Buddha Thoughts

Osamu Tezuka's Budha was defintately a different take on the life and story of Budha. I'm familiar with his past work in manga and anime such as Astro Boy and Metropolis, but even so, never thought he could deal with such deep and adult themes.

The style is of course consistent with Tezuka's usual Eastern style, cartoony designs of the characters, which is effective in immediately connecting the reader to the characters' essence, so you immediately know who they are and what kind of person they are. Takka has a small body and a big head, so you know he's a sly tricky head. The General is fat and gives off the feelings that he is a villain, and so on and so forth.

As McCloud often mentions in his books, the Eastern style differs tremendously from the West in their frequent use of aspect-to-aspect transitions, and the way creators take their time with small moments and silent times. A great example of this is when the General finds out Chapra is a slave and contemplates from he should do in many panels all from a different perspective.

Budha epitimizes many fundamental differences from Western comics, although they seem so obvious, are necessary to point out. The shape of the speech bubbles for instance, retain a circular design but don't have curves/tails from the character's mouth. Additionally, all the speech bubbles in Buddha are pretty much the same shape, so there's no real difference between what a character says and what he thinks. But it seems thoughts are pretty much are typed outside with nothing around them. Additionally, there's no caption boxes, although there are captions to explain the setting and the mood, etc. etc.