From superheroes to fantasy worlds, Appupen has found a distinctive voice

The Batman of his childhood, Appupen says, doesn't have the same baggage and agendas as today's Batman

In late 2015, soon after the protests led by students of Jawaharlal Nehru University made headlines, a desi superhero made his presence known in the virtual world. Sanskaari in his outlook, this green tea-loving, masked and muscled strongman calls himself RashtraMan, the Guardian of Rashtria, a country in a fantasy world called Halahala. Soon after he whacks protestors demanding justice, RashtraMan hands them over to the police, instructing them to arrest those with “radical” ideas. 

“We must be careful, these days, that’s why I have green tea every morning,” says RashtraMan in a comic strip. “It has antioxidants that arrest the free radicals in my body while I take care of Rashtria.” In another panel, this superhero instructs all “Rashtrians” to crank down their air-conditioning to the coldest possible. “This will cool our climate and keep global warming out of our Rashtria.” 

RashtraMan may inhabit a fictional universe, but his brazenly confident outlook on everything that constitutes “radical ideas” to the “greater good” to his understanding of global warming and pseudo-science could just as well be credited to recent statements by some leaders. (“Climate has not changed. We have changed,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi told students in 2014.)

Appupen, RashtraMan’s creator, graphic novelist and comic book artist based in Bengaluru, says that RashtraMan is essentially a desi Captain America, “just that his agendas are not masked”.  

Born in Kerala as George Mathen, the 38-year-old has been known as Appupen for as long as he’s been inking darkly humorous tales. (In Malayalam, “appupen” means grandfather, a group famous for telling stories.) Over the last decade, Appupen has published four graphic novels, all showcasing the world of Halahala, besides online comics on RashtraMan and a serialised cricket comic strip with Rahul Chacko, another visual artist based in Bengaluru.

Much of Appupen’s outlook is defined by what he learnt during his stint in advertising. “We’d make campaigns for corporations and all of them would talk about opening 150-200 stores the following year,” recalls Appupen. “Where would they open all these stores, would they be stacked on top of each other?” he’d wonder. This “stacking” was the visual idea that inspired the title of his first graphic novel, Moonward (2009). 

Appupen’s fantasy world, often solely in black-and-white hand-drawn panels, has only grown since. Legends of Halahala appeared in 2013, Aspyrus: A Dream of Halahala in 2014, and his latest, The Snake and the Lotus, takes an even darker turn.

The multi-layered new book is the outcome of a grant from the India Foundation for the Arts. Using reds, blacks and whites in full-page illustrations originally detailed on stacks of A3 sheets, the novel tells the story of a world where humans, surviving on lotus milk alone,  have become the weakest version of themselves in a world controlled by artificial intelligence.

The pages contain details so vivid that a cursory read does no justice to them. For instance, Appupen was inspired by runes used in JRR Tolkien’s universe to create a font for the novel and, though every chapter ends with a differently drawn lotus, it signifies how man in this city can only choose between one lotus and another. 

Through White City, a fictional place in the book, Appupen explores a futuristic realm of the Halahala universe and the consumerist dream the city embodies, says Shubham Roy Choudhury, programme executive of the arts practice at the India Foundation for the Arts. “White City stands for the perfect marriage between religion, politics and big business, enclosed in a glass dome. We feel this project will challenge various standard artistic norms of graphic novels.” 

Appupen’s distaste for consumerism extends to his having sworn off packaged chips and carbonated drinks for well over a decade. Instead, he runs on copious amounts of coffee and his home-baked “hardcore banana bread”. (Made with ragi and jaggery, his friends reportedly tend to skip this Appupen-special, thus ensuring more for him, he says.) 

Besides the coffee that’s always brewing, “good art, great stories, six hours of sleep and witty repartee,” make Appupen tick, says Catherine Rhea Roy, part of Brainded India’s editorial and curatorial department. Brainded India, run by Appupen and Chacko, is an online platform to promote diversity and dissent among independent artists. 

When Appupen was enrolled in St Xavier’s, Mumbai, he’d walk into a room every day for his part-time job as a tattoo artist. In the first half of the day, the room was a psychiatrist’s office, complete with couch; post lunch the place would see youngsters coming in to get inked with dolphins and the like, under the psychiatrist’s supervision. Also in his storehouse of memories is the time when Appupen had his hostel friends dress up as kittens to promote a line of footwear for children, for Rs 150 to 200 per gig. 

Appupen firmly believes a person is shaped by the people around him or her. His strongest influences continue to be his mother, Geetha, and Mary Roy, the principal of his school in Kerala when Appupen was captain of the state’s Under-13 cricket team. “Both are very strong women,” says Appupen. Mary Roy, writer Arundhati Roy’s mother, helped him see the importance of taking a stand on everything from environmental issues to women’s rights through the street theatre programme she backed. 

Appupen grew up on a steady diet of comics. But the Batman of his childhood, he says, doesn’t have the same baggage and agendas as today’s Batman. As superheroes continue to move to television and movie screens, their stories are growing murkier. Bruce Wayne, aka Batman, manufactures heavy weapons; Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, is a glorified arms dealer in the updated superhero universe. “What kind of impression does that make on children reading these?” asks Appupen. 

Counter-intuitively, one of Appupen’s strongest traits is that he doesn’t take anything very seriously, says Chacko. “It’s actually an uncanny ability to find humour in the face of the rather unfunny world that we are living in,” says Rhea Roy. “Call it a coping mechanism if you will, a line of defence.” If one takes everything very seriously, there’s a distinct danger of becoming everything that RashtraMan represents, cautions Appupen. 

Most of his time is spent at the drawing board, placed near a window that overlooks the cluttered urban cityscape. A wall-to-wall bookshelf is stacked with works by artists ranging from Osamu Tezuka and Will Eisner. All across the room, on walls painted red and green by Appupen, are movie posters, including of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Der Heilige Berg. His workspace also brims with the work of his contemporaries, including Chacko, Sonali Zohra aka Dangercat and Anoop K Bhat. 

When he isn’t drumming his free time away (Appupen has played with post-rock bands like Lounge Piranha), he is focused on developing a “happy place” in Halahala. He’s also preparing to take RashtraMan, two seasons of which can be found online, into the offline world in the form of affordable comic books. 

The world of Halahala may be a dark and unsettling one. But, as Appupen says, “The fantasies offered by governments and corporations are far more dangerous than the ones I am creating.”