Editor’s Note
Inspirational teachers are as much a mainstay of fiction as cops with tragic pasts, over-busy dads who under-appreciate the meaning of family, and hard-working evil henchmen who never give up. We all know the plot of the Inspirational Teacher movie. Madhusree Basu’s story is not that story. It has a Teacher —a disgruntled football coach whose B-plan is to work as a waiter— and it has a troubled student —a kid who prefers not to play— but then the story goes off in a different direction.
A lot of contemporary graphic fiction seems to be trending towards a minimal reliance on words. Lettering is hard to arrange aesthetically on a panel. It distracts from the artwork. So fewer the words, the easier it is for the artist. But perhaps it is also because writing is a very different skill from drawing. It may even be an opposing one. After all, images are direct and leave little room for closure. Indeed, this is why we need a sequence of images separated by gaps or “gutters”. The closure is in the gap. Whereas literary text is all about indirection and closure. Madhusree Basu’s The Red Moon stands out for being unafraid of text. You can view, yes, but you can also read. It’s quite inspiring really.
—Anil Menon
The Bombay Literary Magazine
Acknowledgements
Cover image credits: Elahe Tahan, Red Moon. Location: Yazd Province, Iran, Published on December 1, 2020. Reproduced here under the Unsplash License.
A “red moon” is a partial or full lunar eclipse of the moon. I other words, the Earth is between the sun and moon, and the earth throws some shade on the moon. And the red colour is on account of the shorter wavelengths— Oh, for God’s sake, just look it up. It turns out that photographing a red moon is rather difficult. For one thing, these are mating seasons for werewolves. Less seriously, photographs of a red moon can be easily mistaken for a setting sun. Then there’s the general scale problem of photographing an astrophysical object. Elahe’s photograph, which she has so generously provided for free, foregrounds the Earth. We see fronds and trees photobombing the moon and there’s a comfort to that. All these vast cosmic events, but we, the insignificant, are grounded by the foliage. Life is here, flourishing, green, un-eclipsed.
Author | Madhusree Basu
MADHUSREE BASU is a comics-maker and performer based in Chennai and Kolkata.
