Graphic novels are a new avatar of the ancient illustrated dramas, says one publisher. They are now a promising genre in India, too.
In an era in which the spectre of e-readers haunts the publishing industry, one genre of books has done surprisingly well: the graphic novel. Even in the shadow of the recession, these picture-filled story books, many of them printed in full colour on expensive paper, have been so popular that K D Singh of The Bookshop in Delhi’s posh Jorbagh has devoted one entire shelf to them. He shows me the inventory of titles on his computer. It runs for pages and pages.
For many readers of serious literature, the very name of this genre is confusing. If something involves pictures and speech bubbles, surely it must be called a comic? And if a thing is called a comic, surely it cannot, by definition, be worthy of sober literary attention? Yet in recent years, some of the most successful graphic novels have been both serious and literary: Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman is set in World War II Germany. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi is the autobiographical tale of one little girl growing up in Iran around the time of the Islamic Revolution. Epileptic by “David B” (David Beauchard) is the searing autobiographical account of a young man growing up in the shadow of his elder brother’s epilepsy. All three received ecstatic reviews and awards from the literary establishment.
Cartoons and comic art can trace their lineage back to ancient forms of pictorial story-telling. Across Asia, for instance, in temples from Tibet to India, Thailand, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, stories are depicted through paintings, bas-reliefs and sculpture. But today’s graphic novels go beyond the ancient storytellers’ art. They are often highly personal and politically in-your-face. Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde provides a pitiless account beyond the reach of the international press corps, of the Bosnian War. Nicolas Wild’s Kabul Disco covers a tiny outpost of French graphic design in war-torn Afghanistan.
“You could say they are a new avatar of the ancient illustrated dramas,” says Renuka Chatterjee of Tranquebar Press in response to my question about whether graphic novels represent something “new” in publishing. Nor are they just novels in pictures. “They are so dialogue-driven,” she says, and “the background narrative is provided by the illustrations, unlike in a novel”.
Tranquebar’s recent publication of architect Gautam Bhatia’s Lie: A Traditional Tale of Modern India is a case in point: it is a ferocious satire on modern Indian life, told through pictures painted by contemporary Rajasthani miniature painters. The result is a startling combination of old and new. The artistic style belongs to medieval times, as does the story of a cruelly callous elite terrorising the starving peasantry. But the ethos, the names and the locations belong to our world of corrupt politicians and helpless citizenry.
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Graphic novels, as something distinct from large-format comic books such as Tintin and Asterix, have been around since the late 1980s, starting with the phenomenal success of The Watchmen, written by Alan Moore, drawn by Dave Gibbons and continuing with hundreds of others, most notably the various albums of the Batman saga. In India, Penguin India’s Corridor: A Graphic Novel by Sarnath Banerjee, published in 2004, is considered the first local example of the genre.
Karthika V K modestly resists being identified as the editor-midwife of the country’s publishing phenomenon by saying, “Well, it was a corporate decision.” But she was the one to whom Banerjee first brought his manuscript, in 2002. “I had never seen anything like it before,” she recalls, and was intrigued. She showed the manuscript to David Davidar, then CEO of Penguin India. He opened her eyes to the many excellent international titles in that category and she was hooked. When Karthika moved to HarperCollins, she published Kari, by Amruta Patil, India’s first woman graphic novelist and has just brought out Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Delhi Calm, with plans to bring out a graphic anthology by the Pao Collective — a Delhi-based group of comic book artists including Banerjee, Ghosh, Parismita Singh and others — very soon.
Hachette India is another strong contender in the field, with Sudershan Chimpanzee by Rajesh Devraj due later in the year and “a couple of other projects in the pipeline”, says managing director Thomas Abraham. He has “always been interested” in the pictorial story format, he says. Even though Hachette has its own manga imprint called Yen Press and will soon handle the Marvel Comics imprint, he says, “I didn’t have much hope of seeing local publishing catch on in this genre.” The scene is changing fast. “Corridor was billed as India’s first graphic novel and topped 5,000 copies.” That’s better than many prose novels, especially for first-timers.
“What’s fascinating,” he says, is that this same period has seen the virtual collapse of the comic book industry. “It was so successful in the 1970s through the early 1990s via magazine stands and subscription offers. Now all the mass-market low-priced comics have all but vanished — despite prices as low as Rs 10, and a whole lot of new Indian content along international lines” — while the much higher-priced graphic novels are starting to line bookshelves in homes and bookshops alike.
According to Abraham, “the graphic novel in India isn’t really large-format. Almost all the ones published so far range around the ‘royal’ size — the same size as [the average] fiction hardback. At this size they aren’t particularly more expensive; at most Rs 100 above a regular literary fiction paperback. It’s the ‘collectible’ edition that’s truly expensive, and herein lies the irony: in the midst of a recession, luxury still sells. This type of publishing caters to a niche market that’s willing to pay more.”
K D Singh of The Bookshop concurs. When I ask him whether his customers flinch at the pricey tags on some of his recent titles, he shakes his head, smiling, “Most of them don’t even notice!”
Manjula Padmanabhan is an author and artist