You’re a true blue Bengalurean if you’ve tasted Death by Chocolate or the only other city you can tolerate is Mysore. We have heard these and many other such associations with namma Bengaluru. But these three Bengaluru boys — Praveen Vempadapu, Jaideep Undurti and Gokul Dharmana have gone a step ahead and created a graphic novel titled Bangalore: A Graphic Novel Every City Is A Story drawing stories about the city’s apocalyptic future.
The team behind the pretty, post-apocalyptic picture book, tells us how they got the idea of making this graphic novel on Bengaluru. “Our first book was Hyderabad: A Graphic Novel and we operated out of this assumption that great cities influence their inhabitants. Just as Bombay or Paris have their own distinctive voices — the kineticism of Bombay, often shows in works written there. Bengaluru too has a distinctive signature and has a huge talent pool of graphic novel authors and artists and we wanted to showcase the stories they wanted to tell about their city. It is for this reason that we created Bangalore: A Graphic Novel, an anthology of short stories. In general terms, the Every City series eschews cliches and fights reducing cities to single, so-called iconic images.
For instance, Hyderabad doesn’t have a single depiction of the Charminar anywhere, similarily there isn’t anything directly about beer pubs or the IT crowd in Bengaluru,” says Praveen. So what is unique about this book, we prod and Jaideep states, “When you think of any city there are few things that come to your mind. This can be symbols, architecture, places or cultural aspects. We are not interested in such simple representation. We look into themes and ideas which are not visible to the naked eye but form a core essence, some intangible glue that holds a city and its culture. This graphic novel is as much from Bengaluru as it is about Bengaluru — it is a collection of stories that could only be written in a certain place, in a particular time, as much as it is about a certain place or a particular time. The contributions are a real kaleidoscope of styles, stories and ways of seeing the world.”
So what you can see in the book, adds Jai, is, “George Supreeth’s occult ‘origin’ story for the city done in classic comic-book lines, which will shock a few people out there, for its inversion of the usual legend. We have Appupen with his black humour looking at Bengaluru 20 years from now. At the other end there is Prashant Miranda looking back at the city that was, a meditation on memory.
Young artist Ramya Ramakrishnan places the venue of her story at the India Coffee House and spins out a yarn featuring time-travel and coffee. Thrill meister Zac O’Yeah teams up with one of India’s leading comic-book artists, Harsho Mohan Chattoraj to solve the perplexing mystery when an ATM goes missing while CG Salamander and Devki Neogi delve into true crime and a dark secret buried in Richmond Road. Comics mavens Solo and Oz follow a vigilante operating from the roofs of Bengaluru while Sumit Moitra chases down a legend from the 1940s.”
