Much Hullabaloo Over Halahala

Graphic novelist Appupen takes on consumerism in the third of his ambitious series. But is he part of the very system he is criticising?

Appupen’s latest offering is his most ambitious yet. When he first took us to Halahala in Moonward, we were introduced to the whimsical logic of his universe. It was a critique of the world that we lived in, our prevalent consumer culture and the desire machine that it sets in motion. At that point, I hadn’t come across such a comic about a shared reality within the Indian context. The second book, Legends of Halahala, took us a little deeper into this world, and we followed. I picked up Aspyrus to see where it heads to now.

The book is divided into three parts, and liberally sprinkled with short format ‘advertisements’. The first one starts with a dream being dreamt and the dreamscape that gets built around it; this section is about the dream growing and spawning an entire world of its own. The second is of the dreamer who is propelled by this desire machine through life, including starting a family. The third is about the dreamer being avenged by his daughter; an attempted climax to a book that ends up just a little ahead of where it started.

There is no central protagonist in this series to keep it together, nor a continuing chain of narrative; no names, even. (The hero of the third chapter is called Mona and we know this only because of a name scribbled on a letter that is in the background, in one frame.) The projections we are taken through give us a sense of his world.

Appupen’s world is not a place, it is a condition, and there are various symptoms to that condition. These are etched as graphic stories that render themselves extremely palely; in most persuasive graphic pieces, there is the possibility of finding some clue the artist has left us, hiding; there, in the corner.

The first reading of Aspyrus was unexpectedly fast. I went through it again, this time glossing over the details and trying to dig a little deeper. The cleverness of the format strikes you, but you begin asking yourself, could this have worked better as a serialised comic? What is holding this book together? So, I read it again.

The formal project in this book is clear. It is not so much about the story that you are telling but how you are telling it. It is about how a certain linearity of motion and time is reconstructed as a comic that was central to its form. Moebius will nod in agreement; reading his Arzach series (a comic book collection of four short stories without text) is about soaking in the atmosphere of his own whimsical world. Going through the silent adventures of the hero through a terrain utterly magical and etched with great detail, the larger plot is secondary to its telling. With good comics it’s not merely about creating a sequential syntax, but playing with it; like the difference between speech and song.

And in this case for a song to be sung, Appupen (the pen name of artist George Mathen) needs to make a fourth book. The meta narrative seems to meander towards closure, but by the time you get to it there are no details that remain. Every structure has its own demand, and as much as the book is well designed, at no point can you recall the specifics of what you have just experienced. It always remains a little blurry, like a dream. An unwitting stroke of genius?

For a book that stitches together fragments of a fantasy world that we are still discovering, you wonder why we haven’t seen more of Halahala in the shorter format. There was the shorter Manta Ray piece that was effective; in parts some of the shorter narratives in the book shine through.

Within the infant history of the graphic novel form in India, this book is a milestone—in terms of pushing the form into territories other than that of a purely narrative function. Its publishers need to be recognised for their consistent effort towards promoting a wide and eclectic range of graphic literature in India. But, while celebrating this harsh critique on consumerism, we are left with a sense of irony. Would Appupen’s pen be moving to stranger songs if it were not for the commercial energies that a product such as this is ultimately part of? How much does this project really succeed in communicating its vision to the reader, not just as a graphic story but also as an object that is part of the same world that it is critiquing? For now, this beautifully produced tapestry about a dystopic world being overrun by corporation-led consumer mania costs only Rs 599 in paperback.

(Amitabh Kumar is a faculty member at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology and founding member of The Pao Collective)

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Amitabh Kumar