SOORMAS
by
Varun Malhotra, Sudeep Menon
“As long as mankind continues to acknowledge and act on the goodness within, guided by the light of our great gurus teachings, it shall prevail.”
The short recap:
In the days of the pre-industrial past, an evil Iffrit was running wild in the world and causing chaos and death. It took the King of the Sikhs and the special military group called the Soormas to take it down – but lacking the means to kill it, they are forced to trap it deep within the bowels of the Earth and put up warnings carved into stone and hope that either it will stay there forever or that perhaps they will someday find a way to kill it. Thereafter the Soormas all vow that they and their descendants will all stand in defense of humanity, in particular staying ready for the day the Iffrit was released again.
For those that don’t know, the etymology of the word Soorma is originally from Sanskrit but the Sikhs used a slight variant to describe certain Sikh men and it quite literally means “brave” or “courageous”.
Anyway, the story is very much a great entertainer and really caters to readers like me. It is rooted at one level in Sikhs from the days of the Gurus but that transitions and merges fairly well into a future cyber-punk India. It is both a familiar India but nicely futured up just a little and it is in some respects a fairly familiar grim and gritty near-medium future. Into this future we delve and find new evils are part of our world and also the prospect of perhaps ancient evils getting into the mix – meanwhile we also meet the new faces of the Soormas and learn what happened to those descended from the brave souls who fought the Iffrit in the past. There’s also the almost obligatory grizzled police officer in the mix, some new age drugs and a somewhat shady kid who you feel like isn’t a bad guy really.
Hands down though, the highlight is the artwork. From the creature and character designs to the layouts to the colouring choices in certain different moments and some of the conveyed emotion through either frantic energy or a stillness or any such, really comes across well from beat to beat. Aside from the odd panel here or there, there is also a pretty good, solid consistency
Overall it is a good solid book. It definitely has some flaws but those are more related to editorial finessing of the dialogue and certain moments, etc that could have been improved and there are certain beats and elements that are a bit derivative of the genre and I could see them coming a mile away. That said, as a whole package, it is a highly entertaining adventure-romp and with a bit more polish, any sequels to this could be gloriously good fun as they are not based on or derivatives of western-based mythologies and culture – something I eagerly look for in my comics and fiction.
BOTTOM LINE:
It is not perfect but it is basically a solidly good cyber-punk, supernatural action-adventure with very good artwork. Would definitely recommend for anyone curious about it.
One Happy Monk 
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