Identity Is Variable

Letra

Kruttika Susarla

Clouds / Thunder (rumble rumble) / Lightning / Rain falls on the city, with large glyphs mixed in.

A person wakes up, sees a giant glyph outside their window, runs outside to a scene of pandemonium: gigantic unfamiliar glyphs are all over the city, a car driver scratches their head at the scene, and dogs bark at the unfamiliar objects.

After some initial chaos, and many, many, many meetings later...

A person asks, “What if we...?” and collaborates with others to incorporate the glyphs into an elaborate project of drafting and carpentry. (Thwack!) The king wonders, “Hm, what are they up to?”

The king rushes toward the people, saying “Wait a minute! Hold it! Not so fast! As the king, I decree, only certain letters are allowed in Letra. If it looks like this, or this, or even this, it bears our spirit. Our legacy. Our great and noble kingdom.”

Agitatedly surveying a group of people carrying the new glyphs, the king says, “If it looks like that, or that, or heaven forbid, that—that’s just not us.”

Seeing the approved glyphs in stable position, the king says, “Ah, yes. Much better. This—this is how it’s meant to be.” A woman says to a man, “Psst... What if we...”, to which he responds, “Aha!” They proceed to weld the glyphs into larger formations, to the king’s ire: “What have you done?!”

The king angrily shouts, “No! Jail for you! No! No! No! And you! NO NO NO NO NO—and you!”

In front of a crowd, the king yells, “Jail for all of you!!!” The people calmly carry the king to the cliff’s ledge, and one of them kicks him off. He shouts “Noooo” as he falls.

We return to the city scene we saw before, now enlivened with many mew glyphs, both monumental and used in signage.

Kruttika Susarla

Kruttika Susarla is an illustrator and cartoonist from Andhra Pradesh, India, working across editorial illustration, picture books, and comics. Her narrative work is bright, bold, and textural. She collaborates with community-engaged organizations in the U.S. and the Global South to create books, zines, and toolkits.

Susarla’s work for The Freedom Sisters (Pratham Books, 2024) won a gold medal from the Society of Illustrators and was included in the Illustrators 67th Annual Exhibition. Her self-published comics tell stories of connection, community, and labor. These works have been exhibited internationally, including at the Erlangen Comic Salon in Germany and the Fumetto Comic Festival in Switzerland. In 2022, she won the Cartoonist Cooperative Minicomic Award for Made in Heaven Inc. (2021), and in 2025, she won the Paper Rocket Publishing Prize for Alexander’s Curse (2024).

Susarla graduated with an MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture from Washington University in St. Louis in 2022. She lives and works in the United States.