There are a few cartoonists working today whose comics immediately redefine our sense of the medium. Bhanu Pratrap is one. When I first encountered Pratrap’s comics on Twitter in 2021, and saw in them a totally fresh grammar of cartooning built on stark, contorted bodily forms, jets of tears and, enigmatic captions in eerily open city landscapes. At once post-Barks and post-Garo, Pratrap makes haunting, vivid stories in a netherworld between gag strips and poetry. I was hooked. Later in 2021, Strangers Fanzine debuted Pratrap’s first collection, Dear Mother and Other Stories, which did not disappoint. Dear Mother moves through scenes of abjection and melodrama with surgical distance. Men slip on banana peels and turn into raw abstractions of limbs, a sobbing woman delivers a soliloquy to a corpse’s hernia. Here was an artist whose art seemed to have burst onto the scene fully formed, confidently revealing unseen wonders in comics with incredible clarity of intent. How the hell does he do it?
In June of 2022, I resolved to find out. Pratrap joined me for an interview over Zoom from his home in New Delhi. What followed was an honestly staggering conversation over two hours, on topics ranging from the comics scene in India, gag comics, gekiga, body horror, artistic approaches to melodrama and difficult stories, spatial theory, social media, censorship, and much more. At the time, Bhanu was in the early stages of working on his next graphic novel. Two years later, that graphic novel is Cutting Season, and will see print from Fantagraphics this summer. This interview is a snapshot of a moment in Pratrap’s artistic and intellectual development between two major works. I thank him for his time.
-Helen Chazan
HELEN CHAZAN: To begin very, very generally, what brought you to comics? How did you start in comics?
BHANU PRATAP: It's a very obvious story. As a kid you're into the superheroes and some funnies, like Archie or something. That's way in the past when I was a kid. In my twenties I started getting back into it. I wasn't into art comics exactly, but I was into fine arts people doing art comics. So people like Kent Williams and Ashley Wood, a lot of these sat in an interesting connection between illustration, comics and fine art. So that's some where I kind of started in my adulthood.
There are various phases. As a kid I was into like some Indian superheroes, which were sort of knockoffs of mostly American comics. Mm. So there would be, there was this character called Drhuva which is basically a knockoff off Robin, but there's no Batman. Theres’s just . Same story, a detective, orphaned parents in circus or whatever they call those things. Those kind of comics were there. As an adult, there were these art comics, but something kept eluding me in those kind of comics, although they were visually interesting. When I was maybe 19 or 20, I got into indie comics, the more “literary” stuff, Clowes or Ware or Burns and all these people, the big names of the indie comic scene. I got inspired from there to do something in comics basically.
I'm curious how that went from you becoming interested in comics to taking the work of being a cartoonist into your own hands. Where did that begin for you?
Back when I was 16 or 17, I was very much into Spawn also, so so I started writing a Spawn fan comic. It was just Spawn being a horrible asshole!
Incredible.
Horrible! Yeah, that's how that was. I remember it was my my first proper comic… I don't even remember. I think it was called Spam, just a bad pun on Spawn. So that's how it started. I wasn't good at drawing, so I figured I needed to be good at drawing. There used to be this Spawn forum, back in the days when there were forums. I remember I posted the comic and a lot of people said, “Hey, it's kind of weird. You might have something, but you need to get an artist to draw.” So I figured, I might as well learn to draw, get better at drawing. I went more into fine arts, figure drawing and composition and, like, "the stuff". But again, a lot of these things kept eluding me. I couldn't connect the two till the longest time. I was interested in cartooning, I was interested in Krazy Kat and I was interested in Barnaby and the old newspaper stuff, and I would, like, keep drawing these cartoons, but then they would never come together with my fine art stuff.
Super Commando Dhruva #24, cover art by Pratap Mulick (Raj Comics, 1993)
My fine art stuff was in this other separate silo where I was doing more conceptually driven stuff. In some of my earlier works, there would be a central pushing point and a central thesis. Some of my works were about space. I’d take the canvas as a space and deal with how space can bind you, and how a place becomes a space and how a space can kind of affect you. But it never really crossed through to my comics. So when I was in comics, I was just trying to write plots and trying to make a story with a book and all the crap, like, you know, oh, you have to make a graphic novel, you have to have plot and characters.
There was always this big divide. For the longest time I never thought about crashing them together and seeing what happens. Sometime in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic and lockdown, I just thought, okay, what if I mix the two? What if I mix the two or the three? I also used to write, this was a third silo where I would write personal essays and writing and journals and all that. Nothing published, but just, just as an exercise or something. So all three worked together. They were separate for the longest time, rather. And I just decided – or something pulled me – to just bring them together somehow.
It never made sense before that. But then at that point of time it did. So it just kind of brought them all. I wanted to see what happens when you take a text and you take cartooning and you take fine arts and the new figurative style, the post-Bacon, post-Picasso kind of work and you just put them together. That’s the point where I felt I had something here which was interesting. With writing, I can deal with a lot of metaphors. With cartooning, I can bring out those metaphors in a visual sense. And with fine art, I try to mess around with all these things. It’s not a postmodernist concept, but just trying to question what goes where. Is the language of comics just one moment after the other? Or do the moments sit beside each other? All of these questions started popping up, from writing from cartoons and from fine arts.
Do you see your work as a fine arts-informed approach to comics?
Not really. It's there. I did fine art for a while, I tried to be a gallery artist and everything, but, it just wasn’t a thing that interested me. The body interests me. When you look at a Bacon, or you look at Picasso, and so many others, like the surrealists, there is an interest in understanding the form. But with writers, it can be like, what form is also text? The body can become text. For me, it sits squarely in the middle of literature, comics or cartooning, like pop use of the word "cartoon" and "fine arts." It doesn't belong to any of these. It just sits somewhat squarely in the middle. It's hard even for me to really tell you, "okay, this is this and this is maybe fine arts, or this is maybe literary, or this is maybe just old school cartooning at work." It just is. I've chosen comics, so it looks more like cartoons or it looks more like comics per se, but it sits somewhere, like in a... in an odd manner in the middle.
excerpt from Way Home, 2021
So for you, comics are a way of making text physical or making text sculptural, something like that.
Something like that. The idea of how text and image work is really of interest to me. A lot of times, I read comics and there is narration and there is the depiction of what's happening. And usually there is too much of an overlap between them. You could just be narrating! You don't even need to show it. Or sometimes it's completely the opposite. The text has no link to the image. So to me, that's something that I think I can get at. The image becomes a text, text becomes an image, by using, say, sound effects. You know the moment a cartoon becomes a symbol, right? Like a guy is slipping on a banana peel, right? It's true. It goes back into being a text. You see it and you know where it's from. It becomes a borrowed tool to enter the text again. There’s a whole lot of entering and exiting the text. Trying to deconstruct these things and put them back together and seeing where it lands. And it always lands in different places. Sometimes the image becomes a text and sometimes the text becomes the image, and then sometimes they, just place oddly next to each other. Like with moments and with spaces, and with beats, with rhythms, with meter, all of those things start converging to form this third thing. Comics are very interesting in that sense, right? You can move forward in time, you can move back in time, but still, the time sits beside itself. There is a projection into the future. But you can also look into the past.
I mean, there are lots of formalists. There’s this lovely Goofy comic where there's four or six panels basically where Goofy loses his hat, but at the end, he's actually picking up his own hat from the other Goofy in the other panel. It’s a very crudely drawn thing, but it's beautiful. It’s an attempt at comics and at figuring out spaces and time and what it means. It’s an architectural approach, right? You have a base and you have a foundation, and then you put things in those foundations or these windows, et cetera.
There’s so many interesting ways where comics don't function how we expect language to function. We expect language to function in a very linear sense. One word comes after the other. One sentence after the other. But the moment – let's say even in language, right? – when you start using parentheses, you start hyphenating, you are interrupting the flow. Even just referring back to an earlier moment in the text, you can go back to the text. All of these things make you realize like it's not linear. You realize that linear is just how we are taught to experience things. It's not really how we experience things.
On social media, you've posted some, new versions of comics that appeared in Dear Mother, where you rearranged panels or put things into color that weren't in color before. I’m interested about that in relationship to your approach to narrative and breaking down linear progressions. When you start drawing a comic, do you have a clear idea of where it begins and ends? Are you telling a particular story?
There is a certain story at work a lot of times, that is there, but I don’t think of a story in a linear sense. Story is how something you experience makes sense to you a while later. So the narrative will be like, oh, I slipped on a thing, and so I fell. But the realization of the thing comes afterwards. It’s something as simple as a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? A narrative happens. It's mostly in happenstance. It's mostly some coincidence, but at the end of it, you're like, oh, bad things happen to good people, whatever. All these kinds of prophecies, our personal prophecies, are what we make sense of it. The sense of it after the fact informs the whole thing. Until then, it has not made sense to you. It's just a random set of events. It's just like one thing happened. There may be some causation, for sure, some modality, but there is something disparate in their placement. There is no logical through line between things. A lot of our thoughts, a lot of our understanding of things, is understanding after the fact. We don’t always make sense of things as they happen in the moment. There’s so much going on in the moment.
Story becomes something that you can make sense of afterwards. When I remix, when I take panels, I’m treating these panels not as a specific moment in a specific comic. It's a moment. This moment means nothing by itself. A picture of a face is just a picture of a face, unless, let's say, you know the person, or you are the artist, or you have some external information of that picture. It's a very basic cartoon of that object. But if you put something after it or something before it, you have some context. Context drives the learned ways that we process things. The learned ways that we process tropes and process shapes, process emotions, all those things can come back into the narrative. There is this old editing technique where you put a face and then you put an event after the face. If the event is a happy incident, the face starts looking happy, and if the event is some misfortune or whatever, the face starts looking sad.
The Kuleshov effect.
Exactly. That is one of the things that drives that. With a lot of things I draw, even if they are specific, I think the specificity does not belong to the particular comic, but to the medium at large. A cartoon becomes symbols. All of a panel becomes a symbol, a face becomes a symbol, and now I can arrange them in some way to make some sense of it. Even when I'm working on a particular story, there are usually parallel narratives going on in the story. Not just in layering of the point, but counterpoints and things that you would miss if you do not read it a few times and just go through it, or intentionally, somehow misread. If you overlook some sections there'll be a different reading. If you do not have all the facts of the narrative together, you'll have a different interpretation. There is no one story, a story is just interpretation. The story becomes a collage of sorts. I'm not speaking of, in a subjective postmodernist sense, of the viewer gives meaning, which obviously is also there. But also we are constantly giving meaning to all sorts of things. That meaning and how that meaning is produced and how that meaning gets changed becomes interesting to me. That’s why I keep trying to reuse or recycle images a lot.
At times I trace. I just find an image on Google and figure something out with it. It's not even me. It's just me finding an image which works, which I can make into a cartoon. It’s just me seeing something and finding meaning in it. Like a building where you have just broken up with your partner or something, the space becomes infused with that feeling. I like those kinds of things.
comic excerpt, 2023
Do you think your works are improvisational? Do you go in with a plan of what they're going to be? Or do you go, like, a page or a few panels at a time, see what happens?
I do a bit of everything. There are comics where I just make one panel and then it leads to other panels, which often lead me back to correcting the first panel to connect it to the other panels. Other times it's very straightforward. I have some concept, maybe I’ve written a line of text, and now I want to interpret it in comics. That's another way. But I definitely do not plan far ahead. I'm not that interested in a grand narrative. it doesn't make sense for me to plan out or thumbnail. People would tell me to do it because it makes sense and it's a very pragmatic way of handling it. You would get more done, you can do your research and all that. But for me, even if there is a through line, it's only a through line. It's only like a thread connecting. It's not a grand narrative. So I usually keep to a couple of splashes, a one page turn or a two page turn. The idea, a lot of [the] time, is to compose the page, figure out the beats, and figure out how the page is going to turn, and what happens when you turn the page, when the page turns. How do I want to mirror the previous page, or make it work against the next page? These minor things also take a lot of precedence from me, the moments and the graphical elements. Sometimes I treat it like a, a very simple, like a four panel gag comic and then I repeat the gag, and then I see what happens when I keep repeating the gag. Okay. It’s not a very proactive way of doing comics, but it makes sense to me.
You’ve talked so much about slapstick and arranging time in your comics and in your artwork. And I'm thinking about much of your art kind of has this look of like smear cells in animation, like in-betweens, in images that are creating movement but aren't something you're supposed to see. There's a lot of images in your comics where bodies almost seem to be coming apart in their own movements, or forming shapes that they're not quite supposed to in between two moments. Does animation inform your work?
Not animation in particular, but definitely smears. I often used to look at animation on my laptop and I would pause the thing to look at those panels. That was something I really enjoyed. Just the fact that I was viewing which is not meant to be seen, gave me a sense that there was something extra. It made sense to me, the in-between which is produced, but not consciously consumed, not consciously absorbed. It's just there for 1/24 or 1/12 of a second or whatever. These moments are relegated to obscure spaces within the work. They have a specific purpose. They can't be used for anything else. But what if you use them for something else? What if these smears are also there when we move? Usually, we think of ourselves in an act. You are always after or before a moment. There's always, like a caught kind of feeling, right? There’s a trail that we observe in things. When you do something, it's not you entirely. A lot of things are at work. It's your body, it's your mind, it's gravity. Because you are in motion, you're not really paying attention. We are used to the reality and forms around us, we just make sense of things as they are.
In candid images that are, you know, like somebody caught in a bad moment and have this awkward expression which doesn't make sense. And then it becomes a meme and it fits, and then you make a million memes out of it. That moment of awkwardness, of incompleteness, can lend itself to a lot of things. In those animation smears, there is a lot there graphically because they were using it for different things. They were using it to make sense. Most smears happen because they have to show motion, but they don't want to draw the extra frames. There would be less smears in a Disney movie, or in a feature film.
I always found, found the Disney style of animation disconcerting, uncanny, unpleasant. Do you feel the same in way? There's something just weird about seeing animation that doesn't have some kind of smear or trick or distortion.
Yeah. I've never been a fan of the Disney stuff. Not even the old stuff. Yes, you can see the skill at work, but from the very manner of style, the character. There are techniques that you're taught to do in animation school, and they just do that to perfection. it doesn’t make sense to me. They seemed far too preoccupied with mimicking a reality rather than producing a reality. Even now with VFX and with Marvel, all of these big things, even video games, it's just mimicking reality, you know? I'd much rather have like an old cartoon or something like that.
How do you go from 2020 and starting to think about a different way to draw comics to having Dear Mother published by Strangers Fanzine?
I did a few comics in 2020, which were very different from my current style, they were more realistic. I was a fan of Gretchen Felker-Martin, the amazing writer and critic. I would sometimes send stuff to her, and she was very supportive. I remember I made one which was about the figure and about being, being in a body. I started there. The style was not there yet, but I knew I had something. I realized that thing needed a style. And while I started exploring, I also realized that I can't just be making these comics for the internet. It doesn't make sense. I don't have a problem with posting on Instagram and all of these things. A lot of people have a lot of issues. I do too. I think we are kind of stuck. People try alternate platforms and nothing really happens. It made sense for me to reach the kind of people I thought would like my comics. I remember I wrote to a lot of big name publishers and all that, and of course, you know how it is when you're kind a newcomer of sorts that people usually don't know. I was getting a lot of very polite rejections, let's just say. I dialed back and I said “Fuck this, I’ll just make really short comics.” Four pages, six pages, 10, whatever. When I started doing these, I had some friends who would share them, and they had some friends who were somewhat in the indie scene and they shared those. It kind of snowballed from there. I realized that there were a lot of people in indie publishing who were doing interesting things. A lot of these smaller anthologies, which you don't even know. If you're not plugged into that world, it's super alien.
oil painting, late 2000s/early 2010s
There was this whole different world of these indie people who are publishing very small, but very interesting projects and art objects. I started figuring out where submit my works. Every publisher has their own aesthetic, especially indie publishers. You can expect a certain kind of book to come out of Drawn&Quarterly, you can expect a certain book to come out of Fantagraphics. The same applies to smaller publishers. So when I saw Strangers… I think it was Jasper Jubenvill (he's a young cartoonist, he’s pretty interesting) I think he had posted something about Strangers, so I realized, like, "oh, there's this publisher."
The current work at Strangers is a little pulp inspired with some cartooning and other things happening. I felt that rather than going the arthouse route, I take this other one where people are going to read it rather than look at it, read it as a comic, read it as a cartoon. So I approached them. I just approached them to ask if I could do a four page short in their magazine. I mean, I had, like, a bunch of short comics lying around. Eddie [Raymond], the person behind Strangers, was getting into publishing at the time. I think he just published like one or two books. He just said, "there is already like 20-odd pages of work. Why not just add 20 or 30 more, and let's just make a small book?" It kind of came at the right time. I had nothing to do. I was jobless, I was very much a free person. I was staying with my parents, did not have to worry about boarding and food. I just started making comics, that's it. I think it took me couple of months to make those comics. So, yeah. And then after that, like, I think I was done in September 2021. And by October or something, it came. So, very simple, straightforward. It was like, “You want to do this? Let's do this.” I did it.
You mentioned social media. You’re pretty dependent on social media to get your work out there, and it's worked pretty well for you. I take it there's not much of like a local comic scene where you are.
There used to be a big comic scene back in the 90s. It was mostly mainstream. There were comics which would have print run of a couple of million, with sales and all that. There were star creators in the Indian scene and all. But then that all went after some distributors started distributing international comics. At the same time, Cartoon Network happened. In the nineties, there was a liberalization and opening up of the market in India. A lot of American and, like, just global tech neoliberal forces, came in and just bulldozed over local stuff.
So that scene went in the nineties. Then there was a big chasm of nothingness where some people were trying to do Indian superheroes, like modern versions of Indian superhero comics, which looked like, you know, Jim Lee and whatever, all that kind of mainstream stuff. I remember in 2008 or 2009, somebody started a comic con and there was no scene. That company had like one cartoonist working for them as an organizer. He wasn't even in the company. Actually, I don't think he was a cartoonist! He had another job, but he was making cartoons. So they had this idea of making this comic con with no industry. Outside of maybe hyper local, like campus stuff, there was nothing. But somebody wanted to make an event that looked like SDCC or New York comic con or whatever. I remember, I think in 2010, a few artists just were like, “Oh, comics, let's make comics.” And people made comics. Some of them sold, most of them didn't. And again, after a few years, it died down. Right now, we're in a phase where a lot of young artists are getting into zines. They're getting into their own self-publishing, just small stuff, you know, whatever, like a 20 page comic. Now it’s just more indie, but there is no mainstream! I think I personally know all the main, like, 10 living mainstream comic artists in India.
Oh, God.
Yeah. It's pretty dire out there. And even then, most of those people still have to take up non-comics jobs like illustration or storyboarding or design.
God. And these DC comics artists like complain about like, how, oh, I didn't get paid a million dollars, so now I have to make an NFT or whatever. <laugh>.
It’s pretty unreal to see the kind of complaints that you hear from them here. Creator rights aside, I do not get bare points. Whatever they're saying, they don't really make sense to me because I'm coming from a place where people want to make things. And there's nothing, there's no market. Every person ends up only making their own market here and nothing like a scene really develops. If I have something and I have some following, whatever, like 500 people, and there are some graphic novelists who have their own following, whatever like, 5000 or 10,000 people will buy their stuff or something. And that's it. There'll be some overlap somewhere. But it's very insular in that sense.
There is very little of a scene where people will collaborate or things will happen. I mean, I'm kind of generalizing. There are obviously people, so I don't want to say that there's nothing, it's just so limited compared to, I don't know, man, compared to even anywhere, anywhere in the global north. We don't have anything comparable to that. We don't even have anything comparable to even, like, the Southeast Asian countries. It’s just very few people who do comics sometimes or do a comic just before like some comic fest or some zine fest will happen. And some people who can make their own comics and that's it. That's the scene.
Do you think you have any local audience in India? Or is it mostly international?
I think there are. I was talking to this comic person who's also a professor at this leading institution. We were talking about how a big problem has been the use of vernacular, the local languages where there is a disconnect between, let’s say, an artist class, which is a middle-class, upper-middle-class sort of a person, who has like access to English or access to international media. And then there are people who might be interested but just do not have access. Another thing that comes up whenever I meet other comic artists, especially people who are printing their own stuff, is the point of distribution. A lot of things, if you figure out how to distribute on a very hyper local level, just have a few nodes in one city, and then go from the metros.
In India, metros are like their islands, in a certain sense, that sometimes certain aspects of the metro culture, like these cities; it doesn't travel, it remains in the city a lot of times. It doesn't go to the rural areas. It doesn't go to smaller towns. If we can find out how to distribute to people, I think there is some hope. Of course, my work is odd even among the people who read comics too. So I don't know if my work will specifically have a lot of audience, but I think what it may do is provide a spectrum.
You need a spectrum. For every Scorsese you need a Lynch, you need somebody to be a bit of a counter point. If I have that, if I can figure out with other local people then there could be something. I don't know, I don't think it'll probably happen for in the next decade. But we have to start now.
comic excerpt, 2022
Do you think that there's something about the reception of your work that might be surprising as an artist who's being recognized more internationally than locally just starting in your career? Do you think some things get misunderstood by your readers?
There is this particular thing that definitely happens in India, but it generally also happens in the global south. You have to travel the world to come back to your country. It’s like you have to be recognized by a white person for your people to see your work. It happens with almost all the big names we have in terms of fine art or even comics. They've kind of traveled that way. Somebody who went to Europe or went to America and then came back after some reception. We all talk about it because it happens, but when it did happen with me, it was a little odd. I mean, I'm amazed at the reception, like, it's been great, and the reviews and everything have been very nice, and interestingly incisive. Because I'm trying not to make very specific stories, I give space for a lot of different kinds of interpretations. So there is no such thing. Like, of course, some people do miss the mark. That's fine. But most people kind of do glom onto a few things. And to me, as long as somebody is figuring out some aspect that's more interesting than them grasping the whole work.
How a reader enters the work is much more interesting. Let’s say you’re into body horror, you're probably entering my work through body horror, or you're into slapstick, you're entering my work through slapstick. Even though there is a certain specific route that I'm taking, the devices that I have are very broad. I think it's easier for, like, anybody who has some idea of high artist history or some idea of comics, to enter the work and figure it out from there. To me, that's much more interesting than than them figuring out some cultural aspect. To me, I'm treating that language of different genres and mediums as the grounds for these works rather than some cultural aspect.
Honestly speaking, I don't know how much it is just me trying to appeal to this phantom world audience. You don't need to know some things. If there are five things, if you know one thing, you should be fine with the work. You don't have to have the entire context. You don't even need to know that I'm a brown guy sitting in India making this thing. A lot of people don't even know that I live in India. Sometimes, it's only when they read my name or something that people realize “okay, there is some brownness in there.” It’s not very particularly bothersome for me.
Hmm, that makes sense. And of course, a publisher like Strangers Fanzine absolutely doesn't represent the American mainstream, and I'm not sure how many, uh, how many American readers anything they publish has. I get their stuff and I'm in Canada. Everything in alternative scenes seems to be diffuse and partially sold online. There's always some international element.
Yeah, exactly. Look at anime. Obviously at first when you look at anime, there is the whole fetishization of Japan and the culture. But also, after a while, you realize anime becomes its own thing. The moment it goes overseas, you will have other ways of reading. And as you said, be it for whatever reason, neoliberalism, whatever, the internet, the same happens with comics. It's a specific stance that you have to take to represent a particular culture. I visit the same store, so I go to McDonald's or whatever, I have access to the same kind of cinema that you would. The biggest American export is the culture, right? Like comics, it goes everywhere. If there is English there, if English is even partially a language, there will be cultural aspects that go with it. That also makes it interesting. I can read a French comic and it'll make more or less sense to me. Or I can read, like, an Italian comic, I can read a manga.
I’d have to probably go to some Gekiga, to Shirato Sanpei or Tatsumi or something like that, for something in them to feel a little alien. But even then, after I read like a few volumes of their stuff, there will be things that click. So even that specificity is, as you said, diffuse. That's a really good word. There is a certain flattening that happens when you're reading these things. I find it interesting to use this flattening. You can try to resist it and be unreadable to a certain kind of an audience. Like if you make identity-driven stuff for a very particular kind of people. You can do it. But the only thing it requires is like some entry points for it to be yet again interpreted, misinterpreted, understood by people who probably are not in your head, not the intended audience. So I'm not that worried about this intended audience. There’s a phantom audience I have in my head, but it's not some particular person from some particular place. It's this very general, vague person.
I don’t want to assume your influences, but since you did mention Gekiga, I will say that looking at your work, I remember how I felt the first time I read Seiichi Hayashi's Red Colored Elegy, and I started thinking about different approaches to, like, a linear narrative, or a story, and how you can represent events or emotions. I don't know if it's the texture that those images have or the way that like lighting operates in some of those comics. But I see a lot of that in your work.
Hayashi has been big for me. Like, I remember reading Red Colored Elegy a few years, well, a bunch of years back, I think it was after PictureBox – no, Red Colored Elegy is Drawn&Quarterly.
And then PictureBox did a small book and then a larger book, and then PictureBox didn't exist anymore.
I think I came to [Seiichi Hayashi's] Gold Pollen an Other Stories, first. When I saw these works, I realized something else was happening, which kind of made more sense to me in a way. Whenever I would read American Comics, I would see a lot of thought into twists and blocks and narrative and characters and world building. That's all fine. I'm not particularly interested in that. To me, there can be a specific story, but there are so many other emotions that you can access when you kind of flatten these things out to just a guy, just a bird, or just a setting. Of course, there'll be some specific things. You can't say that Hayashi’s work doesn't belong to an era where people were struggling, and, if you're an art student, you are just around the corner of a revolution, and the economy had just started picking up post World War, but people were still struggling. All those things are a reality, but at the same time, because of a very specific thing to a person, it kind of becomes universal. Like, yes, we are having issues in India which are not the same as somewhere else, but a person is going to experience many similar struggles. It opens up to being universal again. If you read Hayashi’s work, if you really boil it down, it's just melodrama, right? It’s just people tussling with each other, and figuring out what a relationship is, what they want from life, and whom do they love? All that. It’s melodramatic stuff.
In Hayashi's work, there are a lot of obtuse pop culture references that aren't explained, that if you're not in the particular context that even just he, as an individual was in, they don't make sense, but they're recognizable enough as being something that you kind of tap into his relationship to what those images would mean to him. Or you intuit at least that there's something there that's powerful.
Yeah! His comics have a lot of random interruptions. Like it’s a proper storyline, and some cartoon character, like a Mickey Mouse kind of a character would just enter the scene, or something would happen, or a very pop art kind of image would just interrupt. And you do not know if that pop art is the character within the comic, or it's some reference. But not knowing makes it even more interesting. I read some of the interviews and all that, but I'm not that interested in knowing the exact inspirations. I think they all were like being inspired by French new wave and all those things, like neo-realism and all that. But not knowing everything, it goes back into being, like, this alien object where you have to do the work to read, where it's not given to you.
It's interactive.
It becomes very interpretive. It becomes like this experience and not just passive engagement. I think the problem I have with world building and all those kinds of things is that it kind lays it out for you, and then you kind of take it. To me, that's not a very interesting place to be. You mentioned lighting, right? Just the fact that lighting can change from panel to panel, what does it mean? Does it mean something? Does it have to mean something? At times you can use it for like emphasis, for a particular beat. Say you turn a page and there's a full page panel of a face which is covered in shadows, and you can make some sense out of it. There is an internal logic. But if you look at it from conventional logic, let's say, there isn't a whole lot of connection between, let's say, panels and things. Just the fact that you are placing those things and you're making interesting images, I am compelled to read into it. I'm compelled to figure out what is happening. The compelling affect that Hayashi and Sasaki Maki have were both very interesting to me. Maki completely coming from this bonkers, surrealist kind of world, just, I don't know, it's even harder to place in a certain sense. But there is a certain giving in, right? To that world.
There's that one Maki comic where it's a bunch of pop culture photographs xeroxed, and the text is all from news articles. There seems to be some kind of political message, but the further you look, the more it just stops meaning that, or anything at all. It gives you all of the pieces to interpret it and just takes it away from you the more you look into it.
Yeah! It becomes like this third thing, you know? Even though there is all that, and if you choose to you can obviously read it like, “oh, it's talking about pop art, the modification of art reproduction, you know, art in the modern times.” And all that along with whatever was happening at that time in Japan, but combined, it doesn't make sense. It's this thing where, as you said, the more you try to unravel it, the more obtuse it becomes. That was something that really made me think “okay, you know, something is happening here which I have not seen before.” I was reading, like, regular graphic novels and all that, and of course there would be some comics, like Chris Ware’s comics, which would be formally interesting, which would play with iconography and motives and metaphors. But here it was, and it seemed as if they also probably only partially understood some of the things. I may be completely wrong, they might be very well versed with these things, but to me, it read like they thought it was interesting more than it being a specific thing. It's not a specific thing that they were going for. It seemed to me like they were making the stuff open up rather than close down. If it makes less sense, you have to find other ways of looking at it. The process of reading then snowballs into a project. If you're a reader, it becomes a project to try to understand.
That takes us back to the subjectivity at play in your work. I was thinking about the title story in Dear Mother. It's a longer story and it has… I don't want to say that it's more of a narrative story, because in some ways, there's maybe even a little bit more linearity to the shorter stories because you begin with someone slipping and then they fall, or you being with something falling, and then it crashes. But like the story has more of like a literary shape to it, in that you kind of get to know characters over the course of it. And I just think about the way you depict this John or adult baby or whatever, he is rejecting his mother/sex worker, and then crying about how the good ones always leave and how he hates that she left, when you just saw him very deliberately and cruelly reject her. And then he's talking about her leaving. A lot of that is this character's misogyny, but there's something there where suddenly you have to wonder about his subjectivity and what he thought was happening in those moments. There doesn't seem to be any sort of solution to what he's feel feeling there. I like the way that your work kind of gets troubling, especially in that story. Um, I don't think there was a question there. I'm sorry. <laugh>
Yeah, <laugh>
You had mentioned in the acknowledgements that this was a difficult story for you to write, and you had a lot of encouragement to go forward with it. Can you talk about the difficulties you had writing that?
Writing? Uh, yeah. So I think the main difficulty was, like, me being a man writing about this character, me being a very regular middle-of-the-road kind of person, leading a very regular life, talking about somebody who we would consider to be in the margins, a sex worker; a sex worker, who's led a life, who's a mother, who's not just a regular sex worker. It’s not a regular place to go to for a lot of people. Even in any kind of profession, it's a very specific point that I'm kind of talking about. One thing that a lot of people talk about is write what you know, that's very common advice that people are given, right? I'm not saying everybody does it. I'm just saying rather this might be a paranoia that a lot of artists have, which is that you can't talk about certain specific topics or certain specific people if you're not from within that milieu or that culture. So from that point of view, I had hesitation.
You wouldn't want to depict this person in a way that would be hurtful to them if someone like this read it.
Yes. Yes. So that was really weighing heavy on my mind, that it weighed heavy on my mind for a while. And then I talked to a few friends, and especially women. And they were like, it's a story. And if you are honest about it, or if you're earnest about it, even if you make a mistake, it's fine. Like, everything has a consequence, you know? All you have to do is study it rather than passing judgement. I try to not pass judgments on any character within the story. Everybody had their own points and their own frustration and their own cycles that were probably repeating.
I just wanted the story to be just observing these people and their specific nature. A woman is a woman, a sex worker: a sex worker, or a guy who's probably a misogynist, but who probably had a trauma, something in the past. It's still a very specific person, but you don't need to judge them. You just need to open and access to them and their point of view of the world. That's about it. Like I said, I'm not very interested in resolutions. I'm not interested in a neat ending. That helped me, along with, again, encouragement from friends. I remember I shared it with a friend of mine, Ash, and I shared it with Gretchen, and both of them were like, “oh yeah, it's great.”
If you're honest and this seems honest, whatever may be the consequences that like you'll face – of course you don't know what happens when something like this goes out into the world, how people receive it – you're dealing with it in a sensitive way. And by sensitive, I do not mean patronizing. If you treat people like people, it's not that difficult to depict or to address or to provide access to somebody's story. So that was something that I kind of took out. Like I, I understood that, or rather my friends helped me understand that, that there are spaces that, I mean, no space is inaccessible to an artist, as long as the artist is somewhat aware. There will always be blind spots, but if I'm somewhat aware, I can access them, be respectful. And I am trying to understand the humanity of people, not just in a naive, empathetic way, but to understand that we're all stuck in our cycles. I have my own issues with trauma. Everybody else does too. And if you sit with them for long enough, you see a story. I don't have to empathize with you entirely to know your story. I just have to witness. My whole thing was to place ourselves as witnesses to these things that these people were going through.
In that story, I can feel your overwhelming empathy for these characters and your desire to leave room to think about what everyone's going through in it. But I feel like at every moment there's some awareness that you can't quite enter these characters’ interiority, and that these characters do things or experience things that are frightening. And some of it might be harm. You don't end in a place of knowing who matters, there's no resolution. In Dear Mother, we reach a point where you have these two people in front of each other and you don't really know whether what's going to happen next is going to be beautiful or painful or a bit of both. And we sit in that anticipation as the story closes. I think it's really profound.
Thank you so much. That was nice of you. That's an interesting reading of it. To me, it’s about how there is an unfathomable other that is out there that you can never relate to entirely. Even when you are with your lover who you love a lot or the most or whatever, and you understand each other, there will be miscommunications, because we are also propelling our own narratives, which are independent of other people. We have an interior narrative that itself drives us to and away from certain situations that we keep on landing into again and again, which are not removed from things around us, but to a certain extent could be independent of things.
That is a point of entering the text. Understanding people is to know that we don't understand people and it's okay to not understand people. I don't need to have a hot take about you, or your work, or your life, or who you are or what you're about. I don't need to sum you up in a paragraph or two, even in a book or something like that. I'd rather play with the idea that I have of you which informs me as who I am. This idea about identity and who we are, and what makes us, multiplicity of identity that we have, that we play, the performative aspect of identity.
We play certain performances. we perform certain identities. If you really look into yourself, it's very hard to describe. Who we are as people and who we are as characters. The moment you put that opaqueness on, if things work out, it forms your narrative, but if it doesn't, then it's certain, it becomes this traumatic episode where you now either have to reconcile the trauma with your earlier held ideology, or your ideology has to change to this traumatic episode or event. And each time you do that, a certain unfolding or folding of yourself happens where you have to reinterpret who you are. I assume that if it's happening to me, it must be happening to other people. You talk to other people and realize how somebody changes after trauma. I'm not necessarily just talking about big, common-sense trauma, like bad things, an accident, but when you come to a realization of a person and how they are not as what you projected them to be. That’s enough for you to reconsider your relationship to them, your own idea about how you read people. So taking that and then putting in a place where I would force you to look into some regular person we never relate to in life. Because they're opaque, because we do not know their narrative, they could become anybody. They could become you. They could become your lover, your partner, your friend, a regular person you might come across.
You know, you have all these videos of people doing crazy shit or whatever, like all the Karens of the world, right? I'm not saying you have to empathize with them in a regular sense, but you could imagine, what would have to happen for them to reach that point? And again, not to condone, just to see how do you get to that point? How does, like, a poor or an upper-class Indian or a middle-class Hindu in India become, like, mentally like anti-Muslim or anti-minority or something like that. Same with, let's say, somebody white or somebody, or somebody cis, you know, whatever you like, part of your demographic majority, how you become this kind of person.
You mentioned not necessarily being focused on extremes of trauma, but your work does focus a lot on sexual relationships that become violent, violent events, sexual relationships with uncomfortable power dynamics. You mentioned that some people call your work body horror. I might call it like an erotic grotesque, or just a focus on the body, period. Is this something you think about consciously?
I'm definitely interested in the body. Things that happen to bodies do get depicted a lot. Sex and violence are both very physical in their depiction. Even when you try to not show them, there is an implication. The body comes at the center. On a very personal level, it's an ongoing process of trying to understand my body. I feel as if like there is some aspect of depersonalization happening where I do not know, like, this body is mine, but it's not me. The body becomes, on some level, an object to withstand the elements, withstand other people, either take something or give something. It becomes like an independent actor. We make sense of things in our head, but it's the body which experiences. If you have faced abuse or if you faced violence in your life, or even good stuff, even good sex or something. As much as we think about the body in terms of any conceived beauty, we do not think of the body as its own thing. There is a gap in understanding of the body. Does the body belong to you? Does the body belong to the state? Does the body belong to some other forces?
What you're describing, it's kind of like an interrogation of dysmorphia rather than, like, a discomfort with the body as your own or even with, like, the concept of bodies. You’re exploring the body that exists and obeys its own rules that are different from your vision of yourself, maybe.
Some aspect of dysmorphia is there. What I am trying to look at is body as text, as a thing to be opened and unfolded and folded back to itself. So along with my own issues in my own personal self or personal sense, I am interested in the times when a body is not just a person, when a body has text. When you start to fool around with the text, can you fool around with the body? A lot of my comics are fart jokes. There nothing inherently funny about a fart, but we've made it funny because we're uncomfortable with functions. Inherently, we are deeply uncomfortable with our bodies.
I'm thinking about this panel in Interrogation of a Man's Body. The one where the guy dies and the woman starts cutting him up. There's a panel where she's sobbing over his… he's like fallen over and his ass is sticking up. And you can just see his butt hole and there's stuff sticking out of it, it looks like a hernia and her like sobbing face is shoved right up to the hernia. I think about that panel a lot when I think about your work.
<laugh>. Yeah. I think that panel was a landmark for me. The way we grieve about people, we forget that, after somebody's dead, the body is just there. Right? To be grieving, it becomes an object. But at the same time, like I said, when you're farting, it's a source of being. If you look at, uh, I don't know, fart jokes, or poop jokes, or sex jokes, right? A lot of it deals with like being just uncomfortable with certain aspects of the body and you're trying to make sense of it, because you realize a lot of experiences that we go through for whatever reasons aren't normalized. So how are you gonna normalize these experiences? I remember like a long time back, a friend was talking about some dead relative, and there were a lot of smells. The bowels had been released or something. There was a stench of shit where the person had died that because the tension of the bowels had released. That exists at the same time that you're dying. So even though it's a very emotional moment, at the same time, these bodily things happen, you know? People piss themselves when something bad happens, right?
People vomit when they see a dead body.
Exactly. There's so many…
They don't decide to vomit. It just happens.
Exactly. There are these aspects which we don't like. We don’t like vomiting, right? But the vomiting is the normalization. In all those procedural shows where like a greenhorn cop has just come from the academy, and then he sees the scene and the hard boiled cop is like, he's not, he's not even covering eyes or whatever, and this guy goes out [and] pukes.
In that kind of trope too, it's like, because it's especially upsetting or especially disgusting, or someone's especially unprepared. It’s never just, “oh, it smells really bad and your body can't handle that and needs to do this to keep sustaining.” That never comes into that particular trope. I feel like a lot of your works are about how someone just does this because they're nauseous, or someone just does this because they're aroused or thirsty or some something. There's a lot of like involuntary motion in your works.
There's so many things we do compulsively, which we make sense of afterwards, right? Like the greenhorn cop. Like, “oh, he’s just not hardened enough to be on the beat.” By the end of the story, he will be. He’ll come upon a properly fucked up body and he'll figure out who the murderer was, whatever. The body will eventually become inert in that sense. It’ll have no impression upon him, it'll just be a wrong that has to be made right, or a justice that has to be served. The grand narrative will again come and sweep over that next body, which probably has shat itself and pissed and it stinks and there's blood. But now we are talking about justice, now we're talking about the grand narratives that hold the society together. So you have like this whole like, overcoming effect. I don't want that to have that.
Knock Knock, 2022
It’s a very Catholic idea of bodily autonomy and morality – you learn to overcome the involuntary reaction because you become a better person by following a doctrine or a rule.
I think it's just generally religious. There is this whole notion of mind over matter. Like, if you have the law, if the law is proper, and if you follow the law as a doctrine, like, you can overcome these things. But at the same time, there is no overcoming. There is only subsuming that experience into a parallel narrative which overlooks the body. When you come upon something that's sublime, there are two ways to handle it. One is to just be at awe. And to be at awe would be to let your body respond as it would, or let yourself respond. The other would be to make sense of it, to flatten it within whatever your preconceived notions of things are, to fold it back into your ideology. If a traumatic thing happens, do you then change or do you fold it back in and make it sense in the world?
Do you think your work resists making sense of those responses? Is it a different kind of making sense the to what you normally see? Do you think you're exploring your own version of sense making? Or is it about returning to senselessness?
There is some resistance to common sense, the commonly held sense of things. I do have something against common sense because things and people become archetypes, tropes, events become tropes, farces. We are not really accessing things. Of course, I’m probably imposing some other sense, but just placing my interpretation alongside that is enough. The contrast is enough to produce a different kind of a meaning. There would be not a counterpoint because that brings it back to some binary position. But if you can interpret in a different way, just the fact that there is more than one interpretation of an event opens up the possibility of infinite interpretations. The fact that I have my own reading of those things, or my own depiction of those things, that one alternative is there, means that there might be like any number of alternative. Maybe I’m saying that there is no sense. Every time you have to deal with something, there is a new way or a new sensation that you have to deal with. And if you so choose, you can interpret it every time. Everything can be read, since everything is text. You can read it in a conventional sense, or you can say, no, every text is novel and I want to approach it in a new manner. By placing myself, I hope that there is an opening up of readings.
Waste Collection, 2021
Can you tell me about what a day of drawing comics is like for you? How do you set up your space for working? What kind of media are you working with as you, as you draw, as you draft, as you revise?
I usually start a little late in the day. I’m more of a night person, so usually mornings go to just idling away. I think a lot of my work is not working. I can't work constantly. I think I'm decently prolific, I do have a decent pace of working. If I want to, I can finish a couple of pages. But sometimes I’ll have made a first panel, then the second panel can take days to happen. The process becomes a little convoluted.
Usually there's a lot of not doing the work, where I sit and procrastinate and think about like all the other things. And then eventually I get to it. My medium right now is just digital. I am very particular about like the shapes and the design and everything. And if I were to do comics in real media, I do not know how much work I would be getting done. I do paint and all, but comics are all digital. To me, a comic gets realized when you produce it, it's in the production that the comic gets made. I don't have a lot of qualms about it. Friends keep saying if I make that if I do pen on paper, I'll be hav[ing an] original. And that's a fair point that I have on my mind. But at the same time, digital still just provides me enough control, without being obsessive, so that I can keep on producing interesting things.
Where do you think you want to take your comics next at this point? Do you think it's more short stories? Do you think you're going to stay on similar subject matter? Where do you see your own work developing?
So currently I'm working on my next book. It'll have like one longer story, about 60 of 70 pages, with a narrative. In that sense it's similar to Dear Mother. And then I have a lot of shots. I want to balance out these things because I think the shorter works give me a lot of a lot of space to experiment. There are things which are actually better explored in a limited scope. I want to keep on doing those four or six page stories, where I have a joke that I want to elaborate on a little, so it'll be, like, a few pages.
Like I said, I'm not that particular about narrative, but I do have some stories in mind. The next book will more of a proper book, a hundred some odd pages, with one leading story and multiple shorter explorations. Eventually I would also like to make a daily strip, not a daily per se, but a comic with the feel of the daily strip, where I mess around with repetition and characters, have a few characters and then start repeating things and start playing with that. These projects will take a couple of years.
Do you think you'll continue to just work on your own with your comics? Do you ever think about collaborating with other creators, writing for someone else or drawing for someone else?
I only started really thinking about collaboration recently. I think if I would, it would be more in the sense of editing. I'm interested in editing comics, not just copy editing, but editing, figuring out what goes there. Even my own work, after I draw, there is a lot of editing that happens. Panels will change. Something will go, something will come. There is a lot of post-production that I do after drawing. I would want do something along that line, just sit with some artists or whatever and see if we can work on the editing part of comics. Otherwise, I'm not so sure, because I think my work is somewhat specific. It's not just an aesthetic, it's not just a style, it's a lot of things at once. To collaborate can become a little like tricky. I've considered it and not found a stable solution. I might just jump in with somebody, with a few friends that I like talking with. But I'm not sure at the moment.
Is there like anything else that you would want readers of your work to know about? Are there any artists working at the moment that you think people really need to be aware of? Are there any, um, concerns in the scene or what have you that you really wanna speak to? Is there something about your own works that you really want to clarify?
Definitely some artists. I think Biboswan Bose, he is currently in the process of making works and he has been one of the central figures in my life to make work. He is working on something and I hope it finds readers whenever it comes out. Love his work, love him also. And then there is another Indian artist called Anand "Pagalkutta" Shenoy and he's just come out with a comic, with some Italian publisher called Magma Bruta, a riso kind of setup. I really want people to see his work. They’re both on Instagram if you look them up. The people I really like are somewhat big in the scene that we’re in, people like Margot Ferrick, Lale Westvind, Lala Albert.
All incredible.
All incredible. Yeah, exactly. Like Leomi Sadler or Joe Kessler and all of these people. There’s so much amazing work that's happening. I would just wish for people to kind of see like all that incredible breadth of work. Look at these artists and their works and also look at their works, a couple of works, and not just one, because all of these people have like interesting approaches. More meaning is produced when you read a few works rather than just one.
I don't know if I have anything more to say about my own work. I have this habit of trying to obfuscate about talking about my work. I'm sure you must have sort of figured that out.
I picked up on that a little bit.
I want to talk about a lot of things around the work rather than the work itself. So I don't know if I have anything to add.
That in itself is very interesting to hear.
Yeah. Thanks.
The post “A lot of my comics are fart jokes”: An interview with Bhanu Pratap appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean. 
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