Written and illustrated by the godfather of manga, Osamu Tezuka, volume 1 of Buddha is equal parts adventure, historical non-fiction, and, weirdly, old-school Disney animation. I grabbed this as part of a book club a few weeks back and ended up loving it so much, I decided to get the next two volumes (and there are five more, each roughly 400 pages).

I honestly knew nothing about this series aside from it being one of Tezuka's last epics, released in the early '70s and serialized until the early '80s. I thought this would be a recounting of Siddhartha Gautama's life, but, for the most part, this isn't. It's about ancient India's caste systems and the various injustices that came with it. It's also about enlightenment becoming protest against those castes, which really surprised me — I love this framing of Buddhism as a philosophy/religion stemming from a need to level the playing field among the poorest of citizens...

Lots of wide-eyed Disney-esque animals here, and some silly, unsexualized nudity (lots of pee?), juxtaposed with deeply realistic illustrations of India's mountainous environs and needless, sometimes barbaric, ultra-violence. The mash of juvenile humor and seriousness is something I've seen before with Tezuka, but it still doesn't cease to amaze how seamless and natural it reads. Beautiful tale with lots of death, wonder, and birth and rebirth.