Buddha - The four encounters - Osamu Tezuka

I am a sucker for graphic novel and comic collections. I love all those box sets and I love reading books which are part of a series - or atleast looking at them and wondering what the plot would be. :) (There are exceptions of course)

This is one series that i have been wanting to read for a long time now (there are quite a few books that i have been wanting to read and not got around to. So many books are written all the time you see). I almost bought this collection in Crossworld a while ago but stopped myself as i was not sure if i would read it all. Today afternoon, I was in the bookshop and I thought i would flip through the pages to see if the story stuck. Since book one was not there, i started with this one. Before I knew it, I had finished the book sitting right there. This has not happened in the past as i never sit for so long in a bookshop! I do read books mostly comics like Archies.

But this was a brilliant read. The image, the dialogues, the story line, the numerous characters- large and small - everything was amazing. It was one of those books written to be read, enjoyed and pondered. Siddhartha has been portrayed as the boy he was - there is no attempt made to show him as anything. The whole book is just an interconnected series of story arcs each effortlessly leading to another. It could have been longer but the writer and illustrator have stuck to a good pace. The images are damn good and I would love to finish this series sometime soon and perhaps try to own it.