Wanted to be a comic book creator as a child, reveals Vivaan Shah

Two years after the release of his first novel Living Hell, actor and novelist Vivaan Shah came out with his second book Midnight Freeway last month. A hard-boiled pulp fiction lover, he decided to pen a road noir this time around. “In the 1950s after the World War II, noirs started becoming more nihilistic. Midnight Freeway is one such book. It’s more brutal and hard-boiled than my first book,” he says.

Born to a family of littérateurs, actors Naseeruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak Shah, the 31-year-old says that as a child, he dreamed of writing comic books someday. “I never wanted to become an actor. In fact, I was obsessed with drawing comic books. I had a trunk full of them. Unfortunately, my drawing skills never developed beyond a certain level and they remained pretty juvenile,” he shares.

Shah reveals that he was inspired by Hergé, the creator of Tintin, and Astérix series creators René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. But studying in a boarding school robbed him off the habit of drawing. “There’s such a jock kind of an environment in a boarding school where a poor kid sitting and drawing in one corner gets bullied (laughs). But ours had an art school with great artistes. As for comic book writers, they draw on their own study tables. And that’s a very different kind of pursuit,” says Shah.

Coincidentally, some of his popular acting projects, 7 Khoon Maaf (2011), Bombay Velvet (2015) and A Suitable Boy, are all based on books. “It’s a coincidence I didn’t have a hand in. It’s just serendipity, I guess. In this book when I had to write the introduction, instead of listing down the work that I’ve done, I stated that I’ve acted in films and shows with literary source material,” he ends.