Tezuka and Miller -- Compare Essay

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Indeed Tezuka takes great liberties with Buddha, invents scenarios, but his Manga generally stays true to the life of Buddha (Siddhartha) and his spiritual journey to battle injustice (including the caste system), to help those in need during famine, warfare and drought.

Hence, Buddha is editorially far, far apart in style and in concept from Dark Knight, which in comparison, is frivolous and cliched. Aside from the superhero antics -- and saving people from villains -- Dark Knight is a pithy formula-riddled comic that delights readers in a totally different way from the readers' pleasure while going through the many volumes of Buddha. Indeed, many people who are not Buddhists, and have no real knowledge of Buddha and his travels, have been getting an education of sorts by reading Buddha.

Tezuka has brilliant story-telling abilities but his ability to combine the story with the dramatic visual effect brings out a warm human feeling in the style used in the frames. The emphasis in his frames is on action, conflict, character development, movement and emotion, and one could say the same thing about Dark Knight except that the context is wholly different. There is plenty of action and conflict in Dark Knight -- and it's in color, which American audiences favor by far over the black and white found in Tezuka's Buddha -- but there is nothing really philosophical in Dark Knight but in Buddha the pages are a rich blend of art, action, motion, interesting scenes and philosophy based on a real spiritual leader from the past.

Tezuka seems to want to keep readers' attention with his drawing acumen. Not that Miller's work isn't also very excellent with the pen, but his frames reek of sameness vis-a-vis the absurd juxtaposition between the good guy and the evil villain.

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It helps Buddha too that Tezuka invokes a lavish amount of humor. This is part of the plot, of course, and this paper is about style not plot, but the use of Jedi images and ironies adds to the originality and potency of Buddha.

In fairness to Dark Knight, the style that Miller invokes keeps readers interested; for example Bruce's costume allows him to go in and out of the human world; in fact his Batman costume (and all the changes) adds a sense of style and mystery to the frames. The use of the Joker as the antithesis of Batman -- good vs. evil -- is very effective, especially when Miller uses more than one frame to depict the hideous grin of the Joker. The grin expands (a fascinating style in cartoons) wider and wider as it cracks across the wall of one frame and into another. Eventually the Joker' grin is two frames wide, giving the reader a jolt of irony (an evil person with a grin that takes up two frames!).

Conclusion

While the Japanese style (Manga) is very different from the American style of comics, the purpose of any comic is to entertain the reader, and keep that reader coming back for more. It is interesting though that the Japanese comic fan is perfectly content viewing and reading black and white frames while the Americans crave color. That perhaps says more about the two cultures than the technical contrasts of….....

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