Ula Zuhra’s coming-of-age graphic novel illustrates the chaos of female adulthood

Ula Zuhra is a Jakarta-based illustrator, cartoonist and writer behind the full length graphic novel, Aca & Ica: Collected Stories. In the debut piece, the artist explores themes of “feminism, class, eroticism, mythological, and esoteric practices in Indonesia through a tongue-in-cheek satirical lens,” the artist says. Throughout Arca & Ica, Ula often opts for a heady balance of high contrast black-and-white, set aside moments of vibrant colour. The characters’ inner worlds are not lost in the two-tone binary, nor are they washed away with colour. In fact, Ula’s colour choices enhance the narratives of the two women – the colour drains from the pages as the intensity of the story heightens.

Ula’s work is entirely hand-drawn and hand-painted, and it leans toward body horror to demontrate the realities of Indonesia’s fraught and complex sociopolitical landscape. It’s stretched across language too, weaving English together with Indonesian slang. Language jumps out of the page with urgency, swirling around “the contradictions, chaos, and quiet moments of navigating female adulthood in Jakarta,” says Ula.

Ula isn’t new to vibrant world-building, in 2021 she co-founded Studio Cacing, an animation studio that collaborates with local musicians on posters and moving image. Her key cultural influences in supporting her different creative pursuits include the underground comix subculture, 1980s horror, and Indonesian B-Movie films, and the work of Dori Seda, Lee Mars, and Aline Kominsky-Crumb; artists part of the Wimmen’s Comix collective.