Speaking/showing silence in Appupen’s graphic novels

ABSTRACT

There are two uniquely engaging qualities about Appupen’s works: first, all of his graphic novels are predominantly near-silent graphic novels with minimal use of words; and second, there is a conscious and sustained artistic effort towards myth-making in all his works. In the ‘post-millenial’ Indian graphic novels scenario, where much of what gets published can be neatly categorised into sub-genres such as graphic retellings of epics (Amruta Patil), Classics and Mythology/Biographical adaptations (Campfire titles), mock-superhero comics (Gotham/Virgin Comics), political satire and the city-dweller’s angst (Vishwajyoti Ghosh and Sarnath Banerjee), Appupen’s works stand out differently, in almost every aspect of comparison: content, art style, visual narrative structure and ideology. This difference in his oeuvre, allows the artist and his works to defy canonisation. While it may be difficult to pin down Appupen’s works to a genre/category, they can be treated as silent graphic novels. The focus of this paper would be to show how Appupen uses silence as both a motif and a technique in visual narration, to weave a world of modern mythology, the purpose of which is quite literally to draw out a parallel with our living world and make the reader/viewer rethink our potentially apocalyptic conditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Appupen
• silent graphic novels
• visual narrative structure
• myth-making

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Varsha Singh

Varsha Singh is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the Indian Institute of Technology, Jammu, Jammu and Kashmir, India. She was awarded her PhD in English from IIT Kanpur, in the year 2017. Her MA and BA Degrees (also in Eng. Lit) have been completed with a First Class, First Division at Jadavpur University and Presidency College (CU), respectively. Her teaching and research interests include Image Studies, Popular representations of Indian epics, Cultural translation and Literary Theory. Her Articles appear in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (Routledge), The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (Sage), The International Journal of Comics, and the Sahitya Akademi. Her academic projects include a national research seed grant in the area of Visual Culture in Contemporary India.