Title: The Tall Tales of Vishnu Sharma
Author: Written by Samit Basu, artwork by Ashish Padlekar.
Format: Comic book mini-series (five issues).
Reviewed by: Elena
Vishnu Sharma is a somewhat apathetic teenager living a normal life. Until one day a trio of magical talking animals follow him home, and inform him that it is his destiny to Save the World. And then Harry Potter shows up and tries to kill him. No, seriously.
Brief Summary:
Vishnu Sharma is a typical teenage nerd who loves video games. He has little interest in the tattered old copy of the Panchatantra that his grandfather hands down to him. One day, however, a group of three animals from the Panchatantra stories approach Vishnu and beg for his help. It turns out that Someone – or Something – is hunting down all of the old stories in the world, and killing them. Vishnu is extremely reluctant to help these strange creatures, until their mysterious enemy attacks him. Now Vishnu is forced to flee, with his animal allies, into the world within the pages of the Panchatantra book.
Impressions and Opinions:
Action-packed, imaginative, and occasionally quite funny, Tall Tales is the story of what happens when modern pop culture icons declare war on the folktale heroes of old. If this sounds a little bit like the plot of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, well, it is. But any similarity between American Gods and Tall Tales starts and ends with that one-sentence description.
The plot of Tall Tales is, on the surface, all about Vishnu’s journey through the worlds of the Panchatantra stories. And Vishnu’s journey is not so much a literal one – frankly, he doesn’t physically travel very far – as it is a personal one. Whereas Tall Tales could easily have gotten caught up in its own high concept, romping through fairytale worlds and having ancient heroes do battle against modern book and cartoon characters, the narrative instead grounds itself by focusing on Vishnu’s character. Vishnu is an everykid, but he’s not just a cipher. He’s a complicated person who has realistic reactions to the insanity that he’s suddenly confronted with. He’s not always brave. He’s not always heroic. In fact, he makes at least one really bad, selfish decision in the third issue of the series. Vishnu doesn’t follow a straight path from everykid to epic hero. Instead, he fails miserably, and the final two issues of the series center around Vishnu’s attempts to correct his mistake and redeem himself.
Although dense with mythology and folklore references, Tall Tales is actually quite accessible to teen readers. This is probably helped by the fact that it is (sometimes incredibly) violent, with plenty of fantastic action sequences that help balance out the more ponderous, philosophical talky scenes. And, to be perfectly honest, the violence gets really violent. The series opens with a graphic murder, after all. There is blood, some gore, and a rather disturbing scene in which a villainous child gets shot in the head. Whether this makes the series more or less appealing to teen readers, well… I guess that depends on the reader. One thing that is definitely appealing about the series, however, is the humor. Samit Basu has a tendency to make some (but thankfully, not all) of his characters devastatingly witty. Basu’s writing will appeal to readers who expect their action heroes to be able to crack jokes at the same time that they’re decapitating evil robots. Padlekar’s colorful, visually inventive artwork also helps make the series a lot of fun to read.
Tall Tales is so much fun to read, in fact, that it’s easy to forget how densely-packed the story is, both in terms of its literary references, and in terms of its complicated narrative and frequent moral twists and turns. For example, here is the way that the Jackal from the Panchatantra introduces himself to Vishnu:
“Jack of all trades, of fine taste and immaculate pedigree, son of old Anubis himself. You’ve met some of my relatives, no doubt – the dog in Two Gents of Verona? The real hero in dear Mr. Forsyth’s slightly overdone thriller? The wily coyote? Or his great-grandfather, the Aztec’s Ueuecoyotl? No? Mr. Kipling’s Tabaqui? Something more contemporary? Very well, the Anti-Christ’s mother in The Omen – my niece.”
For some readers, encountering an uber-referential passage like that is going to throw them right out of the story. For other readers, however – especially teen readers who love to read, are just discovering the joys of metafiction, or who are hungry to know more about history and literature from cultures other than their own – that is exactly the type of passage that is going to suck them right into Vishnu’s tale.
Have you used this comic in your classroom, or in any sort of educational capacity?
No, but I can’t stop thinking of ways that this comic could be used in the classroom. When I read the comic, one of my first thoughts was literally Wow, I would have LOVED to have read this in one of my high school English classes! I can even recall a particular World Literature class I took that Tall Tales would have been a perfect fit for.
However, there are a couple of barriers that prevent Tall Tales from being easily used in the classroom. The first and most unfortunate is the format of the series. Tall Tales is currently only available as a series of five floppy comic books – which, by the way, are now out of print, although still available on ebay and the like. Its publishing company, Virgin Comics, went out of business before Tall Tales was collected into a graphic novel format. All Virgin Comics properties are now owned by Liquid Comics, if I understand things correctly. Unfortunately, Liquid Comics has announced no plans to re-release or collect any of Virgin’s old series, including Tall Tales. Which is a crying shame, because this series deserves to be made more widely available in graphic novel format, and it needs to be on the shelves in bookstores and libraries. This is a great series for teen readers, and it really should be more widely available, in a more accessible format, than it currently is (or may ever be).
The second barrier is that Tall Tales makes ample references to Panchatantra stories that non-Indian students are likely to be unfamiliar with. Some of these references are vital to the plot of the comic, but are never explained for the benefit of unfamiliar readers. There is no hand-holding in Tall Tales. Readers unfamiliar with the Panchatantra will have to do some additional research in order to fully understand the story. Fortunately, the Panchatantra is fairly easy to research. Plenty of versions are available online for free. Furthermore, this apparently frustrating aspect of the comic – that it assumes cultural knowledge that not all readers will have – can actually be turned into a golden teaching opportunity.
The third barrier is that, of course, there’s violence and gore in the series. I could say that Tall Tales isn’t any more violent than most Shakespearean dramas, anything attributed to Homer, or most of your standard high school English class fare. But that would be an unfair comparison. Because there’s a world of difference between reading a text passage describing a violent murder, versus having it presented to the reader as a bloody, gory picture right there on the page. This is definitely a series that may be too violent for more sensitive readers, and teachers should keep that in mind when using this comic in any way.
This would definitely be a challenging comic for a lot of teenagers to read. But challenging in a good way. For non-Indian students, this would be an amazing chance to experience what it’s like to read literature that’s based on an assumed cultural knowledge that they don’t have. Of course that’s difficult and frustrating, but also a powerful lesson to learn. This would be great for any class interested in concepts like cultural bias and demonstrating how that really works, especially since non-Indian students reading The Tall Tales of Vishnu Sharma would have the opposite experience of what usually happens in most English-speaking classrooms, where mostly Dead White Guy literature is taught to students who may not share the culture and experiences that said literature assumes they share.
On a simpler level, Tall Tales can be used to break up the monopoly that Eurocentric fables and myths have in most English classrooms. It can be used to challenge students to expand their cultural horizons, especially if they have to actually do research to understand the Panchatantra references in the comic. In fact, Tall Tales would be an excellent comic to build a “Panchatantra stories” or even a “world myth” research project around. Also, rather than focusing on how “different” or “exotic” the Panchatantra stories in Tall Tales are, students can be asked to look for similarities between Panchatantra stories and European myths, examining the common themes, tropes, and structures that permeate folklore all over the world. Some of the Tall Tales characters, like the Jackal, are meant to be uber-archetypes anyway. It could be fun for students to look for examples of those same character archetypes (i.e. the trickster dog) in other stories from around the world.
Is there anything else you feel that teachers should know about this comic?
Well, there’s still the glaring problem that Tall Tales is only available as a five-issue mini-series, not as a collected graphic novel. Oh, and it’s out of print already, too. I hope and pray that the powers that be at Liquid Comics will someday see fit to release this series in a proper graphic novel format. Tall Tales is bursting with educational potential. And it’s just plain fun to read, too. Seriously, though: in what other comic will you find Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, and the Cheshire Cat in a single panel together?
An online preview of the first issue of the series is available here. Like I said, it can get pretty violent at times. The online preview gives a good idea of the level of gore that appears in the rest of the series. Although, to be fair, the first issue is probably the worst in terms of the level of violence. It’s mostly all uphill from there.