Buddha, Vol. 1: Kapilavastu

The thing I love about Osamu Tezuka's brutal Buddha series is:
- The brutality
- Especially the brutality as juxtaposed by the drawing styles: rich, deep, textured nature drawing versus cartoonish humans - and those cartoons doing awful, non-cartoon violence to each other.
- Especially the brutality as an illustration of Buddhism's First Noble Truth (“life is suffering”) - so much that happens to these cartoons is HORRIBLY UNFAIR and just plain horrible. Some of the horribleness is because of the Hindu caste structure (and Buddhism as a reaction to Hinduism is a very rich vein to mine indeed), but some of it is just cosmically, randomly horrible.
- The rich, deep, textured history lessons! I dunno about all yinz but I looooove - LOOAFFFFFF - 500BCE history, and especially ancient Indian history. So I love hearing about the kingdoms of Kapilavastu and King Suddhodana and all that.

Most of vol. 1 introduces this crazy, brutal world and the titular Buddha - Mr. Siddhartha, plz - is born in the latter half of the book and then but a tiny babe for the rest of it. But, oh, the other storylines are great - GREAT. Onto vol 2!