9th Art

Of all the different genres out there, ‘Noir’ has been a long time favorite of mine. There’s something about gritty straight writing that I just can’t get enough of. From Miller’s Sin City to Brubaker’s Criminal, I’ve read and re-read them all. Joining that list now is The Killer.

The Killer (or ‘Le Tuer’, as it’s called in the original French) is the work of writer Matz and artist Luc Jacamon. A story of a professional assassin, The Killer is a dark narrative in the first-person by the hitman himself. » Read the rest of this entry «

In Gotham Central, Brubaker explored the lives of regular cops in Gotham Cityand what it was like living under the shadow of Batman.

With the Criminal series, he goes one up. First off, there’s no Batman or any other superhero/vigilante. Second, it’s a story about crime from the criminal’s point of view. According to Brubaker, he wanted to portray “criminals who, as far as their morality goes, they steal, or kill, but they’re good people somehow anyway.”

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In the world of Indian comics, one of the things I’m glad about is that while the output is relatively lower in number than say the US or UK, the quality is not. The issues with which they deal are contemporary and real; be it the double-life of Kari, or the journals of The Barn Owl’s Capers. Penned by Naseer Ahmed, Kashmir Pending is yet another novel on these same lines.

Naseer takes on the decades old strife in the Kashmir Valley, one that we now take so much for granted that it no longer even makes the news. The story, however, is not from an outsider’s point of view where facts and events are laid out so that good and bad are as easy to tell apart as black and white. Instead, it takes us into the life of young Muslim boys growing up in Kashmir and being manipulated by larger forces. » Read the rest of this entry «