Monkey Tales

One of the first things that attracted me to the comics of India was folk tales.

Growing up around the globe, local folk tales and traditions always held fascination for me. I found they told me far more about where i was than the official histories. And, frankly, they were more fun.

This held true for the great mythic tales of the global pantheons and the little stories of life. And tales of fools and magicians always held a special place in my heart, as well as those of tricksters. While one might naturally expect Monkey Stories to be trickster based - and likely fool, too - the Jataka Tales themselves are a singular collection. With some 550 stories believed to have originated between 300BC - 500AD, they are stories of the previous lives of Bodhisatva. The tales in this collection are from his time born as a monkey, and of the lessons learned and taught then.

I've got some personal confusion on Bodhisatva. Growing up, i was taught that he was one who had attained the status of Buddha, but has chosen not to progress onward, rather staying behind for now to teach. In more recent years, i'm always told that Bodhisatva is one who strives to become a Buddha. I suggest we go listen to Steely Dan* and see if we can figure it out. But that's for later.

For now, here's a trio of tales from the book shown above. For a rare change, we have creator info - these stories were adapted by Meena Khanna and illustrated by Jeffrey Fowler -

I can't say why, but i really love Jeffrey Fowler's crocodiles.

pages by Meena Khanna and Jeffrey Fowler for Jataka Tales Monkey Stories (1973)

===
*(Bodhisattva, would you take me by the hand
Bodhisattva, would you take me by the hand
Can you show me the shine of your Japan
The sparkle of your China, can you show me

Bodhisattva, Bodhisattva
I'm gonna sell my house in town
Bodhisattva
I'm gonna sell my house in town

And I'll be there to shine in your Japan
To sparkle in your China, yes I'll be there
Bodhisattva, Bodhisattva

Bodhisattva, would you take me by the hand
Bodhisattva, would you take me by the hand
Can you show me the shine of your Japan
The sparkle of your China, can you show me

Bodhisattva, Bodhisattva
I'm gonna sell my house in town
Bodhisattva
I'm gonna sell my house in town

And I'll be there to shine in your Japan
To sparkle in your China, yes I'll be there
Bodhisattva, Bodhisattva,Bodhisattva, Bodhisattva
Bodhisattva, Bodhisattva

Nope. That didn't really help.)

Birbal And The Ten Greatest Fools

No telling how the net connection is doing, so let's get straight to it.
Continuing from this morning's post, a tale of Birbal and Akbar...

The cover for this issue was shown in the previous post, so here's a couple more Birbal covers instead:

The Ten Greatest Fools from Birbal The Witty (2001?)

Inimitably Witty Birbal

One figure with great personal appeal to me whom you might find in comics from India is Birbal. Part Wise-Man, part Wise-Ass, he's highly relatable for me. He was a real person from the 16th century, Mahesh Das or Raja Birbal was a Hindu advisor to Akbar, the Mughal emperor. He is the subject of a great number of folk tales known alternatively as Birbal Tales or Birbal/Akbar Tales. Still highly popular today, the Cartoon Network in India has a couple of animated series based upon his tales - Chota Birbal and Akbar & Birbal.

Not surprisingly, many have been adapted to comic book form. So let's run a few short ones here, and if the connection allows, we'll be back with a 16 page tale later today.

You don't suppose that's where the expression "to curry favour" originated?

artists and years of publication unknown

Covering India

Oh, the infinite joys of failing technology...

I had planned to break this post up in two or three parts and write a bit about some of the comics, but lost the work in progress to net crash earlier today. So we're just going to do a big cover gallery right now, with almost no comments. But don't worry, we'll come back and look inside some of these later.

Excluding a couple short comedy comics, we've never looked at the comics of India here. Since i've been having those connectivity problems, i indulged in some offline work pulling covers from about 100 Indian comics, some English and some Hindi. About 50 of those are here today, spanning about three decades.

This first cover features Sinbad (and the Roc, of course) -

I don't seem to have included any of the reprint comics featuring The Phantom, Flash Gordon, and Mandrake. (Ever wonder why those guys were chosen to be Defenders Of The Earth? Maybe it was because they were all globally popular characters?) Nor any of the old Bruce Lee comics. Another reason to come back and visit with some of these books.

But for now, let's cross our extraneous digits and attempt to post this into the queue...

covers, or so many covers...