“The Monkey Man of Delhi” – a True Weird tale, presented to you by James Tynion IV and edited by Greg Lockard. (You need a paid subscription to read this.)

Early last year, very soon after I’d agreed to letter the True Weird series of non-fiction short comics for James’s Substack, James asked me if I wanted to pitch him a story that I would also write.

I agreed to this in a flash, of course, and then began researching India’s strange ghost stories, rumours about statues drinking milk, motorcycles that are worshipped in Rajasthan, temples full of snakes and frogs, and all of its many, many local monsters.

The first idea I hit on, though – and the one I kept coming back to – was one that I had seen as it happened. I was sixteen at the time, and even then, I’d found it surreal and kind of hilarious.

This was the weird-as-hell story of the so-called Monkey Man that supposedly terrorised Delhi in 2001.

I kept a few ideas as back-ups, but decided to leap into properly researching the Monkey Man story, and what a rabbit hole it was! I disappeared into the internet for weeks, tracking down videos, articles, photos, academic reports. I even watched entire documentaries on and around the subject.

What I realised as I cycled through all of this material was that the Monkey Man himself wasn’t the story. The story was the story. And it was a uniquely Indian one.

We have our flaws, us Indians, but one of our most endearing qualities to me is our sincere desire to participate. If there is an event, we want to have been there. Or maybe two lanes away when it happened. Nobody here wants to say, “Oh, that? I don’t know anything about that.” It’s “Let me tell you how my uncle’s friend’s nephew was involved.”

So when I was scripting this comic, that’s what I wanted to capture – to condense the hundreds of accounts I’d read, and to convey this Indian desire to sidle into the frame of any camera that’s pointed even vaguely in our direction.

When we were finalising the script, we hoped that we could find an artist who could tackle the baffled complexity of Indian life, and to our immense fortune, Anand, my artist from Grafity’s Wall, Blue in Green and other books written by Ram V, had his schedule open at just the right time and was interested in taking this on.

I don’t think I could’ve dreamed of a better collaborator for this one. Anand has a flair for capturing character through his linework – he is an obsessive sketcher of people – and I knew we could rely on him to design the narrators and “act” with so many different walk-on parts.

He also managed to create some stunning images that I couldn’t stop staring at every time he sent me pages.

Many, many thanks to James for asking us to do this, to Greg for shepherding it through, Anand for gracing it with his art, and my friends for tolerating all of my exclamations of “You won’t believe this …” about the Monkey Man, and for reading it at various stages of completion.

I hope you enjoy the comic. We are very proud. Here’s the link again if you’re feeling too lazy to scroll back up.

This short will also be reprinted as a backup in James, Michael Avon Oeming and my comic Blue Book, out from Dark Horse later this year.