“All I think about is keys and Gs, imagine that, me workin’ at Mickey D’s”
Ram V has put together an impressive year or two of comics, and now we have another one from him, the oddly named Grafity’s Wall, which is published by Dark Horse. The name is bit of a pun, as one character calls himself Grafity because he’s a graffiti artist, but the wall he paints also has its own gravity, drawing the three main characters to it, even as they live their lives in a hectic Mumbai. 
The book is drawn by Anand Radhakrishnan, colored by Jason Wordie, Irma Kniivila, and Radhakrishnan, it’s lettered by Aditya Bidikar, and there’s art assistance from Girish Malap.
Grafity’s Wall is split up into four chapters, the first three focusing on each main character before the fourth one wraps things up. The plots aren’t all that important; we get four people (there’s a fourth character, but she’s not quite as important as the other three) who are struggling through life on the margins of Indian society, and while the society itself might seem a bit alien to us ignorant Yankees, the situations certainly aren’t. The somewhat stereotypical situations that the characters are in doesn’t hurt the book, because Ram isn’t too concerned with them, as he wants to dig into the characters a bit more. So Suresh (“Grafity”) paints walls because he’s good at it and there aren’t any other outlets for him. He’s friends with Jayesh (“Jay,” who’s the most “Americanized” of the trio) and Chasma, both of whom have their own issues. Grafity dreams of bigger things, but of course he’s stuck where he is. We see him move through the city, getting hassled by cops and criminals alike, and when he goes home, he shares a devastating moment with his father, one more devastating because his father isn’t a bad guy and does seem to be looking out for him. Without being too dramatic, Ram shows how life can crush dreams far too easily, and it’s a good moment. Jay, meanwhile, is a low-level flunky for a gangster, even though he cock-walks through life because he thinks he has it made. Obviously, we know he’s going to be brought down a peg or two, but Jay doesn’t, so it’s sad when it happens. Jay isn’t a bad guy, but he’s been sold a vision of life that is attainable to only a few, and those few have to be ruthless, and Jay doesn’t have it in him. We get a glimpse of his home life as well, as it’s easy to see why he makes the choices he does, even if they’re misguided. 
Chasma is a bit portly, which means he’s the nerd of the group, as he wants to be a writer. He likes to write letters to people back in his village, but he decides to write letters with fiction in them and hand them out to people he sees on the streets, which is an interesting experiment. Chasma knows he will be rejected a lot, but he seems fairly sanguine about it, even though it eventually gets to him. He ends up with a girl, Saira, who is hanging around Jay’s boss, the gangster, a lot, and she has her own problems. Her desire to leave Mumbai and return to her home is the driving force of the fourth chapter, after we’ve focused on each character and understand more about them. It’s not a huge, heavy plot, but it does put things into motion, and we get to see how each character would react to an external stimulus, after we’ve seen about their inner lives.
The book has a lot of interesting things on its mind, which is why the lack of a big plot doesn’t really matter. Ram wants to give us an idea about what’s going on with these young people and how the world has shaped them, lifted them up, or let them down. Grafity is insanely talented, but he can’t get a break, and the world constantly wants him to think more like a “normal” person and give up his dreams. The final page of the book is a cruel, ironic twist, as we get, in three panels, a devastating takedown of gentrification and the way people love art but don’t want to support artists. It’s very clever. Jay wants to be a tough guy, and he can be, but not in the way his boss necessarily wants. It’s fitting that Saira, the woman, understands that she needs to get out, because her experience with the city is very different than the experiences of the men, and she’s the only one level-headed enough to have a plan to leave. The others believe they can bend the world to their will, and Saira is the only one who knows that it doesn’t work that way. While the book is not really a tragedy, the way the three main characters act is often tragic. The only misstep, really, is that we actually do find out what happens to them, which probably could have been left to our imaginations.
The art is phenomenal, as Radhakrishnan creates a Mumbai crowded with garbage, buildings, alleys, markets, and people. There’s so much going on in each panel that it’s fun to just look at the drawings and see all the interesting details. 
Grafity’s paintings, in particular, are spectacular, but the architecture of Mumbai is wonderful, too. The tenements and the streets are packed with life, and the art is so expressive you can hear the crowds and smell the food cooking in the apartments. The characters are interesting and unique, and Radhakrishnan’s slightly cartoonish style helps makes both the characters and the clothes they wear very fluid, as if they’re flowing through the city. Bidikar hand-lettered it, as he explains in the back, and the lettering is also terrific, as the use of both upper- and lower-case letters makes even the lettering look a bit more fluid, matching the artwork nicely. Even if you didn’t read the words in the book, the artwork creates a whole new world that Radhakrishnan explores beautifully.
Grafity’s Wall is a good comic, and despite the use of clichés with regard to what’s going on with the characters, Ram V finds ways to still make the characters feel like real people, trying to deal with real situations (clichés are clichés, after all, because they’re so universal). The art is wonderful, the story doesn’t let you down, and we get a glimpse into a city and world that’s different from many American cities but also very similar in many ways, which makes it interesting to see how it’s viewed by people who know it well. If you’ve enjoyed Ram V’s writing on the DC stuff he’s done, you’ll probably dig this. And you can get it below for a good price, plus if you use the link and buy something, we get a little bit of it, and that’s always fun!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
