Appupen (b. 1976) is a Bangalore-based visual artist, graphic novelist, and musician whose work spans comics, painting, and installation. Renowned for his allegorical world-building, he is best known for ‘Halahala’, a shifting universe critiquing power, greed, environmental collapse, and human excess. Trained as a painter, he turned to comics to merge narrative, satire, and visual experimentation. His graphic novels – Moonward (2009), Legends of Halahala (2012), Aspyrus (2014), and The Snake and the Lotus (2018) – deepen this dark, poetic world. His editorial cartoons, murals, and sound experiments extend his sharp, critical engagement with contemporary society.
Appupen’s work unfolds as a multiplatform narrative circulating online, in print and through murals across Kochi’s streets. Marked by dark humour, pop aesthetics, and biting satire, it probes identity politics, surveillance, ecological unease and the manufactured logics of propaganda.
Set within a fictional story of a sinking economy charged with nationalist fervour, the series follows Amfy B. N. Jose, who takes up work in a government’s aggressive campaign against the elusive vigilante known as Frogman. Seeking stability and success, he fabricates fear through staged news and targeted misinformation, quickly earning favour with his crony-capitalist superiors. Yet by night, he becomes the very figure he is tasked with vilifying. Caught between ambition and compromise, Amfy embodies the contradictions of our era, half-belief and half-doubt, convenience over conviction, amphibious in ideology and identity.
Image: Appupen, The World of Amfy B.N. Jose X Frogman (2025). Online, print and graffiti interventions. Dimensions variable. Installation view of Amphibian Aesthetics at the Ishara House, Kochi, Kerala, 2025-26. Photography by Biju Ibrahim
View the full series as a flipbook here.
