There are a few new Dharmix to tell you about. (Dharmic + comix = Dharmix.)

First off, Deepak Chopra’s Buddha series has its fourth issue out, and its getting good. Siddhartha has grown up, has a few mental battles with Mara behind him, and is getting serious about this meditation stuff he’s learned. This is the issue in which he leaves his palace, shaves his head, and wanders the earth like Caine in Kung Fu. Good stuff, beautifully illustrated.

Also, Virgin Comics has launched a new website for the Buddha series, and it allows you to read all of issue #1 in a really nice widescreen-panel format. Check it out here.

The Virgin site even has a “trailer” for the Buddha comix. Here that is:

Then, there’s Green Lama. The Horse reported on the GL’s comeback a good while ago. As we said then, he was a Buddhist superhero who debuted in the 1940s, and was to be soon revived in print by an artist/writer named James Ritchey, III. We even had a link to share of the new comic in on-line format. But truth be told, we didn’t read much of it, because unlike Virgin’s presentation of Buddha (link above), it wasn’t particularly pleasant to try doing so. So now it’s in print, and we’ve snapped it up so we can tell you what we think. Unfortunately, we still don’t have much to say about it, because it’s kind of unpleasant to read in print, too — all black and white, and kinda muddled both in art and in story. (Of course, beauty, and the lack of it, is in the eye of the beholder.) And if there’s anything like real Dharma here, it’s not exactly jumping out.

Back to the other end of the Dharmix spectrum now, with Okko. This comic from artist/writer HUB is dark, complex, gorgeous, and — though it owes much to classic samurai films — quite original in its way. Its first series, The Cycle of Water, has come and gone, but now The Cycle of Earth has begun. (Sample panel, left.)

HUB has also employed a nice trope-like device that allows him extra creative license: his tale takes place not in Japan, but in “Pajan” — and not the city of Ecuador by the same name. (The Pajanese clearly speak Japanese.) So when Okko takes liberties, it’s okay: it takes us right along with them.

As with so many samurai stories real and fictional, the violent main character’s world is one and the same with that of the monks, meditators, and roshis that are part of the everyday local culture. Still, to call this a Dharmic story is probably stretching things a bit. But anyone who’s sat a sesshin or studied Zen will recognize and maybe even take a weird kind of comfort in the depictions of monasteries and temples that have cropped up so far in issues 1 & 2.

You can learn more about Okko and see some sample pages at the website of its publisher, Archaia Studios Press.

And lest we forget, the ever-mighty Sam DeWitt reminds us of the existence of “Zen Karmix.” You might have found the link to it on the Horse’s Link-o-Pedia archive, but in case not, click here to check it out. It’s been around for years but is still one of the coolest mixes of Dharma and comix around.