Creator: Osamu Tezuka
Publisher: HarperCollins
Price: £10.00
By way of introduction, it’s important to know this: Osamu Tezuka is the single most important Manga creator ever. To try and understand how important, imagine if every silver age Marvel and DC character, as well as half the most popular newspaper strips, were written and drawn by one man. Now imagine that same man was responsible for the entire output of the Disney and Warner Brothers animation studios until the mid-80s. When you’ve got your head around that, you’re starting to come close to how much Dr. Tezuka contributed to Japanese culture. Even prior to his untimely death in 1989 to a gall stone infection he was considered a national treasure and referred to as the God of Manga. There’s an incomplete collection of his work that currently runs to 400 volumes (80,000 pages in total), and he’s estimated to have produced 700 separate Manga, running to 170,000 pages in total. And Buddha is one of his more “important” works, a biography of the legendary holy man.
Buddha commenced publication in 1974, and eight volumes were published in the subsequent 10 years. Sadly I’ve only got books 1 and 2 to read, which is a shame because it’s a compelling tale. Book 1 is largely set around the time of Siddhartha’s birth (Buddha’s birth name, in case you didn’t know), and follows two young boys – Tatta and Chapra. Tatta is a Pariah, living outside society with his mother and older sister and a small group of similar outcasts. Chapra is in little better condition – he and his mother are slaves to a wealthy merchant. Their paths cross when Tatta steals a bundle of cloth Chapra was transporting, and Chapra and his mother are banished on fear of death when he fails to retrieve it. They end up living with the Pariahs, but tragedy strikes when a war spreads to their region. Later Chapra inadvertently becomes the adopted son to the general who led the attack on their town, but his past comes back to haunt him, with tragic results.
Book 2 denotes various stories set during Siddhartha’s youth; leading up to the day he leaves his noble life behind to become a monk. They illustrate various stages in his childhood emphasising his weak constitution, boredom and dislike of the life of a Prince and the caste system, and his insistence that people are all equal with each other, and with the beasts. Interspersed in this are the tales of Bandaka, a skilled archer with lofty ambitions, and Migalia, a beautiful female thief who’s a friend of (the now grown up) Tatta, and falls in love with young Siddhartha.
The volumes are made up of largely self-contained stories which tie into one another, most of which are used to illustrate varying aspects of life in what would become India at the time (with varying degrees of accuracy), and often showing how harsh and unforgiving the caste system was. In fact, the bulk of the stories return to the caste system, and very often show anyone who defies the caste system coming to a horrible end. This is particularly ironic given Siddhartha’s vehement opposition to the caste system. Each story flows along at a great pace, the separate chapters all tie into one another well, and no character is out of the limelight for so long that you forget about them. By the time he began this series, Tezuka had been working in comics for around 30 years, so his mastery of plot and form is incredible. The translation is a bit odd though, mixing modern slang in (Tatta refers to his friends as “peeps” on at least one occasion).
The artwork is of particular interest. It follows Tezuka’s simplistic, cartoony style; but the content is far more mature than you’d expect. From the opening story (a recounting of a Buddhist parable) featuring a Rabbit with anthropomorphic features throwing itself onto a fire so a man may live, to the blood-spattered fight scenes and copious nudity – both male and female – the story sets itself up with a very mature tone. It’s considered one of Tezuka’s “sexiest” works, even over his adults-only horror titles like MW. The background art is painstakingly detailed as well, leading to a slight disconnection with the more cartoon-like characters.
Despite the mature nature of the story, there are numerous humorous sequences with the typical Tezuka touch: there are deliberately anachronistic references – a city is compared to London and Paris, they talk about watching TV later on. Tezuka draws himself in as a cameo, and is quickly replaced with a string of inventor/doctor characters from his other works.
While the art does take some getting used to, the cartoon looking style is based on a solid knowledge of how the human and animal bodies really work so it balances the serious aspect of the story with the Tex Avery-style motions that happen once or twice. It also demonstrates a masterful knowledge of what you can do with the comic panel. In one scene, Tatta literally bounces off the panel walls with rage, and there’s an attempted rape scene in book 2 where the art only shows the characters’ feet, but you can pick up perfectly where they would be in relation to each other and their body language just from that.
All in all it’s a bit of an odd read – the story itself is fascinating and amazingly well told. Each horrible twist of the knife comes as a shock – you want to believe that Tezuka won’t kill off or horribly punish yet another character, but still it happens. It’s also a real page-turner: I read both 400-page volumes in short order. Tezuka’s works are an essential part of any Manga fan’s collection, and you could do a lot worse than to start with Buddha.
- Lorcan Nagle is an IT Consultant based in Ireland with a passion for anime, manga and all things robotic. He is also a keen gamer. He lives in Dublin