Tag: Tina’s Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary

Bringing Keshni Kashyap’s debut graphic novel, “Tina’s Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary,” to life was nearly an existential crisis in and of itself. Neither Kashyap or illustrator Mari Araki had worked in comics before. Kashyap is a filmmaker and Araki a surrealist painter. The two worked, blindly, on their debut for hours at a time over four years – the book features nearly 1,000 drawings –  even holing up in a Las Vegas resort for several days to mesh ideas. The result, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, is a smart, funny and refreshingly unique story of adolescent angst featuring the spirited 15-year-old, Tina Malhotra — a Southern Californian of Indian descent who has a penchant for the Sex Pistols and French philosophers. In witty and observant, if neurotic, letters to Jean-Paul Sartre, Tina chronicles the emotional minefield that is her ...