The Cape and the Skullcap

THE JOKE that started it all was simple enough. A friend of Falah Faisal’s, a stand-up comedian himself, used to do a bit on stage about how he looked like a Muslim Clark Kent. The line got laughs, and lodged itself somewhere in Falah’s mind. If his friend was Clark Kent, the question followed, what would the Superman version look like? What if there were a Muslim Superman?

Initially, the project was nothing more than a gag, something to garner laughs on social media, a small strip designed for shock value and community in-jokes. By his own account, Falah had imagined the project first as a YouTube comedy sketch. It was only after watching American Splendor, a film about the underground comic creator Harvey Pekar, that he decided on the format. Comics, he realised, were cheaper and nimbler, and could make for a powerful, accessible storytelling medium. He reached out to Appupen—the well-known Bengaluru-based comics artist behind Rashtraman—who felt Musalman’s story was too action-packed for his own aesthetic but put Falah in touch with a friend named Chako. The two began making strips together.

What they produced was Musalman Comix: India’s first Muslim superhero, born from a punchline, shaped by crisis and published this year as a graphic novel by Yoda Press. It gathers eight of the 20 short comic stories Falah has self-published since 2017 and arrives at a moment when the Indian comics scene is navigating a peculiar set of contradictions—between niche and mass, between the prestige of the graphic novel and the accessibility of the comic strip, between art and activism. That Falah’s work cuts across all of these divides is, in large part, the point.

THE STORY OF INDIAN COMICS begins with a colonial encounter and an act of mimicry that quietly turned into something else. The British satirical magazine Punch, founded in London in 1841, began circulating in India in the early twentieth century and made an outsized impression on the colonial reading public; the art historian Partha Mitter argues that no single humorous publication left a deeper mark on colonial Indian visual culture. Its grammar—defined by caricatural exaggeration, dialogic wit and moralising commentary—was quickly absorbed and repurposed by Indian variants. The earliest of these imitators was the Parsee Punch, an English-language weekly first published in Bombay in 1854 that was later renamed Hindi Punch for wider regional appeal. It was the most loyalist of the early Indian Punches, sometimes critical of colonial overreach but rarely seditious.