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The ancient Indian epic, the Mahabharata, is being retold in a new graphic novel that’s set to hit book stores around the world. Reporter Bruce Wallace has the story. (Artwork by Mukesh Singh. 18 DAYS © 2010 Liquid Comics LLC & Perspective Studios. All Rights Reserved) Download MP3

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LISA MULLINS: There’s a new version of an ancient Indian epic, the Mahabharata. It will arrive soon in book stores around the world. This version is called 18 Days. It’s going to be a graphic novel. And that format makes sense when you consider the story. It’s about super-warriors who meet for a final battle. 18 Days is the brainchild of a comic-book writer who lives in Scotland, an illustrator who’s based in India, and a company called Liquid Comics. They have offices in India and the US. The creators of 18 Days eventually hope to make it into an animated series or, maybe, a movie trilogy. Bruce Wallace prepared our story.

BRUCE WALLACE:  This…

MALE SPEAKER:  There were men fighting for their family’s legacy.

WALLACE: is not your father’s Mahabharata.

MALE SPEAKER: They fought for the word of Krishna.

WALLACE: Maybe your father didn’t even have a Mahabharata. Mine didn’t. If you grew up in India, though, chances are good yours did. The Mahabharata is this epic, sprawling story that’s a foundation of Hindu thought. It’s packed with creation stories and divine revelations and moral treatises and legends about kings and empires. The Bhagavad Gita is a small piece of it. People sometimes compare it to Homer’s Illiad. Its plot is complex. It’s about two sets of paternal first cousins, the Pandavas and the Dhartarastras. There are 5 Pandavas and 100 Dhartarastras. There’s about to be a fight. Krishna is there. Maybe I should let this guy explain it.

GRANT MORRISON: The story is immense and it begins almost in pre-history and traces the development of a family through several generations towards a climatic battle which changes the entire earth.

WALLACE: That’s Grant Morrison. He’s a really big deal in the comic book world. He’s contributed to series like Batman and Superman, worked for Marvel and DC Comics. Morrison was the one who had to tame the plot of the Mahabharata for this new graphic novel, 18 Days.

MORRISON: I must admit I was in despair at the start because I really thought I wasn’t going to grasp the rhythms of the story at all.

WALLACE: He kept reading and re-reading it, though, and slowly got hooked. He says what really appealed to him about it was that, unlike a lot of stories that have totally good heroes and totally bad villains, morality in the Mahabharata is pretty murky. Take Duryodhana for instance. He’s the story’s main villain.

MORRISON:  But at the same time he represents forces we all understand. He has the kind of force of untamed desire rather than a force of evil. So rather than being a story of good and evil, it’s actually a story about desire versus duty.

WALLACE: Morrison’s favorite character, though, is Karna. Karna was actually born into the heroic family but ended up with the villainous one. Morrison says he’s the story’s classic good-guy/bad-guy.

MORRISON: The one that the ladies will love to hate I think. He’s certainly the character that draws me most. He’s the one with the most depth and with most kind of appeal to me. I can appreciate the sadness of his character, but at the same time he’s a fantastic warrior and a very dangerous individual.

MUKESH SINGH: Yeah there was this doomed guy who had a lot of bad luck, but at the same time he had this selfish nature, and that superseded all of his other good qualities.

MORRISON: Mukesh Singh drew the illustrations for 18 Days. I talked to him over Skype from his home in Mumbai. He also thinks the book nails Karna’s struggle between desire and duty.

SINGH: I don’t think that aspect was ever covered in any significant way in any of the formats that I have read at least, or seen.

WALLACE: Singh is 33. He grew up in India. His father did have a Mahabharata, and he’d tell his kids stories from it. It was the art of Western comics, though, that really captured his imagination. He saw his first Superman comic when he was seven.

SINGH: You had this awesome drawing of a guy in blue. He’s breaking this chain of steel and it was a very, very, very dynamic drawing, something which I had not seen before. And it seems like some kind of bomb exploded in my mind.

WALLACE:  He got a degree in painting and worked some in TV, film, as a computer graphics designer, and on video games. When Liquid Comics came along, he saw an opportunity to not just take Western templates and adapt them for Indian audiences, but to create contemporary stories with wide appeal based on the Indian tales he grew up with. It’s exactly what Liquid Comics co-founder Sharad Devarajan wants his company to do. He calls it “reversing the funnel.”

SHARAD DEVARAJAN: The mission of Liquid Comics has always been to transform the perception of India from being an outsourcer to being a source, and to promote and empower a young generation of artists and creators in the country to bring a new visual style to the world.

WALLACE: 18 Days is the third Liquid Comics project based on Indian myths. Writer Grant Morrison thinks the Western world is finally ready for tales where morality isn’t black and white.

MORRISON: We’ve certainly become a little bit darker, and perhaps a little bit more pragmatic about the way we look at human nature, so I felt that the old hero stories could stand a little bit of twisting.

WALLACE: Or, to put it another way, life on earth was good for a while.

MALE SPEAKER: Until our world began its inevitable decay, and all life would be extinguished.

WALLACE: For The World, I’m Bruce Wallace.

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