Writer – Deepak Chopra/Joshua Dysart
Artist – Harshwardhan Kadam
Publisher – Virgin Comics
Price - $ 2.99

Review by Ross

Deepak Chopra is one of the founders of the virgin comics line, and also one of the most prominent translators of Eastern philosophy and religion into a language that mainstream western culture finds easy to digest. This series, beginning this month from Virgin comics, is an adaptation of one of Chopra’s books Budhha: A story of Enlightenment, which was received to general critical praise on it’s release last year. The book, and this series in turn, is a fictional re-telling of the life of Budhha, a tale which should by all accounts be pretty engaging.

The story begins with the birth of Buddha and the subsequent death of his mother, which leaves his father, a regional King, reeling and determined for the young Prince to reach his full potential as a ruler. What follows is a series of rather mystical and spiritual encounters, with mystics, wanderers and sages, all of which leads the king to believe he must shelter the boy from all forms of suffering and pain lest he be driven to leave the palace and help the world.

As a single issue this comic is generally quite unsatisfying, and unless Indian mysticism appeals to you then you are unlikely to find much here to engage you. The dialogue and scripting is pretty solid, there’s nothing to stilted or out of place, but at the same time none of the characters or places are very engaging. I found myself reaching the end of the issue not really caring what happened next, which doesn’t seem a great way to end a first issue.

The art has a free hand sketch style too it, which together with the very pastel colouring, makes the whole thing look like your viewing it through some kind of dream like mist. If this is deliberate, in order to emphasize the looking back to the past aspect of the piece, then it works well. If it isn’t deliberate then it’s just very distracting. Either way it serves to make the whole thing look and feel very cartoon like, which removes a great degree of the gravitas from the story. I can’t help feeling I should be thinking that the life story of one of the foremost religious leaders in history is a serious and meaning full thing. The chosen artistic style here essentially puts it on the same level as Saturday morning kids cartoons and somehow that just didn’t sit right with me.

Given the scale of the story being told here, and that it is adapted from a much longer, non-serialised novel, it is possible that when the other issues emerge, and the whole story is in place, that it will be more absorbing to the reader and gain some of the weight that I can’t help feeling the tale deserves. In the meantime this first issue just didn’t encourage me to stay around and find out.