The Use of Colour in “The Many Deaths of Laila Starr”

The Many Deaths of Laila Starr offers a remarkable example of the aesthetic and narrative boons created through an expert and innovative use of colouring. Far from decorative, Andrade and Amaro use colour to its utmost in advancing a richly symbolic story. #lailastarr 1/10

The opening splash page presents the city of Mumbai with narration establishing the sunset motif: “It began on a Wednesday afternoon as a late December sun was just dipping below the Mumbai skyline” accompanied by the appropriate sunset colour palette. 2/10

The connection between both end of day (sunset) and end of year (late December) establishes the looming presence of mortality by invoking these two important markers of symbolic finitude. While the specific scene and chronology shift, the colour palette remains fixed. 3/10

Indeed, the sunset colours persist throughout the entire remainder of the story rendering a permanent sense of dusk to the comic as a whole and thus an enduring reminder of the spectre of death that hangs over the characters (and readers as well). 4/10

The colours do more than shape the backgrounds. Rather, they infect all aspects of the book, including the characters themselves whose very skin becomes imbued with non-traditional flesh colours like purple and blue and green, established from the very first cover. 5/10

This aligns the characters with McCloud’s concept of non-iconic abstraction at an almost primitive level, in which diegetic people are somehow coloured in like Teletubbies to great symbolic effect without breaking the narrative cohesion of the story. 6/10

The result is a book that can be read with your glasses on the table and your eyes squinted, if need be, yet still appreciated. The colours become an aesthetic in themselves, capable of communicating both visual artistry and even narrative symbolism. 7/10

At the same time, the colour palette makes important connections to the iconography of the Hindu faith and to the vibrancy of Indian culture in general with its consistent veneration of colour as a celebration of life. 8/10

This vibrancy is pivotal to establishing balance within the narrative. As much as death (or deaths) is the subject of Laila Starr, the deeply important counterbalance to this is a symbolic and subsequent affirmation of the vibrancy of life lived in the face of death. 9/10

All of this is to say that there are many reasons to study and appreciate The Many Deaths of Laila Starr, but that it’s coloring is especially triumphant in a medium (and critical community) that too-often treats colouring as an embellishment. Here, it’s a central aspect. 10/10