Comics that force our attention to the little details

What kind of young person would want to read an old-fashioned comic book these days, when life is filled with a million visual stimulations?

- Somak Ghoshal

What kind of young person would want to read an old-fashioned comic book these days, when life is filled with a million visual stimulations? Going one step back, why would creators take the trouble to write, draw, color and make panels with painstaking effort, when many tech and AI tools can do a decent job with much less heartache?

As I opened the latest volume of Longform, an anthology of graphic narratives, I was intrigued by these two thoughts. Founded by a group of four illustrators, writers, scholars and comic-book aficionados a decade ago, the Longform Comics Collective has been working at the forefront of discovering unknown talents in this space. The original founding team of Pinaki De, Sekhar Mukherjee, Debkumar Mitra and Sarbajit Sen is now curtailed to De and Mitra with Argha Manna, a new member joining in. The new anthology keeps the quest for fresh voices alive and kicking. "These stories smell of our country, our times," as the editors write in the introduction, and almost every page upholds the promise.

Although not as uniformly exciting as its earlier editions, this volume bears the familiar hallmark of experimentation all over. The opening piece by Anantha Sriya A., in fact, answers the second question I was grappling with as I began reading.

A classic example of the quiet subversion that is the presiding spirit of all three editions of Longform so far,