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Coming of age in the late 70s and 80s, comics artist Bishakh Som would pore over maps of cities she’d never visited, tracing routes across the paper with her fingers and envisioning what the scenes on each street might look like. She read maps much like she read Tintin, American superhero floppies, and Anant “Uncle” Pai’s Amar Chitra Katha best-selling series of comics inspired by Indian history and mythology — they all opened up her imagination to places and ideas she could only, at this time, fantasize about.
That graphical curiosity eventually led Som to her primary discipline as a cartoonist, an art form she’s practiced for most of her life, though with plenty of detours along the way.
Born in Ethiopia, where her Indian parents were stationed by the United Nations, Som’s family relocated to New York City in the early 70s. There, her interest in graphic storytelling grew alongside a love for drawing. As she entered college, her parents weren’t entirely thrilled with the idea of her studying art; a career in architecture seemed like a more practical application of her talents, so she immersed herself in the field. After graduating from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design in 1995, she worked in architecture firms full time, while applying her day job’s skills of composing built environments to her art.
Som has since left her career in architecture behind, a field widely known for its toxic and sexist culture. But she continues to draw inspiration from maps and architectural renderings in her phantasmagorical comics, which will finally reach a wider audience with the April 14 release of Apsara Engine (Feminist Press), her debut collection of graphic short stories.
An underground figure in comics — yet another industry dominated by white straight cisgender men, with trans and queer creators and women often pushed to the fringes — Som has honed her style through short pieces she’s published in various outlets over the past two decades. Her work has notably appeared in The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts column; BuzzFeed; collections such as 2016’s We’re Still Here: An All-Trans Comics Anthology and the Hi-horse anthology series, which Som co-edited in the early 2000s.
Readers of her previous work likely notice a consistent thread: Som often centers femme South Asian characters, whose stories unfold in carefully constructed worlds. Relevant themes of belongingness, place, diasporas, and resonant memories take center stage in her first nationally distributed book, a deeply personal project she worked on throughout the 2000s and 2010s.
Som did not set out to create a unified body of stories. She created Apsara Engine piece by piece, exploring relationships between people and their environments, friends and lovers, myth and reality. What emerged was a group of dramas that seem to exist in a similar realm — all shaped through a period of disruptive changes in her own life. “A lot of these stories I wrote before I ‘hatched,’ before I came out as trans, so a lot of the characters reflect what I was going through,” says Som, who opened up about her identity roughly halfway through writing the collection.
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“I happened to fall into a community of trans women and femmes around that time; that was the catalyst for me to recognize my own gender,” she says. “The creative work was a way of processing what was happening in my cloudy vision. It was a way to imagine myself as one of those characters and say, this is what I might be like or what I could’ve been like in another life. Writing these characters was saying there’s no difference between the possibilities and realities of gender.”
But don’t mistake Apsara Engine for a memoir. The title, with its juxtaposition of spiritual and industrial images, doubles as a miniature manifesto for her surreal storytelling tendencies.
“Apsaras in Hindu and Buddhist mythology are like these celestial nymphs; they’re playful, mischievous and very seductive. A lot of the inspiration comes from my background and family history as a Bengali,” says Som. “Our family’s goddesses were Kali and Durga, these very fierce embodiments of feminine energy. These are the sorts of gods I grew up with — a lot of that rubbed off on me and maybe made me, in terms of transness and queerness, who I am now.”
“The ‘engine’ part comes from an affinity I have for science fiction,” she says. “I was wondering how these two concepts of a generator and a fierce feminine power could be combined.”
The book contains eight enchanting works of fiction portrayed in chilly monochromatic tones. The stories vary considerably in form and mood, though the group achieves a sense of unity through the magical realism pervading each. Some stories lean in a darkly comedic direction, like “Throat,” a vignette in which a woman crosses paths with a man she had previously met at a party; the encounter gets awkward when she momentarily steps away and leaves her unusual pet, a human-dog hybrid, alone in his company. The book’s namesake piece functions more like an oblique puzzle, with fragments of daily life in a retrofuturistic city told through charts of urban landscapes. And more sprawling narratives — like “Meena & Aparna,” an intimate portrait of close friends in conversation, and “Pleasure Palace,” which unravels like a parable across 40 pages — show off her knack for cinematic pacing.
Som's uncanny visual style highlights emotional contrasts: Sharp lines form expressive faces, which are set against soft water-colored backdrops rendered in sepia tones. A dazzling but restrained color palette stops your thumbs at each story's title page. And her meticulous lettering looks chunky and florid, like the enlightened handiwork of an ancient scribe.
Her lifelong interest in cartography bubbles up in subtle ways throughout Apsara Engine, but takes center stage in the allegorical “Swandive,” a story exemplifying the beauty and humor of her work that feels like the beating heart of the collection.
“Swandive” chronicles a pair of desi trans academics, Onima and Amrit, who meet at a conference. As the first panels depict Onima delivering a paper on mapmaking, the quotable dialogue makes a turn toward the esoteric. “I imagine trans geographies to be a means of using cartography as a generative tool rather than a descriptive device … a way to chart possibilities, ways of being that have yet to manifest themselves,” Onima says, capturing the attention of Amrit, gazing from the audience.
Among all the works in Apsara Engine, “Swandive” is notable for how explicitly and poetically it brings the multifacetedness of trans experiences to the fore. After Onima’s presentation wraps up, the two characters bond over drinks at a bar, where their conversation turns to the intersectionality of gender and race, specifically of trans and South Asian American identities. “It’s like being unmoored twice over. It’s like you‘ve lost a culture you never had, and you’re banished from the family you thought you had,” confesses Amrit, with the panels shifting focus between the characters in a natural rhythm that makes you feel like you’re eavesdropping on a private conversation.
Som’s wit shines through here, too, as her introductory panels poke fun at the self-seriousness of academia while also building a setup to the tender twist the story takes in its final pages. After the couple moves upstairs to a hotel suite, Onima startles Amrit when she draws a vial of her own blood, which she dips her fingers into and then begins painting a magical map, literally deploying the theories she presented at the outset of the story. Onima traces a river, bridges, avenues leading to piazzas, an art school built by a lesbian philanthropist, free housing for gender-nonconforming kids, a small park where a group of trans girls plays soccer and so on. As the imaginary city grows district by district, the comics’ panels turn to detailed splash pages, showing the characters interacting with each other in their fully realized fantasy — the trans utopia they’ve manifested together, painted in their own blood.
“As I was drawing and writing the story, I thought the act of drawing within cartography is the same sort of pursuit as claiming, creating, and enabling your own space as a trans or queer person,” she says.
“It’s a metaphor for the way trans people create our own cultures — a way of imagining something that isn’t there and then saying, we are going to live this way. We create our own spaces where we can thrive.”
And with Apsara Engine, Som has manifested such a space for all of us to visit — a portal to a subversive universe that twists our own sense of reality in strange and empowering ways.
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