1. Please tell us what first drew you to comics.
When I was a toddler, my parents used to read to me the dialogue from Tintin comics, so I blame them. I grew up devouring Hergé, Archie, Amar Chitra Katha* comics, but so did most of the kids I knew. It was just the done thing at the time. I started drawing comics in the third grade, with a small gang of other kids – making up ridiculous characters, devising absurd stories – and I just never stopped. It just seemed organic to me, like it was second nature. Which is true for most kids at a certain point, I think – it's just that most tend to give it up. I just loved the medium (though I wouldn’t even have known to call it that) too much and it stuck with me along the circuitous path that my career has taken.
*Very problematic comics put out by an Indian publishing house, focusing on mainly Hindu mythology, Indian history and culture.
2. What did comics allow you to do as a memoir storyteller in Spellbound?
Comics let me indulge in the landscape of graphic memoir without inserting myself fully into my own narrative, which I was loath to do from the outset and why I had been avoiding the genre for so many years. I had just finished Apsara Engine (which would not be published for a good few years hence) and was wondering how to channel my comics energy. I’d been reading some other artists’ diary comics work – I'm thinking here of Kochalka, Jeffrey Brown, et al. - and I thought, surely I can do that as well. So I gave it a go, but comics allowed me to create the character of Anjali to ‘play’ me, so I wouldn’t have to draw myself. It was a bit of sleight-of-hand which also opened up the space for what eventually became Spellbound to indulge in bouts of fantasy and wish-fulfillment which supplemented the largely memoiristic project of the rest of the book. Writing the book also became therapy for me, as I found myself somewhat unsure, flailing and directionless as an artist at the time. So comics really helped keep me grounded and sane.
3. What messages/themes do you intend to tackle in your work?
More than anything, I’d like to think of my work as a vehicle for representation – a venue to put on the comics stage, characters that you don’t often see in mainstream or even indie/alt comics: trans people, people of South Asian heritage, older women, characters that trump genre and style. But beyond the notion of representation, I think my work, at least recently, has been dealing with what I perceive to be the nomadic nature of both being trans and being set apart from a (real or imagined) sense of cultural origin, of belonging. Which is why I’m also interested in the intersection of travel writing and comics, as genres that can document that feeling of being-in-flight, of crossing borders, of displacement.
4. Please tell us more about Apsara Engine and upcoming/recent other titles you'd like to share about.
Apsara Engine started off life as a compendium of: two minicomics that I’d done in the 00s, an older narrative that I’d started on my trips to India and then two longer-form stories that I started to write and draw after I quit my job in architecture. It ended up, blessedly enough, in the hands of The Feminist Press, who had the vision to take this somewhat random assortment of stories and weave them together into an oblique but consistent vision. They also asked me to write an additional piece, which is how “Swandive”, the most explicitly queer and trans story in the collection, came into being. Even though the pandemic quashed my hopes for a huge rock star-style debut for the book, I’ve been so psyched to see how Apsara has grown into her own and exceeded any boundaries I may have put on her, how so many people have written to me, saying how they related to these stories. Which is more than heartening, after wallowing in a decade of being told my comics were incomprehensible, almost bordering on gibberish.
I’m working on my third graphic novel now. I’ve just finished the first draft of the script and am looking forward to long hours at my drawing table, making the thing real. It’s going to be a book that picks up on themes from “Swandive”, and a piece I did in 2020 for e-flux journal, touching on ideas of tourism, tradition and what the idea of home means, both in terms of gender and culture, for trans people of the diaspora.
5. Where can we go to find out more about you and your work, including websites
and social media tags?
My website is www.bishakh.com and my Insta is @biche_bash. I’m very wary of social media and of the internet in general (I realize fully the irony of my saying this, as I’m talking about myself on the internet) but I do try and update everyone about upcoming comics, books, events and gigs.