In keeping with my recent all-Tezuka posting, the NY Press has a short but good review of Buddha Volumes 1-4:
Osamu grants every character their own strengths and failings. Siddhartha has a spiritual calling, but he looks callous going after it: Leaving home to become a monk, he ditches his wife and their unborn child. After he's gone and his kingdom falls under attack, it's his nemesis, the sadistic archer Bandaka, who saves the day. The action happens in a real world of complicity and compromise. As Naradatta neatly sums up, "No living thing lives in a world all its own, it cannot but interact with other living things."
Link via Egon
