Storytelling is part of our cultural DNA. From moral tales to religious stories to folklore, we have codified them into various folk and traditional formats across the country in performing art forms like Pandvani and Kathavachan and classical formats like Kathakali and Kudiyattam. In fact, the classical dance form Kathak was thus named as the earliest storytellers were described as katha kahe, so kathak kehlaye — the ones who tell the story — are the kathaks. These classical and folk performing art forms have incorporated the sagun and nirgun formats like the aakar and nirakaar or figurative and abstract forms of the visual arts.
Given this world view, when the young artist Aakash Anand tried to describe his abstract comic book, the first of its kind in India, the only visual that floated across my mind’s canvas was the Amar Chitra Katha and other similar variations! Obviously nothing could be further away from the real thing. It was a trip down the rabbit hole a la Alice In Wonderland but with infinite interpretations leading to a story completely unique every time — just as abstract paintings lend themselves to unending elucidations.
Named Untitled, Issue #1 offers you no rules or the narrative of a traditional comic book, but throws the reader’s mind into an illustration-rich world woven with exciting possibilities. There are no words to nudge the reader/teller in a certain direction, but the open ended imagery then becomes the primary tool of communication and lends itself to a myriad thoughts, emotions and creations.
On the other hand, Anand’s comic is quite the opposite. It uses no words but creates imagery that finds words to create a story. The debut comic was launched at the annual Indian Comics Convention that ended on Sunday. Anand reanimates the comic scene by creating a visual masterpiece that promises to blur the line between art and comic books. Comics must have always been a source of inspiration for this young artist, something that is evident in his fascination with the black and white magic of Kirby dots. A field of roughly circular dots used to represent the negative space lingering around mysterious energy, blasts from ray guns and outer space phenomena must have been the visual idols of worship for this graphic novel aficionado who looked up to the sky for aliens and chased the unknown. His work is infinitesimally detailed rather like the Mandelbrot set, which is the plotting of an iterative equation that results in a graph with the quality of self-similarity at different levels of magnification. What this means is that no matter how close you get to it, no matter how small a portion of the plane you choose to study, it will maintain the same level of complexity.
I have been watching Anand carefully for the last couple of years and he never ceases to interest me, as both his perception and interpretation always have a tangy twist in the tale. The comic book is his new canvas. Black and white is his chosen genre, and his solo and group shows, where his earlier illustrations in ink and acrylic too won him several accolades and a staunch following, he doesn’t succumb to the temptation to show until he is ready. In this unique comic book too, he is keen that readers should juxtapose the images anew to create and recreate new interpretations and tales. which forms the hallmark of a true artist.
Alka Raghuvanshi is an art writer, curator and artist