Age of Shiva (The Pantheon Series) (8 page)

Don’t tell anyone, but given those circumstances, I’d have done the job for free. Getting paid a six-figure sum was just the icing – the very thick, delicious icing – on the cake.

I was creating the costumes for the Dashavatara, the Ten Avatars.

My brief was this. The Trinity’s superhero team were based on the Ten Avatars of Vishnu, from Hindu mythology. They derived their power sets, their weaponry choices and their skills from the ten incarnations which, according to the Vedas, the great god Vishnu assumed one after another when he descended into the realm of mortals to combat evil.

Why the Trinity had chosen Indian gods as their theme, I had no idea, not then. But the more online research I did for the costumes, the more I could see it was a rich seam to be tapped. Hindu gods did seem to have super powers and behave like crimefighters, whizzing here and there, righting wrongs, battling baddies, brawling with monsters and the like. Reimagining these ancient deities as bang-up-to-date superheroes – why not? Weirder things have happened. Stan Lee strip-mined the Norse sagas for his spandex take on Thor, after all, while Wonder Woman’s origin and background draw deeply on Greek myth. There was a noble precedent for this.

So I was given photos of the faces of the Dashavatara for reference along with their vital statistics, and was invited to dress them up as devas – Hindu deities – but the look was to be modern, hip, slick, sleek, ultra-cool. The costumes had to be practical but dramatic, hard-wearing but striking.

It was one of those design jobs that I just loved to get my teeth into, fusing the old with the new, the traditional with the on-trend.

Aanandi was on hand to help. Another huge bonus. She was the resident Hindu-mythology consultant at Mount Meru, there to offer tips and advice on the whole project to anyone who asked, but, during the early stages of the costume designing process, she was almost exclusively mine. I’d spend a good couple of hours of each day going over the preliminary and interim sketches with her, batting ideas about, and flirting in my not terribly subtle way.

We could, for instance, be figuring out how to shape Varaha the Boar’s helmet in order to accommodate his wickedly long tusks, and I might make some wisecrack along the lines of “It’s not the size of the tusk, it’s what you do with it,” and she would give one of those laughs that women give to say they don’t mind you being smutty but really you should have grown out of it by now.

Or, we might be discussing how Parashurama the Warrior should stow his battleaxe when he wasn’t using it – on his back or by his side? – and Aanandi would tell me the legend of how, when Parashurama was a boy, he decapitated his mother with an axe at his father’s request, because she had entertained lustful thoughts about a group of male nature spirits passing by, and I replied that there was nothing wrong with lustful thoughts and I had entertained quite a few of them myself in my time but I didn’t deserve to get my head chopped off for it; or anything else chopped off, for that matter.

I took to calling Aanandi my “mythtress,” and she took to pretending she didn’t mind that I called her that. We had fun in that studio, the two of us, me probably more than her, but we did. I slipped into a creative groove, that soaring feeling you get inside when inspiration just keeps on coming and you’re operating at peak efficiency and it seems you can do no wrong, and Aanandi was right there with me.

The first question I always used to ask myself when coming up with an image for a superhero was, “What would Jack Kirby do?” As a matter of fact it’s the first question any self-respecting comics artists should ask himself or herself every single day before starting work. Kirby, rightly dubbed the King, was the man who defined how superhero comics should look. He codified the rules. He set the standard. The rest of us are just his followers, his acolytes, and “What would Jack Kirby do?” is our mantra.

But Kirby, aside from everything else, had a particular knack for a costume. Consider the Fantastic Four’s utilitarian blue uniforms. Consider the star-spangled chainmail of Captain America. Consider the bonkers traffic-light bodysuit of Mister Miracle. Form follows function in every case. One glance tells you how the FF are a unit, a family, parts of a whole; how Cap is a patriot but also a knight; how super-escapologist Scott Free is all about the garish misdirection of the carny performer.

I channelled the spirit of Jack and poured it out onto paper and screen. My Ten Avatars of Vishnu were Hindu through and through. The bottom half of Matsya the Fish-man’s flowing swimsuit had a suggestion of a dhoti kurta about it, while I sheathed Rama’s bowstring-drawing arm from wrist to shoulder in golden bracelets and armlets. Kalkin the Horseman wore a version of jodhpurs, while I kitted Parashurama out in a kind of Mughal Empire chainmail armour. Yet, at the same time, I made the costumes as futuristic and outlandish as Kirby would have. I imagined him standing at my shoulder, cigar clenched between his teeth, saying in his gruff Lower East Side accent, “This mayn’t be how Indian gods usually look, but damn it, this is how they
oughtta
look!”

It was my brainwave to give the Dashavatara individual numbers, worn as chest emblems, the numerals contained in circles and hanging from a horizontal bar, typeset in a Sanskrit-style sci-fi font of my own devising. I wasn’t sure the Trinity chaps would go for this. Maybe they’d think it a bit tacky, a bit low-rent, kind of too obvious, too football team. But when I submitted the number emblems to them via the Mount Meru intranet for their inspection, the response was a hearty, three-for-three thumbs up.

Thus the Avatars were given a set of universally recognisable insignia which reflected the sequence in which Vishnu had manifested as them over the ages:

1 Matsya the Fish-man

2 Kurma the Turtle

3 Varaha the Boar

4 Narasimha the Man-lion

5 Vamana the Dwarf

6 Parashurama the Warrior

7 Rama the Archer

8 Krishna the Charioteer

9 Buddha the Peacemaker

10 Kalkin the Horseman

It was Aanandi who pointed out to me that there was a correspondence with evolution in that running order. Vishnu made his first appearance as an amphibian, then as a reptile, then a mammal, then a human-mammal hybrid, then a kind of proto-human, and so on through levels of increasing social and martial sophistication. The Vedas, she said, weren’t only anthologies of myths. They were commonly regarded as scientific and historical textbooks as well. In fact, some Hindu scholars argued that these religious scriptures contained specimens of knowledge dating back to a millennia-old prehistorical civilisation, long gone and forgotten. Possibly even a civilisation founded by extraterrestrials with technological capabilities far in advance of our own.

I chuckled at that, and so did Aanandi, although not as derisively as me.

¹
Let’s face it, he was an Indian Tony Stark, but without the alcoholism or the goatee.

9. THE GREAT UNVEILING

B
Y THE END
of that two-week flurry of activity the costume designs were finalised, approved, signed off on. I was knackered.

There was no resting on my laurels, though. The costume department got to work – a group of a dozen seamstresses and dressmakers drawn from the world of movies, most of them Hollywood professionals with impressive credentials and even an Oscar or two under their couture belts – and I remained involved through the countless tweaks and alterations that followed. Not everything I had drawn was practically feasible. In comics, if a character’s outfit defies logic, it doesn’t matter; it’s comics. The laws of imagination are in effect, not the laws of physics. Catwoman’s skintight PVC catsuit would restrict her movements when leaping across Gotham City rooftops and probably be biting painfully into her crotch by the end of a hard night’s burgling. Thor’s bulky cape would get in the way when swinging his hammer. The hood sometimes worn by Green Arrow, to remind readers of Robin Hood, would severely limit his peripheral vision and make it easy for enemies to sneak up on him from the side. But no one’s bothered by any of that when they see it on the page. In comics, image is all.

Our Dashavatara, however, needed not to have to worry that they were going to trip over dangling cloth or be unable to draw a weapon smoothly. There could be nothing in their costumes hampering them or inhibiting them in any way.

For example, the mane-like headdress I gave Narasimha was, as originally conceived, too long, too shaggy. We tested it out on a volunteer model, and the fibres kept flopping forwards, getting in his eyes, especially when there was a strong breeze. So they had to be shortened, and the headdress ended up more like a ruff than a mane.

Kurma’s turtle armour was another headache. It had to be lightweight but durable, able to withstand substantial punishment, so the Trinity drafted in a technician from one of Bhatnagar’s R and D labs who was developing an experimental carbon nanotube reinforced polymer for use in bulletproof vests. The polymer, it turned out, wasn’t easy to work into complicated shapes, and my grandiose plans for the armour, reflecting the Mughal Empire stylings of Parashurama’s, had to be streamlined and simplified. The design ended up much blockier than I had envisioned, more like a spacesuit than a shell, albeit with distinct turtle-esque traits. Compromise, compromise, compromise.

As for Vamana, how do you fashion a costume that fits someone when they’re three feet tall as tidily as it does when they’re twenty-five feet tall? The answer is: with difficulty. Lycra will stretch only so far before snapping. I just hadn’t considered this when coming up with my design. So it was literally back to the drawing board for me. Liaising with the costumiers, I figured out that segmented leather panels interspersed with sections of folded elastane would give Vamana just enough growing room. There was an element of caterpillar about the end product, and an element of concertina too, but it worked, which was the main thing.

Did I mind any of this extra tinkering and tailoring? Did I hell. Perfectionist, remember? Anything to get it right.

I hope all this behind-the-scenes nitty-gritty is interesting. I suspect it may not be for everyone, and for that reason I’m going to fast forward to the day the Dashavatara first stepped out in their finished costumes. It was also the day they saved New York.

10. REAL LIVE SUPERHEROES

T
HE
T
RINITY CALLED
an assembly of Mount Meru’s key workers, in whose number, flatteringly, I was included. We gathered on the esplanade at the island’s western tip, near the docks. Here was where ferries, cruise ships and seaplanes were supposed to moor and deposit their cargoes of tourists, except of course that would never happen because the whole “hotel” concept had been nothing more than a a cover story. This place was never ever going to be a leisure complex. This was Mount Meru, the mythical axis of the cosmos, that sacred peak shaped in rings with the material world at its outer edge and Brahma’s sublime, ineffable heavenly city at its summit. This was the Avatars’ base of operations, their Fortress of Solitude, their Avengers Mansion, their Tracy Island.