Pow! Sock! Comics around the world

Is it a play? Is it a musical? Or is it a theatre of the absurd? Actually, it’s none of the above.

It’s the launch of a comic book for grownups, and is curiously titled Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, the second graphic novel from Author stroke artist stroke cartoonist Sarnath Banerjee.
“It’s a book of scandals, of 18th century full of sex, intrigue, blood, fueds and duels. It’s a dark mysterious story which lot of it is me. It’s reality slipped into magic and magic slipping into reality with ease. Despite all the movement in space and time, the narrative is much more linear and much more rounded off. Like my face, the story rounds off. It follows a traditional way of telling a story,” opines Banerjee.

So this is an art form which is too little words to be a novel, too many words to be an object of art in its own right, and too wry and too intelligent to be a first level comic. So what exactly are we looking at?

Always ready to do a good deed, the little cartoon rabbit scooted up with an extinguisher to put out a fire. But when he sprayed the flames, they exploded into a conflagration, burning him to a crisp and leaving only his signature sunglasses intact.

Suicide Rabbit, China’s whimsical Everyman, was the fall guy again, victimized this time by rapacious merchants — seemingly ever-present in this country — who sold him an extinguisher with chemicals that fed the fire instead of putting it out. It was another telling episode in the life of a long-suffering cartoon character who has captured the imagination of many of China’s 137 million Internet users.

Suicide Rabbit, introduced in August by Liu Gang, a 35-year-old cartoonist, has attracted a swiftly increasing audience by portraying with gentle humor the million little abuses suffered by Chinese people as their society endures a bumpy transformation.