Initially, transgender comics artist Bishakh Som’s Spellbound: A Graphic Memoir is the story of a leap of faith: Som quits her job as an architect to work fulltime on a graphic novel. The book presents the story her life growing up in New York City as the child of immigrants from India, and depicts her years as an alienated college student and later as a comics artist that has to figure out how to make art and pay the bills. However, Som substitutes Anjali, a cisgender Bengali-American woman, for herself in a narrative that tracks her transformation into a cartoonist as well Som’s internal process of coming to terms with gender. In this ten-page excerpt we meet Som/Anjali just as she’s about to quit her job as an architect. Spellbound: A Graphic Memoir by Bishakh Som will be published by Street Noise Books in August. Som was also interviewed as part of the New Graphic Novel Showcase panel during BookExpo Online. Go to the 47:30 time-mark on the video archive to see the panel.
