I n the last year, a lot happened in the graphic novel and comics space. Margaret Atwood surprised us with her first graphic novel, Angel Catbird . In the later part of the year, March: Book Three became the first-ever graphic novel to win the National Book Award in New York in the award’s 67-year-old history. Besides that, films such as Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice , and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story , and the series The Walking Dead powered the sale of comics. And, as it turns out, in fiction space, comics and graphic novels saw a 12 per cent increase in sales, even as the rest dipped (according to Nielsen BookScan).
So the time seems ripe for a discussion on the art of using visuals and texts for a story, and one of the sessions in The Hindu Lit for Life did just that. New York-based artist, journalist and author Molly Crabapple and Indian writer-artist Amruta Patil spoke about the trend in graphic novels, finding their unique language that is a combination of words and drawings, and addressing sensitive topics such as refugee crisis, violence and war and homosexuality through this medium.
“When it comes to graphic novels, India seems to be seeing a boom in readership, but in terms of publishing, it’s still a little conservative, simply for the practical reason that graphic novels are expensive to produce and readership is slender. The only way it can be half viable is if the same person writes and draws. That, generally, is not the case, so if you have anthologies with 35 people working on it, it ends up being not viable. But, among readers, there has definitely been a boom in the last six years,” says Patil, whose book Kari is a tale of friendship and love revolving around the protagonist who is a queer girl, and Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean and the recent Sauptik: Blood and Flowers are based on The Mahabharata . According to Crabapple, from an outsider’s perspective, there is a lot of commercial interest in graphic novels, with many of them being turned into films. “But, the problem is that there is so much work that goes into bringing out a graphic novel — imagine, nine illustrations per page, say, in a 300-page book!”
Crabapple’s most recent work is a 100,000-word memoir Drawing Blood , which has interesting bits about her life as an artist who started off her career making drawings of pets and kids, followed it up with drawings of beautiful dancing girls in decadent night clubs, and later, on politics, protests, refugees, war and prisons... Recently, she also undertook a project called Week in Hell, where she locked herself up in a 280 sq.ft. room, covered the walls using white paper, and spent every waking hour during the span of the next seven days drawing on every inch. “I just wanted to use my art to consume everything that I see in the world. We have so much beauty, resilience, kindness, grandeur, and as an artist, how can you not take the pen and capture all of that?” she asks.
Crabapple, who contributes to popular newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times and Vice, among others, initially did not think about using text at all. It was only during the Occupy Wall Street protests (in 2011 against social and economic inequality) when her house, because of its topographic convenience, became a sort of a press room bustling with journalists that she began to write. Her first journalistic piece was about her arrest during the protest. Of course, she accompanied it with drawings. “The reason I wrote instead of just using images is because images can hint, whisper, scream, but mine couldn’t tell what exactly was going on; they couldn’t analyse,” says Crabapple, who names political artist Chittaprosad Bhattacharya’s Hungry Bengal among her favourites.
This struggle between how much and what to convey in images and text seems to be a constant quandry that authors such as Crabapple and Patil continue to be in.
“Since I haven’t had the luxury of collaborating with somebody else, I needed to be an art director and script writer, continuously shuttling between both,” says Patil, who spent nearly seven years researching for Adi Parva and Sauptik , reading 10 different versions of The Mahabharata , books on philosophy, Buddhism, the Puranas and so on. As for Crabapple, who has worked in West Asia and the war-torn areas of Syria, “it’s an obsession to get things right”. So, before heading for a project, she learns a new language, reads, and trawls Twitter to understand the scene at ground zero.
There continues to be a text versus visuals debate. A photo, Crabapple says, could be interpreted in the way the viewers want to. She refers to an incident quoted by a photojournalist in one of her memoirs.
The journalist, dark-haired and wearing a dark coat, was clicked by another photographer, and later, her picture was published with a caption, ‘Looking into the future of the country’ — a clear instance where a photo can totally be out of context. That’s where words help.
Understanding which medium conveys what parts in a story the best seems to be the trick. And, both seem to have mastered it, for their works have been successful in starting healthy debates. While Patil’s Kari projected the reality of queer relationships that many, back in the day, were hesitant to talk about, Crabapple, in one of her works, talked about her abortion, which met with a surprisingly large response from women in favour of her thoughts.
Both, in their own way, have brought out narratives of a struggle — personal and global — with art. And, their attempt is to emphasise on beauty and use it as a resistance to the uprising of hatred. “I am more interested in the people who planted gardens, and paramedics, who often are understated. Take, for example, Nakul and Sahadev in The Mahabharata . They are good-looking and soothing, but are not often talked about in a setting that is rife with bloodshed. The only thing that is valued is the voice of warfare and destruction,” says Patil.
“Across the world, there is a glorification of things that are of toughness — as defined by a willingness to oppress and inflict pain on others. They want to make beauty seem weak and stupid. But no… Beauty is dangerous, powerful and beyond control. They can’t create it and that’s why they want to minimise it. Remember, every time you create something beautiful, you are resisting authoritarians,” adds Patil.
