Graphic crime noir by Saurav Mohapatra

“Mumbai Confidential was what we in the business refer to as a ‘passion project’,” says Saurav. “Vivek (Shinde, the artist for Mumbai Confidential) and I always cribbed about how most Indian comics (at the time) were limited to superheroes, mythology and highbrow literary ‘comix’. We set out to create something that hadn’t been done before create a truly international quality Indian crime comic book,” says Saurav.

He adds that the intent wasn’t to present a documentary style work rather, it was to take a phenomenon (encounter killings) and present it with all the Western trappings of a hard-boiled crime noir. “In a way, we set out to create an Ab Tak Chhappan-meets-Sin City,” says Saurav.

From the gritty storyline of Mumbai Confidential, it was a shift indeed to his next project, a graphic retelling of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s classic Moon Mountain for children. “It was a joy revisiting a childhood pleasure,” says Saurav. “I had read the Oriya translation as a kid, so I had context for most of it.”

The transition between the projects was easy enough for Saurav, who says he works on several projects, parallely. “I make my ADHD work for me,” he says with a laugh, before adding, “I have two kids and they have taught me the value of context switching. Seriously though, I enjoy the context switches as I have a very low threshold of boredom. Working on multiple simultaneous projects is like entering parallel universes. It’s challenging and extremely rewarding. It keeps life interesting.”

Saurav, who was born in Khurda, Orissa, and is an IIT-Kharagpur alumnus, first fell in love with comic books as a child, reading the works of Pran, Abid Surti and Govind Brahmania, Indrajal Comics’ reprints of The Phantom and Mandrake. But the book that brought him his “Dude! I want to do what this guy does!” moment was Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. “I read it fairly late in life, (but) it opened my eyes to what was possible with the medium,” says Saurav.

Ask him how writing for a graphic novel/comic book is different from writing a screenplay or prose, and he explains, “My favourite example is that of a ‘blink’. In a screenplay, it’s a passing mention and a quick shot to show a character blinking: ‘He blinks’. But since comics are static images, you need at least three panels: First panel with eye open, second panel with eye closed and the third with eye open again. Once you understand these idioms and limitations, you get better at writing comic book scripts.”