“Have you noticed that your face is caved in?” a disembodied narrator asks us in the two-page comic “Anvil” by Bhanu Pratap. “Perhaps from the anvil that fell on you yesterday. Or the armoire that will fall tomorrow.” In keeping with the non-chronology of the narration, the panels of the two-page comic, “Anvil,” resist an a-to-b sequence: the caved-in face appears in the first panel, whereas the anvil only appears in the second; subsequent panels go back and forth in time (first a splatter of blood on tiles, then an armoire falling; a man intact, then a face caved in). In eight short panels, the cartoonist blurs the sequence of cause and effect beyond recognition, replacing chronology with determinism: if a wound can appear even before the moment of injury, then the moment of injury does not matter; it is only the anecdotal manifestation of a doom that, in truth, is all-encompassing.

Though “Anvil” does not open Pratap’s beautiful second collection, Cutting Season, released this past August by Fantagraphics Underground, it is nonetheless a tone-setter. Pratap’s first collection, Dear Mother and Other Stories (Strangers Publishing, 2021), sees the cartoonist search for a consistent style through trial and error, pulling his characters in every stylistic direction: his noses are a sharp upturn in one place and Patrick Kyle-bulbous elsewhere. Yet his faces, vary though they may, are still recognizably human and, for the most part, intact. In Cutting Season, by contrast, Pratap crushes, stretches, and mangles his characters’ faces in new ways with each installment, presenting us with forms that are only loosely human, rendered in swooping, sweeping lines that reject bodily rigidity.

The key comparison here, I think, is the painter and cartoonist Jason Murphy, whose work channels Golden Age-era American animation while boiling down characters to blank ciphers. Here, instead of a simple chronological continuation of the rubberhose tradition, we have a furthering of its underlying logic: a physiology devoid of baseline. A Fleischer Studios character hit on the head with a frying pan would, eventually, return to the form dictated by flesh and skeleton; a character by Murphy or Pratap, by contrast, would sooner break down, settling into injury as a default state. It is not that the bodies in Pratap’s work merely cannot heal – they cannot tell the difference between ‘proper’ and ‘improper.’ 

Where Murphy’s textures in works like The Character and Lands Have Mercy are usually flat and monotonous by design, more preoccupied with the untamed vitality of line, Pratap is much more preoccupied with the resulting shape; his inks are heavy enough, the line-weight variable enough, to translate the physical absurdism of Murphy into fleshy three-dimensionality, further elevated by a color palette dominated by bold yellow and red. This, in itself, is a statement – ultimately, there has to be recognizable, physical weight: humanity must first be extant in order for you to feel the devastating pain of it being robbed.

It is no coincidence, of course, that of all body parts, it is the face that suffers the most damage. Pratap’s work rarely lingers on character, which is to say, on specific people with specific lives; details are offered in a fleeting, sparing fashion, allowing the cartoonist to focus on the tone of a moment frozen in time. But, pointedly vague though his scenarios and characterizations may be, it does not take away from the specific ugliness of his emotional truth; as a whole collection, the pieces are not ‘stories’ so much as parables, whose function is to be projected as an all-encompassing world-view. And Pratap is, indeed, consistent in his ‘message’ – common to all of these pieces is a breaking point, simultaneously physical and emotional, rendered in ways that revel in raw self-prostration. These are not comics that are comedically relatable in their blankness; if we relate to them at all, it is not in a way that we would like people to associate with us. 

See, for that matter, “Afternoon Pocket,” the story of senseless cruelty that opens the collection. Standing on the roof of his building, a man whiles away the hours by throwing one of his sweat-soaked shoes down at passersby on the street. When eventually he loses interest in this exercise and goes back home, he seems even more bored, more helpless: seemingly voluntarily, he pops his eye out of his socket then puts it back, as Pratap’s camera wanders down the corridor, the sparsely-furnished kitchen, the dripping faucet. After the rush of the story’s first half, this second half feels like a crash, a collapse into idleness; both cartoonist and protagonist don’t know what to do with themselves, what to look at, where to go. 

The mood prevalent in “Afternoon Pocket” is a childish solipsism: the protagonist’s insistence that he’s throwing his shoe “for science” is evocative of the sort of ‘scientific experiment’ that a child would engage in when left to their own devices, mixing together kitchen supplies to no particular end other than to see what happens, while his hope that “some day I have the courage. To let the other shoe drop” not only explains the comic’s central conceit (the sublimation of common turn of phrase into slapstick pun) but underscores its senselessness as well: he isn’t actually waiting for any other shoe, and the only proverbial other shoe is merely an expansion of his own damage. But every scientific experiment must have a subject, and we can again see the resemblance to Jason Murphy in the reactions of the passersby: when the shoe lands on a man’s head, its impact physically crushes him as if he were a soda can under a shoe; when a woman picks up the shoe and smells it, scent-lines visibly wafting into her nose, she is so disgusted that she must hold her head in her hands as it detaches from the rest of her body. Juxtaposed with the protagonist’s overwhelming sentiment, this break from anatomical reality is given a grimmer edge: the boredom of the individual becomes the senseless suffering of the environment; through his nihilism, the rest of the world becomes less real, less tangible. When finally the protagonist hears his doorbell ring and can smell the distinct stench of his shoe coming closer, inevitably we understand how much of a non-event this all is: this has happened before, and it will happen again – there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it, and we are all the poorer for it.

On occasion, this suffering is not external but self-inflicted. The two pages of “Ways to Go,” rendered in stark black-and-white, deliver on the promise of the title as the comic opens on thick, viscous smoke billowing from an apartment building and ends on a slashing of wrists from a figure that appears to be made out of all limbs, their head and torso either enveloped in shadow or nonexistent altogether; “Pratfell for Virginia,” Pratap’s narrator states, “I want to be like Virginia Woolf someday. At the bottom of a lake / with stones in my pocket.” Death, here, is resigned to, it’s no big deal: the people in Pratap’s comics have already lost their forms, their constituent logic – they are already, to a great degree, dead, marked from the get-go. 

Nowhere is this emotional desolation rendered as vividly, as painfully, as in “Sediment,” which sees him eschew his typical clean ink-lines in favor of a scratchier, blunter, shakier look (evidently achieved through the use of a ballpoint pen). Here, in what is possibly the strongest comic of the collection, Pratap’s protagonist finds himself assailed by a fog “selectively placed,“ which envelops his head and nothing else. Over and over he tries to power through the fog: he tries to flick it away with his hand, but to no avail; he tries to put on his glasses, but they’re just whisked off. But any attempts to power through are, of course, doomed to fail: “I only want my face re-turned [sic],” he laments, over and over, at the end, as he ties himself to a ceiling fan and replacing the fog with the splatter of blood. A fairly straightforward metaphor for depression and suicidal ideation, the piece dives deep into its mindset by presenting us with no good options: in life and in evident death, there is no indication of any existence for the protagonist outside of pain. Pratap’s visual point of view, in a Martin Vaughn–James-esque effect, goes back and forth between the protagonist’s apartment and the surrounding streets, which appear empty and apathetic, underscoring the protagonist’s loneliness; there is nobody on the street, no passerby to notice anything even if there was anything to notice. The only one left to bear witness is the reader – an entity equally faceless and all the more powerless.

Other protagonists choose to channel their aimlessness into submission. In “Croaning,” originally published in black and white in Sloane Leong and Jordan Shiveley’s 2023 David Cronenberg fanzine Murdered Futures, we see a person voluntarily lose their humanity; they lie, unconscious, in a dead end of a room (it might be a padded cell, though Pratap’s rendering of the wall and ceiling tiling is entirely rigid and straight-angled), as fingers are inserted, cords are inserted, and organs are removed. Though “Croaning” is not overtly sexual in its actions, its atmosphere is palpably erotic as the man takes pleasure in not only in the surrender of his body but also in the physical act of being penetrated. 

The version of “Croaning” that appears in Cutting Season is different from the piece’s original publication in Murdered Futures; apart from the new and particularly dramatic coloring (it originally appeared in black and white, and here it is drenched in red), Pratap chooses to change the ending by removing the sole narration balloon in the final page. Initially, the final page sported the narration “I hope they have cable managers in Heaven” (a clever, funny line whose comedy becomes mordant when presented alongside the splash image: a warped body, its back connected to a nigh-brutalist contraption with two rods, a mass of cords erupting from the face); in this new appearance, Pratap abandons this line, ending instead on the previous page’s narration: “I couldn’t ask for anything more. I just hope.” The change in impact here is total – as they lose more and more of their human form and find themself stuffed with mechanical components, the protagonist’s aspirations have no end-point, nothing to make their struggles worthwhile; as the ecstasy is juxtaposed with suffering, hope becomes indistinguishable from desperation.

A similar kind of desperation appears in “Late Night Spread” (a newly-colored version of a piece originally included, in black-and-white, in Pratap’s first collection, Dear Mother and Other Stories), wherein a man named David calls his unnamed girlfriend. He’s calling just to tell her to look at the moon. “David,” the girlfriend tells him, “I didn’t know you were romantic.” As David holds up his phone with one hand, he uses the other to masturbate, calling attention to the moon’s roundness. The choice of the word round instead of full seems pointed: the circle of the moon is, of course, the only item of simple, straightforward geometry to be found in Pratap’s landscape. David’s face, in the first panel of the comic, is nigh-cubist in its pleasure-induced contortions: nose (complete with bubble of snot) held aloft at the top of the head, eyes drooping to just over the lip, drooling tongue descending like a flag at half-mast. As David finally reaches his climax, you get almost a sense of impossible longing: neither David’s nor his girlfriend’s bodies will ever reach that sort of perfection; he is masturbating to an idea of unattainability – and his girlfriend has to stand there and listen. 

This is a pivotal principle of Pratap’s dramatic sensibilities: where sex appears, it is not premised on the even interpersonal keel of love; it is an act more of dopamine production, of a base comfort, than of actual attraction. Noteworthy, in this context, are the two appearances of a mommy kink in Dear Mother and Other Stories: the protagonist of “Strange Afflictions” cries out “Debase me, Mommy!” in the midst of orgasm, and his wish is granted as he ejaculates all over the room and is thrown out of the house; the ‘mother’ of the titular story works as a domme for a middle-aged man who fires her for “desecrating the altar of our love” when she tries to touch his penis as he nurses on her breasts – inherent in these acts is a psychological regression into the comfort of innocence. Sex, in other words, is an escape from self.

“Who are you?” a man asks his sexual partner in “Into Me.” “Your savior,” she replies, to which he says: “I do not think I want to be saved.” In this abstraction of eroticism, Pratap delivers an interesting juxtaposition between slapstick motifs and BDSM imagery: the protagonist at first slips on a banana peel and ‘falls upwards’ to the ceiling, then later is suspended from the ceiling in bondage the woman asserts her dominance him with a large mallet, apologizing for “[having] to break a few bones” but not before berating him for “[getting] knocked out by such a light blow.” Crucially, this is not the dynamic of healthy kink, contingent on the comfort of consensual boundary-testing; the erotic charge stems precisely from the awareness that its romance, too, is doomed. (The “[crash] into me” described in the woman’s closing dialogue comes as the man goes down on her, and the two bodies melt into one mass, losing their selfhoods.)

The cartoonist does try, on occasion, to put a pause to this all-encompassing, all-defeating despair, as is the case in the three-panel “This Too Shall Pass.” On its face, it’s a perfectly simple gag: “This too shall pass…” the protagonist narrates in the first panel before going quiet in the second panel, hunching over, and farting out the narration “Like a Fart Outta My Butt!!”; under a less interesting artistic hand, this would be a chuckle-worthy but largely forgettable joke riffing on the hollowness of catch-all affirmations. Yet Pratap does not take the straightforward route, instead infusing his gag with tactility. Note the way he renders the protagonist’s body in every panel: in the first, distended but flatly-rendered; in the second, a heft of contorting ink-lines; in the third, just as the fart is expelled, even flatter than the first panel but now full of broken curves, reminiscent of Max Huffman’s geometric contours. Note, too, the way the body loses coherence at the end: the belly’s folds are evocative of a colon (as if there is no flesh or bone under the skin to cushion the internal organs), while the pose appears inhuman – ass held up, one foot touching the opposite hand seemingly in midair, the other foot evidently planted on the floor. It’s a sequence of physicality so counterintuitive, so contrived, that it completely distracts from the juvenility of the narration – and it’s precisely this friction that makes it worthwhile.

But, if respite exists, it is only as an exception that proves the rule, a teleological suspension; ultimately, collapse will always win out. The two lovers at the heart of the concluding story, “Cutting Season,” are on the run, and as they have sex they hear someone coming up the stairs. Again, the man is at the mercy of the woman, as he “slips onto [her] device,” a metal rod that functionally skewers him, before he penetrates her from behind; again, it is an act of sex as self-loathing: “soon I will trip on myself,” the man narrates on the first page, “as I escape myself to you.” We do not know why this couple is on the run, if they are guilty of anything outside of a shared existence that appears, fundamentally, transgressive. Finally, they make their escape, leaving behind their own innards, and one of them speaks: “We managed to escape them. But we could not escape our love.”

Structurally, “Cutting Season” is a perfect come-down. The first page, which shows the man running down the street en route to his beloved, is perhaps the closest that Pratap has come to Lale Westvind levels of kinesis, the legs red and plasticine-like, their impact on the concrete a splatter of yellow. The final page is lavender with deep-purple shading, not calm so much as subdued. Its three panels, much smaller and narrower than the preestablished baseline, feature extreme close-ups of the woman’s breasts and crotch and the man’s penis, splattered with fluids; Pratap cleverly uses his coloring in a way that makes it unclear whether the fluid is semen or blood so as to elevate the overall bleakness. If there is any titillation here at all, it is not one that comes from sanitized, well-lit Pornhub fantasy (see how Pratap draws the shaft of the penis: it looks almost wooden in its grooves); it is rasping, painful. If “Anvil” sets the tone for personal doom, “Cutting Season” does the same for the interpersonal. The story’s closing narration is a thesis statement if there ever was one: the lovers use one another to escape one another. To Pratap, there are no Hallelujahs outside of the cold and broken; love may obscure and distract from various things, but if you count on it to heal you – then the joke is on you.

If there is one element of Pratap’s art that I must voice some ambivalence about, though, it is his lettering. Where dialogue and narration exist in Pratap’s work, they are almost always rendered in the same style; the font has no variance in letter-forms, only a stenciled monotony, and the balloons look mechanical in their perfection. This stylistic choice is a double-edged sword if there ever was one: on one hand, it lends an element of immediate, blunt legibility that grounds the elliptical narratives and chaotic anti-anatomies; on the other hand, it adds a deadened, robotic aesthetic that feels almost antithetical to, or, at the very least, inconsistent with both the distinctly-human tone of Pratap’s speakers and their total kinesis and malleability. It is hard to imagine what Pratap’s dialogue would look hand-lettered, or with hand-drawn balloons (whether the style would be clean and labored or heady and scratchy), but in his current lettering there is something dashed off, perfunctory.

All in all, however, the vision at the heart of Cutting Season is sweeping and absolute, cementing itself as one of the most fully-realized—and most harrowingly beautiful—releases in quite some time: Bhanu Pratap’s is a world suspended between profound distress and abject resignation. Its collapse isn’t merely inevitable – it has already happened and is just waiting for you to catch up. So, while you’ve still got time, before doom becomes self-evident, Bhanu Pratap would strongly advise you to find yourself somebody to love, to submit to — it won’t help you a single bit, and it might just make things worse, but at least you’ll have one another’s bodies to cushion the blow.