INDIA AUTHENTIC #1 REVIEW

[Stephanie Kay]

Reviewer: Kerry Birmingham, birmy@juno.com

Look at Ganesha. Emulate him. Cultivate the qualities that he represents in your awareness and you too can become the remover of obstacles, the Lord of Knowledge…

Created by: Deepak Chopra
Script: Saurav Mohapatra
Pencils: Satish Tayade
Color: M. Vishwanathan, S.M. Bhaskar, R.C. Prakash
Cover: Abhishek Singh
Letters: B.S. Ravikiran, Nilesh S. Mahadik
Assistant Editor: Neha Bajaj
Editor: Mahesh Kamath
Published by: Virgin Comics

The comic book industry being what the way it is, there’s generally some initial suspicion when a new publisher enters the fray, especially one with money behind it. You can’t blame a comic fan scorned, and the landscape of the industry is littered with the corpses of publishers who swore they were in for the long haul, only to join the Tundras and the Firsts and the Valiants in the Graveyard of Forgotten Publishers. Even Crossgen, which had a major media push, a fruitful talent search, and the backing of a millionaire, failed to use its initially vaunted business savvy to save itself.

Perhaps Virgin Comics does Crossgen one better, emerging on the scene with the backing of the titular multinational conglomerate and enough “name” creators (from comics folk to film stars) to make anyone who pays attention to the industry notice. Publishers that aim for the big-splash entrance don’t often gain traction; a franchise cannot be built in a day, and a juggernaut cannot be built out of marketing alone. Virgin Comics, despite its dubious origins and insistence on itself as a publishing force to be reckoned with, is, to its credit, taking a different approach to its material.

Like the similarly styled, far less effective AK Comics, Virgin, spearheaded by author Deepak Chopra and Jeevan Kang, does not aim for out-of-the-box franchise characters or a pre-fab superhero universe, but instead draws from myths and legends of India for inspiration. Its “Director’s Cut” line features the high profile film luminaries, while its “Shakti” line attempts to reevaluate and re-present classical concepts of India and Hinduism in modern ways (reflecting the heritage and beliefs of Chopra and Kang).

A somewhat natural and obvious extension of this mission statement is their “India Authentic”
line, of which Ganesha is the first (Kali and Indra follow next). An education in the back story of the elephant-headed, multi-armed Hindu deity, Ganesha is part-bedtime story, part-religious exploration, and part-big budget epic. In its simplest terms, Ganesha as presented here is the story a young boy, newly created from clay, sworn to protect his mother while she meditates. Given great power to defend himself by his mother, who happens to be a goddess, the boy vows not to let anything disturb her. Things hit a snag, however, when the goddess’s husband and fellow deity returns with his vast army from a campaign abroad. After the boy, ignorant of this man and aware only of his duty, devastates and humiliates the army, he is forced into a confrontation with his stepfather that ends both in tragedy and the birth of a new and familiar deity.

It is not my intention to evaluate the symbolic and universal correspondences of Ganesha as an entity, either as significant to Hinuism as a faith or to outsiders looking for a bit of insight into the alien. Chopra himself provides a brief, two-page introduction to Ganesha’s resonances in Hinduism and human psychology that displays more depth and facility for the material than my meager understanding of the subject could possibly convey. Taken on its own, as a comic story with roots in Eastern myth and literature, it’s undeniably well done. It would have been easy to let this sort of thing become rote and pedantic, a by-the-numbers adaptation that had more in common with the stodginess of Classics Illustrated than the slicker product that has actually resulted.

Everything has a nicely cinematic feel: sweeping vistas, clamoring armies, nature beautiful and savage. Satish Tayade’s pencils are often very loose, and sometimes the action is a little confusing, but it is by and large beautiful work. Tayade’s work is helped immensely by the team of colorists who elevate his work, much like how Cary Nord’s art is made much more palatable by the color washes of Dave Stewart in Dark Horse’s current Conan series. The whole issue is awash in infinite skies, rainbow sunsets, and figures silhouetted by a golden sun as they do battle. With a few possible exceptions (Jose Villarrubia springs to mind), there’s few colorists who would have done as effective a job at turning decent pencils into beautifully saturated landscapes that enhance the mythic, dream-like quality of the story. Similarly, Saurav Mohapatra’s script is appropriately lush, often verbose but grand where it needs to be and intimate where it needs to be. The all-Indian creative team is unfamiliar to me (hell, it’s been difficult just to type their names), but this is a strong showing with room for improvement.

Those concerned with the religious content shouldn’t be alarmed. There is no preaching here, no Jack Chick-style spiritual hard line; either Hinduism as a whole is less prone to moralizing or Mohapatra and crew wisely downplay the purely religious angle in favor of storytelling and more cross-cultural themes. The spiritual aspect is present, mainly in Chopra’s introduction and an anecdotal account of a Ganesha-related “miracle” that, at least as presented, has all the credibility of spotting the Virgin Mary on a piece of toast. All but the most extreme agnostics, atheists, and Christians should be able to relate to the familiar archetypes, which correspond easily to Western myths and beliefs, and the story’s earnest notions of familial fealty and Ganesha as an outward manifestation of an inward quality.

I’m not entirely convinced that Virgin Comics is much more than a pet project for its founders and a breeding ground for film projects (at least one is already in the works), but this is a pretty impressive way to go about it. “India Authentic” doesn’t have the commercial appeal of, say, a comic created by Nicolas Cage, but as a line and an ethos it’s a bold idea that could have been done without subtlety or even competence. It’s clearly a thoughtful, non-exploitive approach to subjects rarely broached in comics, and Virgin deserves some credit for putting this out in the direct market. If they can balance conceptually riskier projects like this with their Soon-to-Be-a-Major-Motion-Picture comics, the underdog from that major multinational conglomerate may be able to stick around a bit longer than some of its predecessors.

RATING:


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