would read it again. We bought only a dozen titles, but through diligent borrowing we read well over 100. Living as we did so far from our grandmother, without the Amar Chitra Kathas, we simply would not have inherited the stories that were due to us.
I still find comics irresistible. Every morning I check what Beetle Bailey is doing before I read the headlines, for laughs and also for a four-panel window into life. When I want to know what's really going on in the United States, Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury gives me the big picture more reliably than any editorial. When I want to understand children, Calvin and Hobbes enlightens me. Everything I need to know about business is in Dilbert.
Now that comics are called graphic novels and cost hundreds of rupees, grown-ups can openly go to the better bookshops and buy them. In our town, unfortunately, we are offered a Tinkle instead. So I read the reviews, knowing I am missing out on something wonderful. Last summer I watched Persepolis, an animated film made from comics by Marjane Satrapi about her girlhood in post-Revolution Iran. I also saw V for Vendetta, a film based on a graphic novel by Alan Moore. The film uses live actors, but its shadows and lights remind us of comics. In both novels, the protagonists fight social and political oppression.
I just acquired Cairo, written by G. Willow Wilson and drawn by M.K. Perker, in which two Cairenes, a Lebanese, an American, an Israeli, and a djinn cross paths. The story is thoughtful and the drawings are magical, every bedsheet waving on a clothesline, every raised eyebrow.
I also bought The Complete Maus and read it in one sitting. Maus is Art Spiegelman's account of his parents' life in Poland during World War II and the things his father, Vladek, did to survive the German occupation and concentration camps. Spiegelman draws Vladek not so much in black and white as black on black, showing the horrors he suffered as a young man, the horrors he still carries with him, and also the horror he has become. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, so this most respectable book, I hope, will be the beginning of my respectable collection of comics.
anantharaman.bookwise@gmail.com
