A curious beast

It starts completely wordless for at least the first fifth of this nearly 300-page story, a tool that is revisited a few more times during its course; and Mathen (or Appupen, if you please) should perhaps be commended on being daring enough to let his pictures tell a story. He makes the best use of his skills in these pages, easily the most immersive in the book, before the plot drifts, and drifts it does, before eventually getting lost.

We are taken on a trip through time, witnessing allegorically a simple organism rising up from the oceans to walk on land, taking form, the founding of language, religion, society, consumerism, well, pretty much all that you would expect. A light-handed parable this is not, and that ultimately is where the work fails. It succeeds, certainly, as a world-building exercise, taking us through its timeline, introducing the rules for that world et al; but its characters, its designs, its histories and motivations are stock. The strongest sequences in the book, oddly enough is its opening chapter, ‘Moonwatcher’ which reappears in a coda at the end of the larger story.

Distanced for the most part from the rest of the narrative, the sequence is an whimsical Bill Plympton-esque short; its voyeuristic nature an effective tool to help the reader enter (and then exit) the world that is being created. And so you are introduced to Halahala, aforementioned world; The Mahanana, a false prophet or Prophit who eats money; Tika, the starving though prolific artist who enters the Mahanana’s world, eats money, loses his creativity and starves; Dishko the bearded enforcer; Supakola, the official drink; Kleenarse, the... well you get the idea.

We’ve seen this all before, primordial nature corrupted by want and greed and big business, and that’s disappointing since Mathen says, speaking about the book before its release, “I wanted people to interpret what they saw, the way they want. I want them to read between the lines.” And yet there isn’t much left to interpret, or imagine.
It’s all spelt out, has been spelt out, many many times before.

Sequenced as a series of narrative vignettes that advance Halahala chronologically, each vignette also feels like it moves too fast, that one can’t really immerse oneself into the world created, but is watching it play out sequentially, through a zooscope, skipping keyframe to keyframe. And the illustration style actually adds to that effect at times, the hatching giving you that odd feeling of watching a strange antique illustrated documentary.

Where the illustration fails though is in its clutter. Every panel is crowded and scratchy and the visual experience of a world evolving is lost since one goes from a crowded, scratchy jungle to a crowded scratchy concrete jungle. And at times, the illustration veers from the scratchy hatched lines to a grey-wash, that looks as though colour images were resampled and it’s all rather blotchy, dark and messy. This is likely a printing error, but it’s still a distracting one.

The art in most places doesn’t look like it was created to be printed in the paperback format that (all) graphic novels in India seem to be printed in. For a book so reliant on visuals moving the story forward, one wishes that the publishers had opted for a different format.

But for all the criticism one may level at Moonward, particularly for its originality, curiously, when taken in the context of the Indian Graphic Novel, itself a curious phenomenon, it is this perceived weakness that becomes its USP. This isn’t a biography of any sort, nor a re-imagining of a folk tale or something urban and angsty.

Rather, it’s an odd genre-curving work, equal parts fable as it is dystopian science fiction, and that in itself is commendable. And Mathen is a capable illustrator, the nature of his story hiding any technical problems with his draftsmanship without the comfortable cop-out of being the illustrator’s ‘personal style’.

And so Moonward succeeds, in its failings, for its ambition and for its scope; for the possibilities that Mathen finds open to him to revisit, an idea that he apparently is open to exploring. The ideas are there, the world exists, created by Appupen in substantially more than a week (from 2007 to 2009). Moonward, the book, exists as a primer for this world.