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BOMBABY #1
by Antony Mazzotta
($3.50,
SLG Publishing,
Bombaby.com)
Review by Mike Hunter
Far as I know, this is the first American comic to deal with the version of modern India exemplified by "Bollywood" movies, where – as flashy musicals did in the U.S. during the Great Depression – wealth, romance, and glamour offer escapism for the impoverished masses.
Bombaby begins with a splash page of a crowded cinema, the audience watching a silhouetted woman brushing her hair. A Hindu chant dances through the air. In the next page, the screen is seen from its "other side," the bedroom mirror of the heroine, Sangeeta Mukherjee, who finishes tending her luxuriant tresses, picks up a book on meditation, and commences her spiritual exercises.
Startled to find herself having an "out-of-body-experience" – which she keeps telling herself is "only a dream" – she floats about her parents' mansion. Her tomboyish "cockroach" of a little sister, Shakti (the name for the active, creative force of the universe, seen as female in Hinduism), is spotted at mischief. Her arranged-marriage fiancé, drolly named Sham, cockily strides in, Sangeeta wondering, "I wonder what makes him so happy? Probably found a rupee on the front steps..." Outside the house, a mystic eye is seen by the reader, and a force pulls her startled astral form toward the glittering modern towers of the city, while a narrator's voice intones, "The ancient dynasties venerated her...she gave them guidance...as time passed, many had forgotten her...[so] she must return..." – serpentlike Hindu demons float, unseen, about a stretch limousine – "...in her latest...and greatest...of incarnations."
Here is another dazzling splash page, an aerial view of the city with smoke arising from a spotlit shootout below. In neon lights "Diva Devi" (Devi, literally "shining one," is a "generic" term for Goddess*) glows above that mystic eye, in which the mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion is seen – remember India is a nuclear power – and the title of the book, and name of that avatar appears: "Bombaby - the Screen Goddess."
Sangeeta is appalled to find her astral self in the midst of the shootout, the limo plowing among the combatants and capturing the object of the conflict, a metallic attaché case. She swoops in, grabs the case "...[so] these men will have nothing to fight over...", and takes off, her presence only sensed by one of the men after the case, who bears a Goddess tattoo, cries out "Ma" (Hindu Goddesses are frequently revered as maternal figures) and "Forgive my sins, Goddess!"
Astonishingly, in view of the masterful assurance displayed, this is writer/artist Antony Mazzotta's first published comic. In places the art suggests Kyle Baker's rubberyness, and, like Baker, Mazzotta is expert in using a computer. But he knows how to rein in the beast: the effects and unusual palette of colors never overwhelm the art's "readability." Mazzotta knows to use Mumbai for Bombay, the city renamed a few years back from the colonial version back to its ancient original name. Everywhere he shows enough acquaintance with the modes, styles, and speech patterns of modern India to satirize knowingly. Even Sangeeta's beauty differs from the bland Western fashion. The gaudy, borderline-tacky glitz of well-off Indians (balusters in her home take the form of wrought-iron dollar signs) is, as hinted by the cover, with the Goddess looking down upon a littered grey waste peopled by the starved poor, likely going to be contrasted with the privation all-too-prevalent in India in future issues. But
www.bombaby.com offers tantalizing glimpses of more fun – Shakti is transformed into a blue tiger – and colorful villains to come.
Bombaby - The Screen Goddess is on the racks of comic stores right now. Get in on the ground floor of what is sure to be an impressively towering edifice...
*
shivashakti.com mentions, "...There are said to be 33,000,000 Devis [in Hinduism]...", hence the need for "generic" terms!
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