John Carter posters are on every bus today. It reeks of manufactured epic-ness with its Ariel Bold like typeface. The red mars in the background and the silhouette of the lone man looks heavily inspired from a cover of The Dispossessed, lending it that science fiction feel.
But I can't help smiling when I look at it. I always think of that man working as a pencil sharpener whole-seller who started writing the story in order to earn a few dollars more in order to support his family. Today that very story has spiraled into this mega million dollar commercial product.
It's quite awesome when you think about it.
So, what's behind a story? It's another story.
There is the patent clerk's job behind the special theory of relativity, a picnic behind Wonderland, a disenchanted man's suicide behind evolutionary game theory, a bet behind The Lord of the Rings, and also one behind The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and pencil sharpeners behind interplanetary love affairs.
That's all I can think of right now.
What's the story behind your favorite story?
To be quite honest, my favorite story is "The Adventure of Tintin - The Blue Lotus". Having read it so many times, and at so many different ages (the range being 8-22), I have come to savour this creation of Herge's like a fine wine. The level of detail, the portrayal of the characters and the sheer humanity that reeks out of every single one of them is amazing.
ReplyDeleteThe story behind this is probably well known to you - there being a real Chang whom Herge had befriended (and had portrayed again as a character in the brilliant Tintin in Tibet), there being an International Settlement in Shanghai and all the racial discrimination that dominated the place, the Sino-Japanese war and the politics that ensued at the time.
I suppose the real story was that the events leading up to the book transformed Herge as a human being - and for the better. Up till that point, Tintin was just another comic book with characters set in a symbolic world. After that, however, Tintin became real - wandering around in a real world, interacting with characters with believable emotions and flaws. That realism, I think, has never been captured in any graphic novel since then.
Hmm. I'll write someday on the story behind my story. Maybe I've already mentioned it sometime in Kgp. It was a story written by Tulika Bondhopadhyay in the Sunday Statesman sometime in the 90s. And even then, after I'd read it, I knew it was going to be my story. Spooky?
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