Book Review: Buddha: The Comic Book

Author:

Reviewer: Mark Groenewold

Date: January, 2006

I found this little multi-volume treasure at the local library and was intrigued as to how such a huge, broad, and multi-faceted religion like Buddhism be brought into graphic novel form. Of course, as a kid, I remember getting some awful printed comic book material featuring Jesus and His disciples, a few stories from the Old Testament (sadly none of the more interesting ones!), all dressed in the appropriate robes, as well as beards for Abraham, Moses, and Jesus and his disciples. They never had a comic about Ehud, a minor judge of Israel who assassinates king Eglon on the toilet. I think that would have made a GREAT comic book!

This comic book series does something with its own religion that in Christian circles, should they have done the same, would likely be decried as blasphemy or profane by some elements. Knowing not enough about Buddhism myself, and seeking more information on the matter, I naturally turned to comics.

I’m just kidding. I don’t normally turn to comics for hard information, but it is true that I know little about Buddhism. These comic books actually, for all I can tell, encapsulate nicely some of the central tenets of the faith. It is an interesting introduction to Buddhism, and in some places much more expansive than the texts I have studied regarding Comparative Religions.

For the purposes of this review, however, I shall take no time in discussing the various metaphysical issues of the tenets of Buddhism, but rather focus on the other elements of this graphic novel presentation from the perspective of someone new to these ideas. Also, as someone who has been raised on comic books and graphic novels I have a pretty keen sense of what is successful or what fails in this medium. Graphic novels are often unexplored in the West as a legitimate means of transfering either knowledge or aesthetics, but in truth, we can find great creativity, the power of story telling, and even the transferrence of knowledge within these cheaply printed pages.

Beginning from humble origins, this text begins with Buddha as a child, then as a boy, and then slowly turning and growing up as a monk. Along the way, many things are left behind: family, possessions, country, and eventually human desire and pride. As this tale unfolds there are a variety of different narratives that are introduced by a wide variety of colorful characters. Their lives intersect with meeting the Buddha and they are each changed or affected in profound ways. An understanding narrative development, as the Buddha simply sitting and meditating does nothing to further any plot, or give opportunity for the Buddha subject to interact and explain enlightenment in a variety of situations. This is not a problem, but it is interesting to see in the narrative that there are no exceptions to the rule. Whether they be man, bird, or beast, all are affected, and to no small amount, by the power of the enlightened one.

The artwork in this series is a creative and successful marriage of extremely detailed and highly rendered backgrounds and objects with more simple, symbolic, and thus pliable drawings of main characters and objects they directly interact with. In many scenes of this book, where the two must merge, such as when the body of a character needs to be focused on, there is a successful marriage of these two styles. The backgrounds, nature drawings, and scale and perspective of many static objects, places, and scenes, is staggering. The amount of meticulous pencil and pen work needed to produce a single page is mind-boggling.

I have heard of, and seen programming on how some Japanese comic books are created, and there have been reports of a kind of "factory" style of production used to create them. Some artists work for the main story-teller in that they produce only backgrounds, draw buildings, or do the highly detailed work needed. There is a similar style that we see in these backgrounds in a variety of other Japanese comics so one wonders if there are not certain "schools" of background creation to make these images more uniform. In contrast to most American and Canadian comic book artists, who are responsible for the whole comic, not just the characters moving from panel to panel, backgrounds are a continual head-ache and challenge to make them interesting, engaging, and to place authentically enough the character in the scene without being bogged down in the details. Buddha is packed with to-scale detailed backgrounds, the work alone in producing them would simply take years for a single person to do.

So, that issue, the issue of background artists getting absolutely no credit or recognition for their stellar work, aside, Buddha is an extremely engaging narrative. Translated from the Japanese, the style still seems to flow mostly seamlessly. There are times, however, that the text begins to de-evolve. The instances that I refer to are where the comic book characters start to engage to or talk with the reader directly, or when anachronistic comments are made. Comments like, "You could have gone to Harvard" or "You know I don’t like McDonald’s hamburgers" in character dialogue, or when comments like, "I can’t see you because you haven’t been drawn yet!" are examples of this deviation from the standard narrative.

At times these post-modern shifts from comic book reality are interesting, sometimes they are quite insightful to both the story, as well as the medium itself. But we run into problems when they are too often repeated, or too oblique or strange to have much meaning. In the sixth book of the series, the narrative kind of grinds to a halt as the characters get lost in this sort of departure. It is like "Waiting for Gedot" but on a corner where crack cocaine is peddled.

One thing that always attracts me to the Japanese comic book style, the manga, is the pacing or the introduction of a new scene or character. There are some standard story-telling devices that are quite evocative and interesting. For example, in many super-hero comic books we explode into action. Often the first page is a splash page of two colorfully costumed guys duking it out. I love it. That’s always good stuff.

In the Japanese manga, a nice introduction to a character or a scene is a focus on an object or a thing in the room. We pan out. We move back a little bit from the object, it could be a lamp, a fish in a pond, a leaf on a tree that is breaking away and falling, a cricket on a branch, anything. The character is seen in part, slowly moving down the page we see a little more, a foot, a shadow, and then they speak. We are drawn in through evocative images and we scan down the page. The manga suckers us in. It’s a beautiful device, and one that we have seen successfully making the transition from East to West in today’s comic books.

This comic book series was awarded the Eisner Award, a prestigious award for comic book artists. I wonder if it may have been a bit premature. I think that this Buddha comic book is interesting, but I did not find it to be as groundbreaking, evocative, or creatively put together as many other graphic novels out there. There is a current love-affair with Japanese manga, and most definately there are some real gems that are making themselves available in translation to the West. That’s great. I enjoy a good comic book, and hope to review more of them to make this artistic medium accessible to visitors to this website. But I have a long list of other graphic novels that are much better reads that Buddha, much more creative, artistic, moving, surprising, evocative, and engaging that this one.

If you meet this Buddha in the road, or in a comic book shop, you don’t need to kill it. It’s a good read, and an interesting exposure to another world, but I think you can do better.

Mark Groenewold
Kanazawa, Japan
February, 2006