Swarathma
- Jan 26, 2019
- 2 min read

Raah-E-Fakira Graphic Novel & Artwork: The Story

The Raah-E-Fakira graphic story-book is a visual treat. Complimenting 8 songs of this album, they add multiple dimensions to the Swarathma's musical storytelling.

Our self-produced third studio-album Raah-E-Fakira is a unique blend of music and art. The song of this album are introspective, personal journeys where we look inside our souls to find the way. Each song harbors at its core, a story inspired by an incident or a thought.

We love graphic art - for our debut-album Swarathma, we went into an extensive process to get the album art-work right and remarkable. The eventually award-winning art-work was created from hundreds of photographs depicting quirky everyday graffiti that beautifully complimented the songs of this album. With Raah-E-Fakira, we wanted our story-telling to be multi-dimensional, with visuals, and accompanying videos.

In the absence of CDs which have become entirely anachronistic, we collaborated with a bunch of young graphic artists from a Kolkata-based collective called Ghost Animation, to tell the stories embodied in the songs, visually. A connect over Instagram lead to months of joint effort - for each song, we came up with a story or a visual idea which was translated to rough sketches. We wrote the dialogues before creating the final art-work.

The final result is a 40-page book in the graphic-novel format featuring eight stories written by us revolving around the songs of Raah-E-Fakira. The booklet is available in both physical and digital formats - and we signed many a copy for our fans at then end of live performances.

The team at Ghost Animation interpreted the songs and through their art-work, brought the stories to life while staying true to the narrative. Launched on 26th January, each story has a dedicated 2-page spread as inspired by songs of the album. Every story has been illustrated by a different artist, bringing freshness to every page.