9th Art

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 «

Kari is the story of its eponymous heroine, who leads a double life. By day, Kari is a writer in an ad agency, and at night, she’s a boatman.

The story begins with a double suicide. Two women jump off their respective roof tops. One, Ruth, is saved by a safety net, while the other, Kari, survives when her fall is safely broken by the sewers. Thus begins the double life as the ‘boatman’ who cleans up the sewers. » Read the rest of this entry «