96 pgs. full color | $29.99 hardcover | W/A: Bhanu Pratap
Fantagraphics has a decades-long history of publishing some of the most fascinating and challenging works in the medium of comics. Though their bread and butter lies in literary graphic novels and archival re-releases of classic comics works (like the complete reprinting of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts or themed collections of 1950s EC horror comics), they keep that original indie spirit alive through their Fantagraphics Underground imprint, which releases limited-run editions of works that are truly off the beaten path—in their own words, “books that are innovative, quirky, idiosyncratic, oddball, experimental, or downright crazy.” They selected well in deciding to publish Bhanu Pratap’s Cutting Season, which is boldly, defiantly all of those things.
Cutting Season is a collection of 16 short stories from the New Delhi-based artist, ranging from 1 to 16 pages. Calling them “stories,” though, is a bit of a stretch—as Pratap himself put it in an interview with Helen Chazan of The Comics Journal, “I don’t think of a story in a linear sense.” The ones that come closest are the longer entries, which establish a scenario—a young man is abused back to life by a mystery woman, say, or two lovers on the run make time for sex even as a detective closes in on them. But even in these there’s no narrative, no beginning-middle-end, there’s just scenario and mood and the vaguest notion of the passage of time, and very little dialogue to help you make sense of it.
All of this is captured by some of the most abstract art you will ever find in the pages of a comic. Pratap draws some of the most bizarrely smooshed and stretched out human figures, like the rubbery people of a Bill Plympton or John Kricfalusi cartoon got melted by Salvador Dalí. His characters are already contorted to the point of unrecognizability (even if the backgrounds often show impeccable draftsmanship to drive home how this is a stylistic choice), but Pratap also contorts the “story” in similar ways with panel-to-panel transitions that rarely show the gradual progression of action and instead offer cryptic zoom-ins to elements of the situation or just eschew readability entirely for what feels like random non sequitur imagery. The inscrutability is even more accentuated in the shorter stories, which often make no sense at all. (Lest you think it’s all highbrow nonsense, though, there’s also a one-page gag whose sole dialogue is “This too shall pass…like a fart outta my butt!!” Artsy-“fartsy,” indeed!)
As difficult as Cutting Season is as a reading experience, it still offers its fair share of visually arresting imagery. In “Into Me,” the story of the abused man mentioned earlier, he is at one point bound and hog-tied hanging from the ceiling by thick ropes mere inches from the object of his desire, and that desire is palpable. In another, a man shoves long needles through his mouth then yanks them out one by one with a set of pliers in a gruesome bit of body horror. (In another, a man stretches open his eye socket to graphically reinsert a missing eyeball. Yikes.) A man with his head forever surrounded by fog yearns for his face back and Pratap fills the pages with sketchy smoke that weighs on you like it does the character. If you grok to Pratap’s art style, Fantagraphics’ release is about as impeccable a presentation of his visuals as you could ask for, featuring a large format (8.8 x 11.3) hardcover with heavy, matte finish paper stock that does an excellent job of capturing Pratap’s bold color choices.
Honestly, Cutting Season wasn’t the book for me—I love seeing artists experiment with the form of visual storytelling, but at the heart of it, I still need a story to invest myself in and that’s just not what Pratap is interested in providing. That said, I absolutely see the appeal in his cryptic storytelling, ultra-stylized art, and grotesque, stylized violence. If you crave surrealism in your comics and don’t mind your storytelling on the abstract side, give this book a look. | Jason Green
For more information or to order Cutting Season directly from the publisher, visit fantagraphics.com.
