Tezuka's Buddha Vol 1 Review

I just finished reading Battle Angel Altia just before diving into this work, and can there be a bigger difference between these works? Altia is a scifi action series centered on the battles of a cyborg warrior, and Buddha is, well, a retelling of the story of Buddha. Visually these to pieces are wildly different, as Tezuka’s signature style, which graced my childhood in the form of the original Astro Boy, is on display in Buddha. Tezuka’s style is more cartoony, with anatomy sometimes getting a bit lost, the characters are not nearly as crazy detailed as Battle Angel’s but they are probably more enduring for it. I have never heard the story of Buddha before, I know the general idea, but the specifics have never been known to me, but if I never knew that this was the story that Buddhism is based on, retold, I would have enjoyed the ride all the same. The characters in Buddha, while being these figures from this religion, stayed human and appealing, I was able to connect with these characters because they’re flawed, not idealized characters. I really enjoyed the story; the only thing that threw me was how quickly Tatta seemed to get past his families deaths. Buddha does have the classic anime “overacting” going on, though in this time, and still today, American comics were doing much the same, but mostly only in the funnies these days. Overall this was a brilliant piece, and now that I really examine Tezuka’s work in context, I can see the huge affect he had on every anime or manga that followed him, even my personal favorite, Mobile Suit Gundam was very Tezuka like at its inception in the late 70s.

Battle Angel Altia Review

For me, reading this manga was very nostalgic, while I had never read this particular manga before, I did used to read quite a bit a manga, and sometime in high school I stopped. Remembering what it was like to discover the strange, larger than life stories manga had to offer cam rushing back to me. Reading the fantastically ridicules Berserker series came to mind as I read Battle Angle Altia. I thought it was an interesting choice to drop us into a world, with, from what I gleamed, has a very rich history behind it, and then letting us grasp at straws until they finally gave us enough info to understand, sort of, what was happening, or at least who was who, seemed like a risky choice. While I knew I had the next few issues waiting for me, anyone who was reading this month by month it was probably infuriating waiting for the next issue, I would have contemplated not even getting the next issue. I think the decision paid off though, I was hooked and I couldn't wait to understand the world to which I was just introduced, and the characters that inhabit it. The art certainly helped, it had that super cool, kinetic, wholly designed look that all my favorite manga’s do. The level of detail in each panel and the thought behind how machines and the rules of the world work has always blown me away in manga and Battle Angle is no exception. There is a clearly defined logic behind this world, and from what I read, was not deviated from. This taste of the series has most defiantly peaked my interest and I hope to track down some more in my free time.

Blankets

An interesting and extraordinarily personal graphic novel that is unlike any graphic novel I have read before. Craig Thompson’s drawing style was a fascinating graphic abstraction, in which he often did not concern himself with drawing the exact same character in every panel, in fact from panel to panel the characters changed slightly, but the characters maintained so iconic part, be it their hairstyle, cloths, what-have-you, that kept continuity between panels and, as a result, throughout the story. It’s fascinating to read an autobiographical graphic novel, it’s simply something I have never encountered before, or even considered as a possibility really. There were elements of Craig’s struggle I could identify with, mostly in his doomed romance and awkward high school years as opposed to his traumatic childhood. My childhood was not traumatic and my parents are both lovely people who didn't scare the carp out of me the way Craig’s dad scared him. Craig seemed to be going through some similar things I was through, I too was raised in a nice, Christian, Midwestern town, though I was in Kansas and the city was not too far away. Unlike Craig I never really subscribed too heavily in the Christian beliefs everyone seemed to have, I went to a youth group meeting once with a friend, and was so weirded out by the experience that I never went again. I have had relationships that felt like something more than they turned out to be though, and I went through the same emotional arc again with Craig as he got wrapped up in the passion, and then reality came crashing in at the end, I’ve been there. Fascinating too was Craig’s visual representation of feelings, the fires of hell when he felt like he was sinning, feeling uncomfortable in a crowd by crowding the page with people, or finding a beautiful whimsical design to represent the feeling of the breath of the girl he liked as he observed her sleeping. This was clearly a very personal piece to the author/artist and that came through on every page.

Calvin and Hobbs

A classic comic strip, mention Calvin and Hobbs to people of the right age and they just melt with nostalgia. Calvin and Hobbs were a cultural phenomenon that seems to be universally loved by the American audience it reached (in particular). I believe this is because Bill Watterson was able to hit on some pretty common veins in everyone’s childhood. Calvin is more cleaver than most kids, or at least has a larger vocabulary, but Watterson built the strip around such a heartfelt center, a friendship between a boy and his imaginary friend Tiger that it is instantly accessible. Add to that Watterson’s hilarious and refined drawings, that are just so very appealing to look at, and the strip radiated humor and warmth at every turn. Watterson was also very much connected personally with the strip, it was always written, drawn lettered, and colored on Sundays by Watterson himself and his personal connection to the strip helped it stay as authentic as it could possibly be. Calvin was just like any kid, mischievous, brilliant, but only on his terms, and at his core kind. Watterson had an uncanny ability to boil an idea down to its basics and keep it totally recognizable which also abstracting the it completely, there’s one strip in particular that embodies this amazing talent Watterson had for cutting to the core of an idea (I wish I could find it). In this strip we see Calvin as cattle being herded, as a fish out of water, as a robot, on an assembly line having slimy radioactive stuff pored into his head and at the end Calvin comes home from school! It’s brilliant every time I look at it! Every image captures a feeling, and Watterson had a real talent for that.

Understaing Comics and McCloud's TED talk too!

McCloud brings up several interesting notions that I, honestly, had never once considered before. I have read many comic books and even several graphic novels in my day, but I had never attempted to analyze comics on a more fundamental level. I had always only paid attention to the drawing skill or the writing skill of the artist/author, but I had never considered the medium before. To think about the art of comics on the level of what it means to abstract something, which I have considered before, but I had never considered it in relation to comics, or even how words relate to that abstraction. Also, the notion of juxtaposition as it relates to comic panels was interesting to dissect, how we, the readers, are given as series of images, and because we notice similarities or can relate these images together, we make the leap that time passes between panels and actions which are crucial to understand the story take place. Which is an aspect unique to comics, as a medium like animation, which is a series of images juxtaposed as well, has the benefit of time being represented by time as 24 frames a second connect actions for the audience (not to say there are not similar juxtaposed understanding that need to be made in animation, but the entire medium is not based around this idea). In addition, McCloud’s thoughts that he shared in his TED discussion, about where he sees comics expanding in the digital age were extraordinarily fascinating. The idea that using the monitor as a window to be able to view a comic as a long sting of images set side by side as opposed to the edge of the canvas forcing us to break that continuous train of thought is a most intriguing and curiously unused harnessing of this technology. When one orders a digital copy of a Marvel Comic, for instance, the comic is represented in the context of a page, just like the tangible equivalent, but this seems silly and short sighted. Another way that I have noticed people have started to utilize digital technology for comics are in the form of motion comics, which real just bridge on the edge of just limited animation and doesn't use any of the elements that McCloud discusses that make comics an unique medium.