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As one Grant Morrison miniseries ends,
another begins.
Vimanarama is set in Bradford, kind
of. Ali is a British Asian, and seems to be the most
western in the family. He's due for his arranged
marriage to Sofia, and for a pleasant change, everyone just
takes that as a fact of life. This isn't a comic about
the westernised children trying to escape the family
traditions; Ali's just worried that she might be ugly or
boring.
Morrison then takes the "putting him back
in touch with his roots" plot remarkably literally, by having
a bloody great hole open up in the bottom of the family corner
shop, leading to a huge great Hindu temple thingy below.
Baby Imran inadvertantly releases millennia-old monsters who
want to destroy mankind, and only the Ultra-Hadeen - a sort of
Hindu-via-Kirby team - can stop them.
As with We3, the idea is
straightforward. The charm comes from the details.
This isn't one of Morrison's theoretical philosophy epics;
it's a mix of gentle comedy drawn from the family, and
deranged epic hugeness. The contrast is ridiculous
which, of course, is the point.
Best of all, it's got Philip Bond on art.
I love Bond's work, and wish we got to see more of it.
There's something about his style which doesn't quite fit for
most mainstream American books, but he's perfectly used on a
book like this (which, by the way, is about as un-American as
you can conceivably get - it's set in Bradford, for god's
sake). Bond's characters are superficially cartoony, but
in fact there's a real depth and solidity to his work.
That means he's ideally placed to play both
the family comedy and the huge epic gods. His spread of
the empty temple is fabulous, but for my money, the best thing
in the issue is the opening double splash page, with Ali
cycling off to the shop with everything behind him arranged
like a Bollywood musical. That's just a fantastic piece
of art, worth buying the comic on its own.
Okay, the story's a little slight.
I'll grant that it's not perfect. But it's still damn
good.
Rating: A
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