If we were to pick up an anthology of short stories, we would most likely thumb through the book after scanning its foreword and contents. The thumbing through — even if it means flicking black cursive on white — derives from the muscle memory of using flip books as a child. As seasons slip into time, ‘flip’ is dropped for wordy volumes. Thankfully, in a collection of graphic stories, the thumb exercise unfolds the elaborate delight of rolling over colours, textures, people and voices.

Longform 2022 (Penguin India) lands on that sentiment. It goads readers into dreamscapes wherein regular characters, doers of regular actions, share their extraordinary stories. Among 18 stories, our first favourite, Alendev Vishnu’s The Tail, tells the tale of a boy who was born with six fingers on one hand. All goes well and his shadow birds continue to have more feathers until when it vanishes one day. While others don’t think it’s worth any fuss, the little boy has lost a part of himself forever. Stories such as Kallan by Milad Thaha and Storm Over A Teacup by Suman Choudhury say no words, yet move hearts through the sheer power of art. We realise the title was aptly inspired by Joe Sacco’s essay on the diminishing space to narrate long pictorial yarns.