A captivating Comic Art exhibition

‘The Flaneur in the City: A Comic Art Exhibition’ at Bangalore-based Gallery SKE featured unusual works by E. P Unny, George Mathen, Gokul Gopalakrishnan. Here, we get a glimpse of them:
  
‘Halahala is Here, is Now’ by Appupen

"For the show, I have drawn stories from Halahala – a mythical world that shares its name with a deadly poison in Indian mythology— at times strange and fantastic, at times a reflection of our own. It’s a collection of short stories strung together by their twisted urban reality and where the city has a continuous, lurking presence.

‘The Valley of Bloody Lal’ looks at the notorious underbelly of White City – of deceit, corruption, killings and monsters along the wake of a suitcase. ‘Midway’ is a futuristic narrative. ‘The Hunters’ is a surrealistic take of the city. In ‘Dreamsu’, Appupen shifts to a new city and inspiration strikes as he inspects a potential house to rent, changing him forever."

‘Fort Kochi: A Walk Through a One Square Mile Town’ by EP Unny

“Between cartoons I like to step out and sketch; for one, it is an escape from the cubicle - from the drudgery of bending over the drawing sheet or laptop to condense content into a rectangle that holds…

No such worry when you stand, stare and sketch. No need to ideate, no need to stylize, no need to bother about all the graphic dos and don’ts that make a printable tile. The best reward comes from the passerby who stops to ask, “Are you an artist?” The drawings were beginning to tell a story about the place in a manner that reflected much cartoonishness. There was no plan, no plot and not in the least the intention to mock but whichever way I shuffled the sketches the Kochi story wouldn’t go away. And the story seems to be held together by what is essential to the one who made it up – the comic eye.”

‘Meanwhile, Elsewhere’ and ‘A Superhuman Existence’ by Gokul Gopalakrishnan

For me, comics with their image-text interplay and time-space continuum relay a unique creative/reading experience–a collaborative, creative process that demands an equal share of involvement from both the artist and the reader. Often non-linear, self referential, and allusive, the art form throws up innumerable possibilities for creative expression. The works on view invoke this very nature of the art form – strolling, the city, and the superhuman.