Buddha: Volume 1 by Osamu Tezuka

This week I read the first volume of Osamu Tezuka's Buddha series. The first volume alone is 400 pages, yet is a very easy read. His style is very playful and energetic. Emotions are clear and are pushed, but don't appear as cliche. His influence by Walt Disney is also clear, especially with how he draws animals. What i find most interesting is that Buddha, or Siddhartha as he was named at birth, barely features in this book at all. His mother and father are mentioned and he is born, but that's it. Which really emphasizes how much more entertaining the other characters are in comparison to the main thread of plot. The side characters are Tatta, a pariah caste boy who can posses the bodies of animals, Naradatta, a Brahmin studying under Master Asita, and Chapra, a shudra/slave caste boy who wishes to rise above his rank in society. By their level of abstraction you can immediately grasp onto both Naradatta and Chapra. Both have a handsomeness in the style. They are drawn less caricatured and more remote in style. It instantly makes them stand out compared to other characters. Tatta, for all his interesting abilities and personality seems to be more of a background character. He's almost comedic relief in comparison to the other two. Yet Tatta's powers come from his minor enlightenment, making him a bit more important spiritually in the story. I really liked the section where Naradatta sent Tatta, in animal form, to bring a message to his Master Asita. It showed that for all Naradatta had thought he had become enlightened he still knew nothing by wasting so many animal lives just to save Chapra and Chapra's mother. I'm very interested how Tatta and the now feral Naradatta will feature into the next volume. The last pages seemed to imply that they play important roles in the life of Siddartha. I'm very glad I chose this manga over others as i do know a little bit about the story of Siddartha and how he became Buddah, as well as a few stories about the caste system in India. For a while I was thinking that Chapra's story was a retelling of the story of the Potter who became a soldier. Unfortunately Chapra's story seems to end much more tragically than how I heard the Potter's tale ended.

King parts 1, 2, and 3

This week I read the graphic novel King by Ho Che Anderson. The story is about Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. At first I found the beginning of volume one a tad disorienting, it was a series of scenes, in color, that were of different racial incidents that still occurred in 1993 followed by suddenly going into pure black and white images and scenes from 1933. It was a tad confusing because the 1933 scenes had no explanation and were very short and quick. It took me at least 3 pages before I realized these were scenes of the child Martin Luther King Jr. Book one covers him growing up to after the Bus Boycotts. I really like the style of this volume more than the other two. it looks a tad more cleaner and the poses are a bit more gestural and less static than in the other two books. The splashes of color when added to images in this version make the images stand out, where as the over abundance of color in the later editions seems to mute the effect. I also really liked how most of the faces are in shadow in the first volume. It's a tad more graphic and feels a bit more powerful with the use of dark verses light on the page.

Of all the volumes I think I liked the second one the least. In this one all the faces were more exposed and images were almost over exposed with the use of white on the page. It felt like it lost a bit of the power of the first piece. Images were less emotionally distant, and more about facial emotions. Photo montage was more prevalent as was the use of coloring on top of them. Figures were also a little more distorted and felt a little less refined and finished than in the first book.

The third book was predominantly color. I do like the texture of the materials and how expressive the colors were. Yet it still didn't feel like it matched the first book. Figures were very geometric and distorted, even compared to the second book. Yet this book had a lot more life to it. Over all I respect what this book was trying to do, but I'm not as impressed with it as I was with other graphic novels like Blankets.