Review: Cutting Season by Bhanu Pratap.
Fantagraphics Underground, August 2024. 96 pages, illustrated. ISBN 9781683969815, hardcover, $29.99.
Reviewed July 2025
By: Mimosa Shah, Reference Librarian, Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, mimosa_shah@radcliffe.harvard.edu
Dystopian literature, games, and other media persist in their popularity as sites of catharsis, perhaps acting as a funhouse mirror to the current global realities of environmental disaster, economic decline, and political turmoil. Curt sentences and few landmarks define Cutting Season by New Delhi artist Bhanu Pratap, a collection of sixteen short stories that play with proportions and perspectives. This graphic novel has characters that morph, burst, and liquefy, sometimes merging with their surroundings and across pages. A bright palette of blues, yellows, reds, and pinks periodically interrupted with simple black and white, evokes feelings of ennui, glee, lust, anger, and even delight in the ordinary horrors of life as we know it. Rather than reading, one is moved to experience Pratap’s slanted visuals as they gradually break the carapace of ordinary lives.
Gnarled feet, knobby noses, and sinewy limbs regularly appear across stories, only to be transformed by the thud of an anvil or the surprise visitation of a ‘savior.’ “Into Me” revels in the awkward comic book hero fumbling towards eroticism. In “Engine,” the decision to use black and white emphasizes the crash and destruction of a locomotive headed to nowhere in particular or possibly becoming forever lodged into the shores of a subconscious mourning. Sometimes, there’s flatulence, and sometimes, there are odd juxtapositions, like a pair of wizened pomegranates suddenly materializing in a scene of pleasure.
Cutting Season is fascinated by and plumbs the nihilism of contemporary life. This volume would be an excellent addition at many libraries and is best suited for adult audiences seeking a mash-up of influences like Francis Bacon paintings, parodies of superheroes, and early aughts vampire flicks. Read-alike items for this include experimental comics such as Trust No Aunty by Maria Qamar and Grip by Lale Westvind.
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