In ‘Longform 2025’, comics and graphic narratives are empathy-generating machines

It’s rare that a literary anthology is practically 10 on 10, no notes. I’m speaking of the fantabulous Longform 2025, the third edition of the graphic narratives’ anthology produced by the Kolkata-based Longform Comics Collective. Their idea is to showcase the best and most cutting-edge work in Indian “sequential art”, as described by Will Eisner and later elaborated on by comics theorist Scott McCloud.

Across 18 entries, over 300 pages, Indian artists from various universities, including the National Institute of Design, along with independent contributors, tackle late-stage capitalism, climate change and communal tensions. There are also cats!

Midway, there’s a fabulous interview with journalist-cartoonist Joe Sacco, whose essay on longform comics inspired the collective’s name. The entries also include Santanu Debnath’s beautiful wordless series of paintings that explore the transformation of a village via industrialisation, digitisation and climate.

A new era

The first edition, released in 2018, was a radical statement: here are comics rooted in resistance. By 2022, the second edition had become sharper, more unpredictable, featuring a wide array of voices. The attempt to make a statement has continued with the new edition; most of the contributors are not cis-het men, despite the Longform Comics Collective editors being all men.

Nearly all 18 entries are top-notch. Compiling such a high-quality product is...

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