Genthiran

Enthiran was gen bad. In other words, it was disappointing. As a result I was disappointed with it. Below you will find a list of reasons why.

But first: Spoiler Alert! and all that. Meh.

1. Aishwarya Rai (blecch)

She's fantastic, made of plastic.

If there was one thing I was sure of after watching Enthiran, it was that Rajini probably has several films left in him, but Aishwarya Rai ought to have retired decades ago. I haven't seen a more plastic-looking actress anywhere. It's not like her acting skills make up for it either.

She plays Sana, who is Vaseegaran (human Rajini) and Chitti (robot Rajini)'s love interest.
Shallow female characters are hardly unusual in Tamil cinema, but Sana is so shallow she couldn't drown an ant. The one and only character trait they give her in the movie (apart from her plastic bimbotude) is that she's a medical student who cheats on her exams given the slightest opportunity (which she gets in the form of Chitti/Robot Rajini). It's a small mercy that we don't see her trying to treat anyone later on.
She's friggin annoying. Even thinking of ways to describe how annoying she is in the movie is making me annoyed.
All I know is that during the second half I was praying for Chitti to get enraged with her refusal to reciprocate his love and just explodify her head. Seriously. That would have made this the best movie of all time.

2. Rajinikanth

Don't get me wrong, Rajini is usually ozum. It's just that Enthiran was more of a film with Rajini in it than an actual Rajini film.
The director, Shankar, initially proposed the film Robo in 2001 as a project starring Kamal Haasan and Preity Zinta. Since then the project shifted from one production house to another, most notably to Shah Rukh Khan, who was, before he dropped it, to be the star of the film. Rajinikanth entered the film much later. In short, it wasn't a movie written with him in mind - and if they changed the script once he entered the film, they didn't change it enough.

How does this matter? You go to watch a Rajini film for the Superstar Rajinikanth, not so much the character he's playing. In other words, you expect to see the larger-than-life, superhuman-yet-still-totally-relatable-human do-gooder and villain-basher hero. Enthiran confuses the hell out of anyone with such expectations.

Rajini plays two roles, Vaseegaran, the scientist, and Chitti, the robot. For a substantial part of the film, Chitti is the villain, and the creator, Vaseegaran, has the task of shutting him down. This leaves one confused about which Rajini to root for.

That's some next level sideburns

On the one hand you have Chitti, the awesomely super-powerful android robot who goes rogue after his creator decides to give him feelings. But then, Chitti is clearly not the Rajini - he's a robot, with about as much charisma and style as you'd expect from a robot. As if having Rajini act robotic isn't alienating enough, you are shown Chitti multiple times in the movie without his flesh mask, allowing you to see a steel face that looks nothing like Rajini. Besides, Chitti is decidedly evil in the second half of the movie, leaving a wanton trail of death and destruction wherever he goes (but even more despicably, falling in love with Sana).

That's some next level beard

On the other hand you have Vaseegaran, the human scientist and creator of Chitti. Could this be the Rajini? Afraid not. Yes, he's the good guy throughout, he's got the girl, and quite a wicked beard too. But he's a wuss. The biggest flaw of Enthiran (apart from Aishwarya Rai) is that human Rajini doesn't get to beat up any bad guys. The most he does in this department is fling some sand into a fisherman's face and rescue Sana from a situation she damn well deserved to be in (Ask a random stranger to be your boyfriend for a day and try not to expect trouble.).
If at least the character of this scientist were played by someone else, we could have unashamedly cheered on the robot Rajini as he cloned himself and tore down the city. But no, we have two Rajinis to choose between. Something about the robot Rajini is not real, and the 'real' Rajini gives us very little to cheer him on for. When Vaseegaran infiltrates Chitti's lair by dressing up and acting robotic, he loses what little Rajinific charisma and style he had, which, sadly, wasn't much to begin with.
Also he loses the beard.

Who is the Rajini in the film, then? There isn't one. Which is why Enthiran isn't a Rajini film, it's just one with Rajini in it.

3. The Script

For all that budget and hype they could have put a little more effort into the story. Even leaving aside the camp and the many logical inconsistencies, which are only to be expected, the script is bad. It's not very original, 'pays tribute' to a number of Hollywood robot-themed films (Terminator and I, Robot come to mind, and I'm sure there are others I can't remember right now).
The movie doesn't deliver much in the way of (intentional) laughs. I didn't even realise that Sanatham and Karunas, who play Vaseegaran's assistants, were supposed to be the comic relief until I read the Enthiran wiki later.
The villain for the first half of the movie, played by Danny Denzongpa, is hardly threatening. He's incompetent (his robot picks up a bun when told to pick up a gun), and not really very malicious at all - he's just a little jealous that Chitti's better than his own robot. Plus, his only real act of evil is giving Chitti some destructive capabilities, which allow him to promptly be killed off by Chitti, who then takes over as the villain.
And then there's the most insane, as my friend sitting next to me in the theatre put it, "messed up", scene in the movie, where Chitti saves a number of people from a burning building. The last person he saves is a girl who happens to be naked and in the bath when he rescues her. This act of being rescued in the nude so traumatizes the girl that she runs in front of a truck, effectively killing herself. This brings much ire upon Chitti, for not having the sense to save the modesty of the girl while saving her life. Did he have any clothes on to cover her up? No. Did she have any lying around that hadn't been burned in the fire? Not that we know of.
There seem to have been no options available to Chitti but to rescue this girl as she was, and yet this "unfeeling" act of his is what prompts Vaseegaran to programme emotions into him. This creates the situation for the main conflict of the film to unfold.
It's ridiculous, but sadly not the kind of ridiculous you can laugh at. It's just messed up.

As a result of these things, I was disappointed by Enthiran. In other words, it was disappointing. It was gen bad.

Avatar

In 1492, Columbus discovered America. Over the next couple of centuries the indigenous peoples of America were wiped out, thanks to Mr White Man.
In 2009, James Cameron makes a film in which white men try to wipe out blue skinned aliens (whose culture is curiously similar to the Native Americans') from their home planet.

SPOILER ALERT - don't worry, you can't spoil what's already rotten.

And the natives win! Are American guilts assuaged? Is everybody happy that the tree people who are one with nature defeated the evil greedy humans' high tech helicopters and gunships with bows and arrows? Are the Native Americans feeling warm and fuzzy because their fictional alien counterparts won the battle in this movie? Yay!

Avatar is visually impressive, but I'm going to be only so impressed with visuals. The plot is one giant cliche made up of smaller cliches, and the whole thing is ridiculous and unintelligent. Alright, it's perhaps not as stupid as the second Transformers movie, but it comes pretty damn close.

Consider the fact that the movie is set in the year 2154 on a planet that's 4.3 light years away from Earth and everyone from the human race is American. Alright, I'm willing to let that go, maybe America conquers the rest of Earth by then.

To be fair, until right about the middle, the movie's not bad, which is what makes the entire thing worse. It floats the hope that the climax is going to be at least slightly ingenious - after all, the premise raises an interesting problem. Sam Worthington plays a U.S. Marine who is given a sort of remote control of a Na'vi body - the "avatar" - with which he is supposed to infiltrate the Na'vi tribe to make it easier for the humans to get what they want: a precious mineral that lays right under their habitation. Worthington in his avatar body then learns the ways of the Na'vi and becomes one of them, and defects to their side when the humans move in for the kill in their giant helicopters and robo-suits with all their explosives and ammunition.

From that point it seems like the writers just gave up. Once Worthington's avatar takes command of the Na'vi forces, he launches the most ridiculously absurdly stupid counterattack on the humans. What's his plan? Shoot at the helicopters with your bows and arrows! Charge at them on horseback! (On the Na'vi equivalent of horses. Whatever.) Waow. Shuuurely that's going to work.

But it does. Why? Because as soon as Worthington takes charge, the Na'vi's bows and arrows are suddenly able to shatter bulletproof glass and penetrate all the humans' high-tech armour. When the Na'vi are still losing, they are suddenly helped out by bulletproof alien rhinos. No kidding. Be one with nature and nature will send bulletproof alien rhinos and vicious alien dogs to your aid when you're fighting against those nature-hating humans. Apparently Deus Ex Machinae are fine as long as they are in stunning CG.

Writer 1: And after the Na'vi have won, what happens to poor Worthington's character who wants to be one of the Na'vi but is actually bound to a human body?
Writer 2: Oh... um... that's a problem we kind of forgot about, didn't we? We really should tie that up. Any ideas?
Writer 1: Uh... how about... magic!
Writer 2: Awesome. Let's magically transfer him into his avatar body. The Na'vi have magic, right? I mean, they love nature, and nature's magical, isn't it? Anyway, it's alien nature, so it can give them whatever goddamn powers they want.

Thank you James Cameron, I have learnt a valuable life lesson from you. I will remember to love my planet and be one with nature. My heart can finally go on.

Understanding the Kafkaesque

Understanding the Kafkaesque

Understanding Kafka is no easy task. A reader of Kafka’s work in many ways becomes like one of Kafka’s own protagonists – an isolated, confused being, struggling to understand a world that in some way constantly defies understanding. This is probably why so much of criticism on this early 20th century German-speaking author from Prague clings so desperately to the raft of Kafka’s life, through his letters and diaries. Considering the number of these he left behind, a biographical reading of Kafka is a popular approach: easy, straightforward, and really quite inevitable, given the circumstances through which much of his writing is available to us today. Kafka felt a deep personal connection with his work, and asked his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, to destroy all his unpublished writings upon his death: last wishes that Brod disobeyed after Kafka died in 1924, changing the face of 20th century literature. It is impossible to deny the strong presence of Franz Kafka in his writings. His protagonists’ names, for example: K. from The Castle, Josef K. from The Trial, Gregor Samsa from The Metamorphosis, are all encapsulations of Kafka’s own name. The domineering, authoritarian father figure – most notably in The Judgement, seems to be a reflection of Kafka’s own father, underlined by Kafka’s own Letter to His Father.

However, reading Kafka’s works through his life is a bit like flipping ahead to the solutions pages in a puzzle book. Not only is it a bit like cheating, it leaves the reader cheated as well, whether or not they are aware of it. For one thing is sure about Kafka’s works: they defy any sort of essentialist reading. Turning to the solutions pages in this case helps us only to place the body of Kafka’s writing in context; more than anything, along with Kafka’s fiction, it helps us understand the author Kafka better, but his fiction itself remains as puzzling as ever. Like Kafka’s unfortunate protagonists, we are not meant to fully understand the absurd reality of Kafka’s fiction, or find any solution for it. Like Josef K. and Gregor Samsa, we struggle against this breakdown of sense and meaning, only to fail at the end. It is this inexplicability that lies at the core of Kafka’s fiction.

Nowhere is this made as clear to us as it is in Kafka’s metafictional short story, The Cares of a Family Man. The narrative begins in a manner suggestive of an analytical reading: “Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to be of German origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty of both interpretations allows one to assume with justice that neither is accurate, especially as neither of them provides an intelligent meaning of the word.”

We go on to learn that Odradek is “a flat star-shaped spool for thread” that “looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished”. Odradek can be seen as a metaphor for Kafka’s own works: senseless, but in its own way perfectly finished. The narrator of this story, the family man, struggles to grapple with the meaning of this object, but by the end of this 500-word story we realise, along with the narrator, that Odradek is what it is: meaningless, but permanent. In the final line of the story, the narrator admits: “He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful”. These words are prophetic in the way Kafka’s own “meaningless” work would survive him. What is more important to consider, however, is the way Kafka plays with meaning and meaninglessness in the story. The narrator knows Odradek to be meaningless, but we also observe, along with the narrator, the slow implicit dawning of the realisation that in his impermanence, he too is rendered meaningless. Odradek is the family man’s shadow, his guilt, a manifestation of his own meaninglessness. The narrator is only defined for us as the “family man” – a label apparently filled with meaning, but in a way no more meaningful than Odradek’s description of being a flat, star-shaped spool for thread. The narrator will only be survived by his legacy as a family man – his children and his children’s children – and Odradek.

The story is a wonderful comment of the worldview of Kafka’s fiction, which we may call the Kafkaesque. It embodies a certain nervous laughter that is so characteristic of the Kafkaesque. Consider the opening passage of The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect, and Samsa’s first thoughts are about how he will get to work that morning. It is this nervous laughter, this humour of disbelief, that is the only form of escape in the Kafkaesque world, that is otherwise menacing and claustrophobic. Jean Collignon explains the source of this humour in Kafka’s fiction:

When confronted with an absurd situation, we burst out laughing, but we do so only because we believe that, due to this very characteristic, it cannot last. Pretty soon, we argue, the absurdity will be exploded and reason reestablished. If not, we go on laughing because we feel superior to the absurd, unaffected by it, while those responsible for it are discarded as fools. But if the absurdity affects us deeply, we either sink into despair or revolt. Now Kafka's heroes, without growing despondent or rebellious, seem to wallow in absurdity with a surprising amount of delight. (Collignon 59)

The Kafkaesque perspective is the perspective of the bug, the pest, the Ungeziefer. Although we see the bug only in The Metamorphosis, a similar perspective is retained in Kafka’s other stories.

(click to see larger)

(Watterson, 22)

Kafka’s protagonists all have that dim perception of being the victim of some cruel prank or joke. When Josef K. is arrested at the very beginning of The Trial, he harbours for a long time the suspicion that it is merely a practical joke that his colleagues are playing on him. As a result of this perspective, Kafka’s protagonists seem to go about their increasingly absurd lives with a sense of flippancy. The Kafkaesque has often been described as being nightmarish, with perhaps too much emphasis on the nightmare as being horrific. It is nightmarish in the sense that there is a constantly present hope that the protagonist will wake up.

In Adam Thirlwell’s description of the Kafkaesque, he describes and refutes the common perceptions of the Kafkaesque: of expressing the alienation of the modern man, of prophesying the totalitarian police state and the Nazi Holocaust, of expressing a Jewish mysticism, of an anguish of man without God, of being very serious, of his stories all being autobiographical. He says of these notions of the Kafkaesque: “All of these truths, all of them are wrong. It is not a very accurate word, this ‘Kafkaesque’” (Thirlwell xi).

Thirlwell does not go on to define the Kafkaesque. He defines it only negatively, by stating the things it is not, which are, ironically, the very things it is popularly perceived to be. The Kafkaesque can never be an accurate word. Defining it would be to essentialise it, which would go against its very essence. Which is not to say the Kafkaesque is not characterized by a very distinct, constant style. No one-line definition of the Kafkaesque could capture its complexity, except if it is defined as being reminiscent of the works of Kafka. Such a definition begs the question and leaves us no wiser.

Perhaps it is true that the “Kafkaesque” can no longer be seen only in light of Kafka’s own work. The adjective has transcended its original relation to Kafka’s fiction, and attempting to redefine the Kafkaesque so it better represents the work of Kafka might not be a worthwhile exercise. It would be interesting to understand, however, why the Kafkaesque describes a certain kind of literature that cannot be described by any other word. The Kafkaesque of Kafka’s fiction, at the very least, fails to attach itself to or group itself under any other labels of genre.

The difficulty of pinning down Kafka and the Kafkaesque is reflected in Kafka’s uncertain position in the literary canon. Kafka cannot comfortably be grouped under any literary movement, for while his style shares elements with several of them, it also lies outside the boundaries of every one of them. “Kafka turns out to be as much an Expressionist as a Zionist as a mystic as a pre- and post-Communist Czech as an Existentialist as a post-modernist as a post-colonialist as a (whatever he will be next month). Kafka's work and his life seem to lend themselves to infinite readings and finite exploitations” (Gilman 9). Kafka is often categorised as an expressionist: his surreal narrative seems to occupy a more mental and emotional realm than a purely physical one.

One important aspect of the Kafkaesque is claustrophobia. It is not the surroundings that are claustrophobic (although occasionally they are), but a claustrophobia of the mind, the frustrating confines of the character’s thoughts and their inability to comprehend baffling surroundings. When Josef K. of The Trial is arrested, it is primarily his own mind that shackles him. The Kafkaesque claustrophobia is perhaps illustrated best by his story The Burrow. The narrative is the frenetic thoughts of a burrowing creature, constantly worried about its burrow. One could say the claustrophobia of the narrative is reflective of the physical confines of the burrow, but interestingly the narrative squeezes the reader into an even tighter box within the creature’s thoughts when the creature leaves the burrow. The mind seems to be the primary dimension in which this aspect of the Kafkaesque operates. Yet to call the Kafkaesque only expressionistic would be to completely miss the point: the Kafkaesque explores the entanglement between the dimensions of the mental and emotional with those of the physical and real. The uneasy relationship between the two is what creates the nightmarish quality of the Kafkaesque. It is an unreality imposed upon a very familiar reality. Ritchie Robertson, in his introduction to Kafka, explains this with the example of The Judgement. “In The Judgement, Kafka defies the expectations of readers that a text will have a stable relation to reality - that it will stay in the same literary mode throughout. Instead, Kafka begins in the realist mode and moves to the Expressionist mode, with hints of a further reality that neither can accommodate” (31). He goes on to explain that while The Judgement employs a shift from the realist to the expressionist mode, The Metamorphosis employs both modes simultaneously.

Expressionism was a turn-of-the-century movement, relating more to developments in painting than in literature. It is a movement clubbed under the larger cultural epoch of modernism. Kafka’s work, containing elements of the expressionistic, undoubtedly contained elements of modernism. His stories did reflect a certain mundanity of modern urban life: Gregor Samsa’s constant worrying about his job as a travelling salesman is evidence of this. Kafka’s heroes’ struggle to make meaning for themselves in a chaotic world is a modernist quest, and a strongly existentialist one.

Yet at the same time the Kafkaesque mocks and parodies the familiar (although perhaps not quite so familiar in Kafka’s time) modernist narrative. Samsa is an insect when he worries about his job as a travelling salesman. The modernist quest for meaning always fails, and Kafka distorts the very concept of meaning, as we saw in The Cares of a Family Man. The existentialist aim to define oneself is always thwarted.

The inevitability of the hero's reduction to powerlessness culminates in his death and dramatizes the superiority of the victorious forces which render all attempts at self-determination futile. Rather than providing the reader with that privileged moment of insight into the reasons which bring about the protagonist's downfall, Kafka's obsessional quest for completeness and absolute truthfulness is frustrated by the maze of minute detail. This deconstruction of totality ultimately leads to the fragmentation of truth. The failure to establish a totalizing view restrains Kafka from restoring to the narrative any familiar sense of omniscience. He renders the world unintelligible and truth inaccessible. (Beicken 401)

In its parody of modernist narratives, the Kafkaesque is also postmodernist, despite its arrival prior to postmodernism. Kafka’s use of metafiction is an indicator of his postmodernist tendencies. The refusal of the Kafkaesque to maintain a stable relationship with reality could be read as a sort of pastiche of genres, a favourite tool of the postmodernists. The Kafkaesque belongs to no single genre, but borrows from several, mixing them together in what continues even today to be a confusing narrative, despite the arrival and growth of postmodernism. James Whitlark says of Kafka’s prose that it is “reminiscent of literary realism, except in its dreamlike minimalism […] If Kafka had merely presented a ‘figure… or system’ and its deconstruction, he would still be working within a fairly traditional logic. Instead, he jostles one system and its deconstruction against another, creating an ungovernable world where any struggle for control becomes nightmarish – the Kafkaesque” (13).

Kafka’s fiction also manages to fall into the magical realist mode, even though the very term magic realism was coined one year after Kafka’s death. Yet the dynamism of the Kafkaesque’s relationship between the real and the unreal, in retrospect, finds itself a place in the magical realist tradition. Milan Kundera cites Kafka’s surrealist humour as being the predecessor of magical realist artists like Federico Fellini, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Salman Rushdie. Like magical realists, Kafka distorts the dimensions of space and time – Kafka’s characters are often running for their lives to stay in the same place – they are unable to move. Time, too is hugely problematised, and turned into a mental dimension rather than a physical one, as we see in Kafka’s A Common Confusion. In the story, A accomplishes a journey to H in ten minutes on the first day, but the same journey takes him ten hours to complete on the next day. Magical realist narratives are seen as postmodernist narratives, being concerned with questions of being rather than questions of knowledge (McHale 83). But if we are to consider this definition as accurate we know that Kafka once again steps out of the magical realist framework by concerning himself with questions of knowledge as well as those of being. The Kafkaesque is plagued with these questions – in Kafka’s The Great Wall of China, we are told of the Chinese emperor who is known only through bits of knowledge, fragmented, like the Great Wall itself, and wholly unreliable because they have passed through the distorted filters of Kafkaesque space and time.

The Kafkaesque, Kafka’s Kafkaesque at the very least, therefore, creates a category of its own, a new genre that manipulates other genres, with the effect of bewildering the reader, who, like K. or Samsa, becomes a victim, a bug, with a dim perception that it is at the butt of some cruel trick, but lacks the intelligence to really comprehend the magnitude of it.

Understanding the Kafkaesque then becomes oxymoronic – we cannot understand that which is not meant to be understood. The only understanding this essay, or any elucidation of the Kafkaesque can offer, is that the Kafkaesque will puzzle us, there is no way around it. All we can do is laugh disbelievingly until the very end.

WORKS CITED

Beicken, Peter U. “Kafka’s Narrative Rhetoric.” Journal of Modern Literature. Vol. 6 No. 3 (Sep 1997): 398-409. Web.

Collignon, Jean. “Kafka’s Humor.” Yale French Studies. No. 16 (1955): 53-62. Web.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York and London: Methuen (1987)

Gilman, Sander L. Franz Kafka. London: Reaktion Books, 2005. Web.

Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Great Britain: Penguin, 1977. Print.

--- “The Metamorphosis.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Thirlwell 3-54. Print.

---“The Burrow.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Thirlwell 113-149. Print.

---“Cares of a Family Man.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Web.

---“The Judgement.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Web.

---“The Great Wall of China.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Thirlwell 55-69. Print.

---“Letter to his Father.” Web.

Robertson, Ritchie. Kafka: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Web.

Thirlwell, Adam, ed. Metamorphosis. London: Vintage, 1999. Print.

---“The Last Flippant Writer.” Thirlwell ix-xxviii. Print.

Watterson, Bill. Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat.

Whitlark, James. Behind the Great Wall: a Post-Jungian Approach to Kafkaesque Literature. Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1991. Web.

Comiclore

Coming soon, saar. That, was what the chap at the Sathyam box office (do ticket counters at multiplexes count as box offices?) told me, when I asked him when the damn Watchmen movie was coming out.

So I asked him again, does ‘coming soon’ mean March or, sayitisntso, April?

Idontnosaar, he replied. Coming Soon.

Ah well, so it goes.

Some of you gentiles, who haven’t read the book yet, might just what the big deal in yet another big budget Hollywood adaptation of yet another comic book is. So before you say that, or something similarly uninformed, let me take you through a rough guide of sorts, into that strange realm of pop culture which, when you think about it, isn’t as pop as it should be, since its only nerds and critics who seem to form its primary constituency, the graphic novel.

As someone very excellently put it, cultural epochs come and go, but one-upmanship is forever. And we here at The Pseudputs Review, are all about the one-upmanship. Also, as everyone knows, or should know, Dickens, Eliot, the Russians, and books without pictures in general, are like, so passé.

So here’s my list of graphic novels/comics that everyone should have heard of/read:

1. The Watchmen by Alan Moore

I remember the day I finished reading The Watchmen; I thought it was Western Civilization’s greatest artistic achievement.

I’ll admit, that was, maybe a tad over the top. But I still think The Watchmen is right up there with Anglo-American popular culture’s greatest achievements- The White Album (I like it better than Sgt. Pepper’s), Pulp Fiction, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Arrested Development and Pepsi (I like it better than Coke).

The story of The Watchmen unfolds in 1985, in a universe that’s similar, yet not quite the same as our own. Nixon’s in his fifth term as President, and America is at the height of a Cold War with a Soviet Union that is anything but dying. The threat of nuclear war and subsequent annihilation (that quintessentially 80’s concern: like Bon Jovi), is a ominous theme throughout the story. Also, masked vigilantes, or ‘super-heroes’ if you will, are a part of everyday life; that is, until they were outlawed in 1977 (a bit like the Incredibles that bit, only these guys didn’t have any powers at all. They were just grown {wo}men in costumes.). The book starts with the mysterious death of one such retired super-hero, The Comedian. This death briefly brings together many of his former caped crusading colleagues who are now fat, balding and/or impotent; all of whom, except one for one Rorschach (he wears a napkin with an inkblot as a mask), have ambivalent feelings about all the ‘crime-fighting’ they did in the past. In this universe, some of them even fight in Vietnam.

The idea of a super-hero is a funny, uniquely American, one: a masked vigilante who upholds the moral order of the time and vanquishes anyone who dares go against it. But what if say, the dominant moral order isn’t quite that peachy itself. It’s sexist, patriarchal, racist, dominated and manipulated by the interests of the rich and powerful (Manufacturing Consent, anyone?). Where does that leave our superhero? It makes him, or her, knowingly or unknowingly, a bit of a crypto-fascist. Someone who has clear ideas of what society should look like and what would constitute, an undesirable element within it. Suddenly, the Joker isn’t half as bad, is he (he was just plain ol’ anarchist)?

This is just one of the many fascinating ideas Alan Moore explores in his remarkable book, which starts off, and ends, as a whodunit. Throw in some Neitzche, Dylan, and super villains famously spouting post-modern art theory on the eve of veritable diabolism, and you have the comic book equivalent of Paradise Lost.

2. Fables by Bill Willingham

Snow White is Deputy Mayor of a secret township of exiled fairy tale characters living in the heart of New York City. The Big Bad Wolf (or Bigby more affectionately) is the Chief of Police. Prince Charming is a manslut, who has been married and divorced three times (not to mention cheated innumerably more- he can’t help it, his charm’s his curse), to Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and Cinderella respectively (all whom meet regularly over cocktails, a la Sex and the City, and bitch about him). Goldilocks is a flaming Marx spouting revolutionary, out to incite armed rebellion. Jack (of the Beanstalk fame) is a con artist. Beauty and the Beast are desperately seeking a better apartment and higher social status. Mowgli is an international super-spy. So is Cinderella.

Welcome to the world of the Fables, imaginary to us, but real nevertheless. The Fables have been driven out of their Homelands by the Adversary (you’ll never guess who that is). And for the past few hundred years or so, they’ve been living in the world of the Mundanes (that’s us, Mundys more affectionately: don’t worry any similarities with Harry Potter end there).

Winner of 7 Eisner Awards (it’s like the Oscars for comics) so far, the Fables has been called the best ongoing comic book series. And you bet it is. Thankfully devoid of any Nietzsche, these are funny, absorbing tales of adventure, romance and absurdity; Bill Willingham’s created something of a masterpiece here.

And the best part? Unlike every other title on this list, it’s an ongoing series; meaning you can have the unique pleasure of waiting to know how the story progresses with each issue.

3. The Sandman by Neil Gaiman

I’ll confess I haven’t finished the series entirely (the .cbr versions of this comic I find particularly unbearable). But this is another one of my favourites, nevertheless. Actually, pretty much anything Neil Gaiman puts down on paper is hallowed literature to me. The man’s a genius.

In a nutshell, it deals with the travails and adventures of the Sandman, the Lord of the Dream Realm etc. etc. He is one of the seven Endless (his siblings, of whom, Death, his sister, is one). It’s difficult to say what the Sandman series is about, it has seriously epic proportions. Dreams, Life, Death, Art, the Meaning/Absurdity of it all, the crazy King of San Francisco, Baghdad in its Caliphate glory days, Aborigine folklore, and where Shakespeare really got his inspiration for A Midsummer Night’s Dream from. If I could take one thing to a desert island, I’d pick the collected Sandman series.

Now for my favourite part, Neil Gaimanisms:

“Walk any path in Destiny's garden and you will be forced to choose, not once but many times. The paths fork and divide. With each step you take through Destiny's garden, you make a choice; and every choice determines future paths. However, at the end of a lifetime of walking you might look back, and see only one path stretching out behind you, or look ahead, and see only darkness.”

“Slipping and sliding and flickering through dreams; and the dreamers will wake and wonder why this dream seemed different, wonder how real their lives can truly be.”

The series also contains, what I believe, is the greatest drinking toast ever written:

“To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due.”

4. The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller

Published in the same year as The Watchmen, 1986, and almost as canonical a work, The Dark Knight Returns, finds Bruce Wayne graying and old. It’s been ten years since Bruce last put on the Batsuit, and Gotham is a city racked by crime and unemployment. To top it off, we find Bruce in the middle of a profound existential crisis. He too wonders whether any of it was worth it (yes, what was it with the late 80’s and superheroes getting existential all over the place?).

Consider this, in one the first chapter Bruce is returning from a meeting with his old friend Commissioner Gordon. As he walks along what he realizes was the same street his parents were killed over 40 years ago, he is accosted by two teenage thugs with knives. And suddenly, having something of an epiphany, realizes the man who killed his parents was just like the two boys in front of him, “all he wanted was money. I was naive to think of him the lowest sort of man.”

While the not quite as multi-faceted as the Watchmen, this work is considered by many to be the best Batman comic ever written (apart from of course Year One, also by Miller). It’s a trenchant (and, I must admit, brazenly liberal-Democratic) look at Reagan-era America and its contradictions: where the government cut social security spending in the name of fiscal prudence, crime and inequality went through the roof and, at the same time, billions were spent on keeping the ‘Evil Empire’ away from the ‘Free World’.

Also, did I mention Batman fights Superman in this book? He does. And it’s epic.

5. Maus by Art Spiegelman

Maus is about the Holocaust. The Jews are mice and the Nazis are cats. Simple, yet scathing. It’s also a true life story. Maus derives from a series of interviews Art Spiegelman conducted with his estranged, difficult father who went through Auschwitz and somehow, came out to tell his tale.

And Art Spiegelman is not one for crude, simplistic portrayals; he is brutally honest. He even brings out the rather disturbing fact that his father, the survivor of the worst genocide in human history, is also, a racist. Spiegelman Sr., like many of that era, didn’t quite fancy black people.

Maus is a psychologically complex work that ought to be standard reading in schools, if you ask me.

Note to insti junta: All of the titles here can be downloaded off LAN. I'm sharing.

Non-insti: This should get you started.

Honourable Mentions/ I’m too lazy to write anymore

The Preacher by Garth Ennis

The Killing Joke by Alan Moore

A Contract with God by William Eisner

Arkham Asylum by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean

Kari by Amruta Patil (Honestly, it wasn't that great. But whatever, I actually bought it- so I’m keeping it on the list.)

Batman: Year One by Frank Miller

Signal to Noise and Black Orchid by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

Transmetropolitan and Bad World by Warren Ellis

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

MAD Magazine (The only comic I've been buying since I was kid)

Principles of Uncertainity by Maira Kalman (Sadly, this old column of hers is no longer available online. Check out the link anyway, she's got something new going on.)

And of course, Charlie Schulz and Bill Watterson; no list is complete without them.