‘I try to create a chasm between the word and the image that only the reader can bridge’
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The unclassifiable Nishant Saldanha has launched his Mr Good Guy series of books at Cafe Literati in Candolim, Goa. But these books are also unclassifiable because they have the form of the codex but have no titles, no author is named; they often do not have scripts or stories but rely on collage, montage, juxtaposition and the imagination of the reader; there are few words and those are from the dyslexic eponymous central character, Mr Good Guy and so they are laconic to the point of being gnomic.
This highly personal, independent comic was born when Saldanha was a student of the Character Animation department at CalArts but its reputation grew until it found a place in The Best American Comics 2019 edited by Jillian Tamaki and Bill Kartalopoulos alongside works by Joe Sacco and Nick Drnaso. Saldanha was also asked to do the end papers and riffed on the Last Supper, replacing the apostles with the wildflowers of Goa and the US.
These works of art offer no easy interpretations. They are whimsical but also melancholic; their colours are punk bright but the characters trapped in them enact scenes of loneliness, alienation and heartbreak.
But it also must be said their indecipherability, their inscrutability, is belied by their immediate...