[Fantagraphics; 2024]
There is a paradox about the comic form. On the one hand, because of its visuality, it bears a clear location in the sense of identifying a city or a region by using any place-oriented markers; on the other, it lends itself to the grotesque and the surreal so well that a non-place entity becomes the place: The space as seen by the human eye or imagined and interpreted by the mind is the only space there is. Further, when used by a Global Majority artist, it can easily confound because it is assumed that, for instance, a piece of work coming from India might prove to be difficult to engage with because it does not come with an anchoring that can be traced to Indian history, geography, culture, and so on. Delhi-based artist Bhanu Pratap needs to be approached against this tension between expectations of location and location-defying abstraction of the surreal. His Cutting Season is a collection of sixteen stories about bodies crafted in the images of mostly wordless scenes and moments of nameless characters: characters moving, thinking, living.
The first story, “Afternoon Pockets,” sets the tone for the rest that follow. It opens with a person looking up, standing on what seems to be a terrace, thinking or saying that their foot feels sweaty. In the second panel, there’s the foot, except that it is not a solid thing but a liquidy, wavy thing: shapeless and fluid the way sweat feels on the skin. The waviness extends to the hands in the third panel: Soon, the character drops his left shoe, and it falls on others, their bodies equally strange and shapeless, squished under the foot. Next, their eye pops out, getting washed down the drain. They fix it back, the panel strangely zooming into the eye socket and the putting back of the eye. Red and yellow dominate to the point of rendering shapes, objects, or things less visible. Between the announcement of the sweatiness of the foot at the beginning and the ringing of the doorbell at the end, the story foreshadows Pratap’s style and themes in the rest of the stories: encounters with the starkness of body horror, the externalization of the unexplainable feelings within the body, the interweaving of the frames about the city within the narrative that is intensely focused on the interior.
Intimacy, in the sense of being unimaginable, is the best explored theme and trope in the visuals of the collection. “Into Me”, when read for the words alone, will give a sense of the “plot,” as it were:
The wave that fell on me as I thought of you has filled my lungs with water.
Under my skin I am crushed.
Wake up. Who gets knocked out by such a light blow?
I had to break a few bones.
For that I apologize.
Who are you?
Your savior.
I do not think I want to be saved.
Woah! How did I do this?
You slipped on a banana, and fell upwards.
Come down now. There is much work to be done.
Yes, indeed.
But first.
I am feeling a bit light in my spirit. I think I need to eat.
Who are you?
My lover?
Thank you for keeping me tethered.
Now we wait for the crash.
Crashing into me.
Crashing into me.
Spread over eight pages in twenty-four panels, that is all in terms of words uttered. The visuals, on the other hand, are loud. Red dominates the story: One character gets paid a surprise visit by their love interest or a stranger (we never learn). But the visit turns out to be a sexual escapade with bondage, sadism, and masochism all thrown in. The tethered character falls literally and sexually, crashing on the other. Despite the tightness of the plot, the story and the panels still make space for the constants in the collection: There are scenes or shots of the house, the window, the wires outside the house, the fan, and so on, before the climax of the sexual climax. The story also has Pratap’s penchant for the slapstick, that of falling on the banana skin. As in all stories, the location or the city could be any place; there are no specific places mentioned or identified. The space of the imagination in all its surreality is the space in which the stories are anchored.
Slipping and tripping happens in the title story, too, which is another sexual adventure. Two characters make love in a frenzy and escape before someone nabs them. They escape before they are caught, but as the closing panel says, “could not escape [their] love” with the visuals capturing an abstract, distorted sense of an embrace or sexual union.
The body in Pratap’s visual is a strange thing: There is the tongue, the penis, the vulva, but it is also marked by faces that are distorted in a Cubist or Expressionist vein. Mouths wide open to express ecstasy and eyes shut, with the rest of the face shrinking to let the mouths occupy more space on the page. A couple of panels have what looks like eyes and mouths very close to each other as if these were the sexual organs. These are joined in union and there is what looks like semen splattered around these parts of the body.
It takes several readings for each story in Cutting Season to “make sense.” Perhaps sense making is not even the point of the pieces. However, what establishes a connection between the stories and the reader is the instinct for probing complexity, its persistence, despite, or because of, the obscurity of the distorted body. Pratap’s surreal take on the body comes not from what it looks like to the others: flesh and skin tautly contained around the bones, muscles, and organs, identifying one as a specific person. It comes from the sense of body that is imagined within oneself. It is blurry, but, most importantly, it is also the site of the bizarre and the fantastic. It is real in the sense that reality is not external but visceral in the sense of locating the perverse in the world: the panel of a mouth sewed up, the panel with the act of passing wind as imagined as shapes out of a surrealist painting, with the body in countless panels distorted to an extent that it is not clear which part of the real, physical body they correspond to.
To return to the question of location, Bhanu Pratap has aroused the interest of an audience not necessarily located in India or locating him as an Indian artist. His take on the abstract will keep the enthusiasts of abstract art very engaged for its representation of the body in terms of the universal: There is no forced attempt to impose a brownness on his characters, homes, fans, cities, and internal mindscapes. Since this book repeats the format of the short stories from his debut, Dear Mother and Other Stories, Cutting Season might make readers curious about his experiments with the longer formats of novels and even series, essentially making them look forward to the possibilities the genre and the artist hold for explorations of the depths of mental lives.
Soni Wadhwa teaches English at SRM University, Andhra Pradesh, in India.
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