Rogan Gosh: Star of the East

by Peter Milligan, Brendan McCarthy (Illustrator)

Dean Cripps is a regular guy who just wants to order a nice hot curry from waiter Raju Dhawan... until Kali, goddess of death, rips through the Star of the East restaurant and ruins everything. Propelled into a futuristic India, Dean and Raju encounter exotic Hindu deities, sex magic, weird reincarnation, opium dens, Rudyard Kipling, and the mysterious House of Smoke... In short, the world of Rogan Gosh. A psychedelic journey to find enlightenment, truth, and the finest Indian cuisine. US Edition.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Fantasy, Comics Manga, Graphic Novels Comics

60 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1994

About the author

Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name

Peter Milligan is a British writer, best known for his work on X-Force / X-Statix, the X-Men, & the Vertigo series Human Target. He is also a scriptwriter.

He has been writing comics for some time and he has somewhat of a reputation for writing material that is highly outlandish, bizarre and/or absurd.

His highest profile projects to date include a run on X-Men, and his X-Force revamp that relaunched as X-Statix.

Many of Milligan's best works have been from DC Vertigo. These include: The Extremist (4 issues with artist Ted McKeever) The Minx (8 issues with artist Sean Phillips) Face (Prestige one-shot with artist Duncan Fegredo) The Eaters (Prestige one-shot with artist Dean Ormston) Vertigo Pop London (4 issues with artist Philip Bond) Enigma (8 issues with artist Duncan Fegredo) and Girl (3 issues with artist Duncan Fegredo).

Series:
* Human Target
* Greek Street
* X-Force / X-Statix

Reviews

[Riku Sayuj · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rogan Gosh: The Acid-Masala Curry Comic

Rogan Gosh is designed to be as incomprehensible to the reader as the original dish must have been for Milligan and McCarthy. The name comes from rogan josh, a spicy Indian curry dish rich in chillies and dangerously red in appearance.

As Grant Morrison says, Rogan Gosh was a product of the new psychedelic period of the nineties. The focus turning from outer concerns to inner ones, along with the presence in many of the artist's lives of the new psychedelic drugs.

It was also supposed to be inspired by the Amar Chitra Katha tradition of story telling. This was the reason I decided to take a look at it. The cover was a weird blue half-god, half-acidhead, with an assortment of images that assaulted my good sense.



But I decided to be forgiving and carried on. The first page of the comic convinced me that I will not only read this but also love it, no matter how much of a hallucinogenic trip it might be. McCarthy had reprocessed the lush, painted look of the Amar Chitra Katha comic books from India and also imbued them with a sort of deranged other-worldliness that was impossible to resist.



That tanned man with the mustache you see in the crowd is Rudyard Kipling himself, one of the possible contenders for the lead character in this book, where dream-world meets reality, shakes hands and sleep together.

Rudyard Kipling goes into a drug-house in search for truth after some serious accident involving his servant and then lapses into a euphoric dream in which he dreams of two characters who are pre-incarnations of a future "Karmanaut" called Rogan Gosh. And then the of the whole psychedelic adventures unfold.

That or the whole thing is a dream by a rejected lover who drinks and cuts his wrist and hallucinates ever closer to death.

Or, it might all be real and Rudayard Kipling might really have been a form that Soma Swami, the ultimate villain who tries to keep us all veiled in Maya, took to trick Rogan Gosh into destroying himself and he pre-incarnated as the two characters and all their adventures are real.

The text too flows between several narrative voices, including Rudyard Kipling and an unnamed dying youth representing the voice of bleak rational existentialism in the face of the uninflected void. Blending their stories like the spices of the Curry that inspired them, they dress it up and serve it forth for your dining pleasure.

Got all that? Now remove all the "Or"s and replace them with "And"s. Yup. Rogan Gosh is supposed to be an experimental story where it is not a Either/Or world but a world were dreams and reality are all happening at the same time, one inside the other, creating each other.

The concept is good and the presentation is mind-blowing. But, I wish they had given it the definition it deserved instead of making this such a free-flowing story with no ends or resolutions and absolutely no structure. The art work seemed slovenly at times and completely random at other times.

Don't worry about all the plot details I covered here, they were not even half of the possibilities and they were not spoilers. You can't really spoil a good curry.



PS. Today might be a good day to appreciate Rogan Gosh, especially if you too look like that cover after your Holi celebrations. Happy Holi!

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're like me (and we have no reason to think you aren't), then you're a big fan of everyone's favorite British Indian acid comic, Rogan Gosh. And if you're like me (again, probably), you also can't make it past page 3. SO LET'S TRY IT TOGETHER.

p1 - Rudyard Kipling wanders the opium dens of Cawnpore (Kanpur) in Northern India, full of bad karma after his romantic relationship with an Indian manservant led not only to Kipling being blackmailed, but to his lover's suicide. Kipling now searches for a 'karmanaut' (spiritual healer) named Rogan Gosh, in the hopes that his soul can be cleansed.

Kipling finds the Jadoo Gher, a den nicknamed "The Magic House." After consuming "opiates and subtle potions" and meditating, Kipling reaches a higher plane called the Second Veil of Maya, a "jasmine-scented dream of the future."

p3 - Kipling's "dream" transitions into a modern bedroom and a different narrator -- a young man lying in bed, just waking up. A vision of Kipling is there too, along with Hanuman the Monkey God, and a female entity the narrator recognizes as the Dawn. This modern narrator (we'll call him The Boy) has been awakened by the neighbor's baby crying, but Dawn "lowers her veil" so The Boy can continue dreaming.

p4 - The Boy, in turn, dreams of Jadoo Gher again - but in his modern era, it's now an Indian restaurant called The Star of the East. Currently, a sad Brit named Dean Cripps is attempting to order food from the dapper Raju Dhawan, a man of great potential whose family feels he's wasting his life. Raju thinks in Indian food metaphors, while Dean is too depressed over a recent breakup to know what to order.

p5 - Kipling has found Rogan Gosh, and offers a golden totem in return for Rogan's aid. Rogan, a blue-faced deity, is aging and losing power, but meditates with Kipling only to find that Kipling has changed into Kali the Soma Swami, a malignant force that needed Rogan's karma-cleansing powers to be free of an ancient curse. Kali immediately attempts to kill Rogan, who decides he will escape his fate through reincarnation.

p7 - Just as Dean Cripps orders a rogan gosh mutton plate, Kali rips through the reality of the restaurant and decapitates both Dean and Raju Dhawan. Both men live, and find themselves transported to a Future India, chased by cyborg Karma Kops until they reach Jadoo Gher, now called the House of Dreams. Hanuman the Monkey God invites the men inside.

Raju's skin is now blue, and Hanuman points to the old husk of Rogan Gosh in the corner. Raju is the new Rogan, he explains, and now he must battle Kali the Soma Swami. Dean and Raju try to run, finding confusion and horrors throughout the House of Dreams.

From behind one door Raju hears himself singing in an American accent...

p11 - Raju has become a four-armed cowboy, and Dean his "hoss" (a sacred cow). Raju wonders aloud how it is that he's aware of each new iteration of his personality, and they wander through the Wild West Land of the Dead and into the psychedelic frontier town of Neither-Nor, in order to find the "Injun" that might explain things.

The Injun turns out to be a blue-skinned Kipling in a Native American headdress. He explains that Kali is a soul-scalper and a vampire, and he's currently draining the souls of Raju and Dean. Kipling invites them to suck on his Dream Pipe, and they dream of The Boy...

p13 - The Boy wakes in his room next to his sleeping girlfriend (perhaps this is still Dawn, but she's differently-colored). He dresses, leaves the house and goes to his local comic shop, where he picks up the new issue of Rogan Gosh from Mr. Khan, the elephant-faced proprietor. Saying "they're a bit easier to understand once you've read a few," The Boy opens the newest issue, smelling Indian spices on its pages.

p14 - the original Rogan Gosh hides in The Real World of Lila (the Dreamworld), stuck inside Taj MaHell, palace of Kali. His soul is dying while he waits for Raju to become him. Rogan gets lost in the palaces' Corridors of Uncertainty, and is surrounded by Tantric nymphs who wrap themselves around him, turning him to stone.

As Kali mocks him by speaking through a totem, Rogan grows a lotus flower from his stomach to heal himself. He traps the totem inside the lotus, then changes the flower into a pink flying limousine. Hanuman appears as the driver, and Rogan asks to be driven home.

As they coast over the Vales of Maya, Rogan recalls his heyday, and mourns his fortunes upon realizing that with Raju taking over his mantle, his dreamself is due to be reborn in the past. He thinks on Raju, who screams...

p16 - The Boy and Dawn finish making love in his bedroom while the neighbor's baby screams. As they chat post-coital, statues of Rogan and Kipling look on from the dresser.

p17 - Kipling awakens in the opium den. He muses on guilt and sin, seeming to shout at the reader: "It wasn't a dress rehearsal, fuckheads. It was all you get..." Jadoo Gher, now a pyramid with a man's body, rips Raju and Dean's hearts from their chests.

p18 - Mary Jane, Dean's ex, complains to her mother about watching too much TV. In their small apartment, Jadoo Gher is on television while Jane reads Car Mechanics for Beginners.

p18 - Having lost their hearts, Raju and Dean reappear in Jadoo Gher, now called the House of Smoke. Hanuman suggests they try another door in the Corridor of Uncertainty. The two come out through the closet of The Boy's bedroom, and as "their spark plugs explode, the pistons of their libidos pump ecstatically." They undress and make love, as Raju becomes The Boy and Dean becomes Dawn.

p20 - The Boy wakes up in bed alone, thinking of Mary Jane and Dean and Raju. He dresses in a bra and trenchcoat, writing "I KNOW WHERE BEAUTY LIVES" on his chest in lipstick. He muses on the five miseries: Birth, Death, Old Age, Disease, and Mediocrity. He tells us that Mary Jane left him six months prior for having no feelings.

The Boy walks through his city. He is concerned that not only does he not believe in love, but "no one else really believes it either." He remembers feeling a different kind of love, after his mother died.

When she died, he recalls, he felt "awake." He ceased to be, and became love itself.

p26 - Raju and Dean are themselves again, in some kind of abstract space. Dean is embarrassed for his intimacy with Raju, while Raju is overwhelmed with emotion. Hanuman appears, telling them to meet Rogan at the Ashram of the Absolute. Dean questions Rogan's ridiculous name, and Hanuman insists such names keep deities humble, then says "Actually, that's a lie. There's no such person as Rogan Gosh."

p27 - The Boy sits in his room, confused as to his identity, while Rogan meditates in the Ashram. Both are waiting.

Rogan longs for Raju, and remembers the spiritual masters (Christ, Buddha) that have come before, with the Soma Swami existing in order to keep Man from enlightenment.

p30 - a new first-person narrative voice finds The Boy, naked in his room, licking a version of his own face in the mirror. The other face is painted like one of Kali's totems. The Boy smashes the glass with his face and then contemplates one of the glass shards while the new voice narrates in disgust.

p31 - the voice looks in on Raju and Dean, who've arrived back at the Indian restaurant. Hanuman ushers them inside as Kali chases after them, then explains that the last Hanuman they saw was Kali in disguise. Raju asks what exactly Kali's been cursed with. Hanuman explains that the curse combines having love snatched away, growing old and watching dreams wither, the awareness of death, and dying in misery and ignorance.

Rogan Gosh, still waiting, says "Oh. Is that all."

At Hanuman's instruction, Raju meditates to connect with Rogan. Time is "squashed," and Raju and Dean are transported to the Ashram, and Dean realizes that the journey they've been on has taken centuries, and many of their lifetimes.

Dean and Raju take hands and enter the Ashram, seeing Everything and Nothing.

p36 - The Boy, naked and bleeding from his wrists, gets a call from a distressed Mary Jane. One of her friends, she says, was running a Soma Swami rave and, in the throes of ecstasy, stepped off a roof and was decapitated.

p36 - the heads of Dean, Raju, Dawn, Mary Jane and Injun Kipling call out to Rudyard Kipling as he wakes up once again the Jadoo Gher of his own time. He begins to stand.

p37 - Dean and Kaju rise from the material world as Rogan and Raju become one. The Boy realizes it's his voice that's been looking down with disgust. As Mary chastises him over the phone she becomes a totem of Kali. Rogan raises his Raj Gun, which chants at Kali's totem until it shrinks into nothing.

Rogan/Raju, now a many-headed cowboy, rides off through the desert toward the Jadoo Gher pyramid, leaving Dean to return to his Mary Jane.

p39 - The Boy tells Mary Jane he loves her over the phone, and waits for her response.

p39 - Kipling is attacked by a Sudra as he attempts to leave the House of Smoke. In the ensuing struggle the House is set ablaze, and Kipling escapes as it explodes. As it burns, Kipling comes to the realization that nothing is real.

p40 - the new Rogan is borne toward heaven. Dean returns to the material world and immediately begins to regress from enlightenment.

p41 - Kipling wanders through the Cawnpore marketplace. He sees a mother carrying her dead child and is struck with the idea that only real life brings enlightenment, and "those who live in the House of Smoke...are stunted, blind things, hiding from life."

He resolves to go back to his life and deal with the consequences of his actions, and disappears in the crowd.

p42 - Dean makes it to Mary Jane's house just as his enlightenment disappears. All he's left with is a lotus flower, which he offers to Mary Jane. She smiles and invites him in.

p42 - The Boy lies dying on his floor. He's called the Star of the East, not to order food, but for someone to talk to. He asks, "Is this the way the dream begins...?"

His bedroom disappears, and his hands become Kali's hands. His face is beginning to look like Kali's totem as he finishes, "..Or the way the dream ends?"

From the other end of the phone Hanuman says, "you're going to have to find that one out for yourself."

The Boy's narration concludes, "At least I'm not pretending there's anything but darkness here...darkness and my voice. A voice that's fading...and at the end of this sentence...will cease to be...."

So, yeah. Whatever THAT was.

[B · Rating 2 out of 5]

I get the feeling like everything here was done in genuine good faith and a desire to imitate a certain style.

But it all felt very, let's say, racialized rather than homage-y. It felt an awful lot like much of it was very reductive: The idea that Indian food is spicy and "foreign" is a really central idea.

I'm not sure I liked the idea that the story was happening on so many levels either, but that's not a dealbreaker.

[Drew Canole · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bizarre and hard to follow in the same way as like a Naked Lunch style book. McCarthy's artwork is fantastic and perfectly fits the story. Honestly with a lesser artist I could see myself just giving his a 1-star.

[Rick Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

The sheer influence of the Desi diaspora in Great Britain is on full display here. The Subcontinent saw a fair exodus of migrants in the immediate post-Partition years, many of whom landed in London to start their lives anew. The ensuing results are still seen today with Indian cuisine dominating the restaurant scene, which undoubtedly was the easiest way to steep a young Peter Milligan and Brendan McCarthy in the rich cultures of South Asia. I can only imagine their first time trying a truly spicy curry, a rogan josh even, as being a psychedelic, out-of-body experience. That's the only way I can really feel like I understand why this comic even exists.

I grew up on Indian comics like Amar Chitra Katha and Tinkle. While they don't share the rich heritage of the comics scenes of Western Europe, Japan or the United States, the Indian comics that truly stood out were the ones that leaned into the mythological prowess of Hindu scripture. With Milligan's and McCarthy's Rogan Gosh, I find here a true nexus between the psychedelic glory of Hindu mythology placed in the hands of two highly adept comic creators who are more than willing to allow their stream-of-consciousness approach deliver one of the weirdest and most amazing comics they've ever put together.

For stretches, this comic barely makes sense and is rather incomprehensible with the narrative direction. But other times, it's a story that reads like an untangling of the deeply complex concepts in Hindu scripture like maya (the world is an illusion), karma (responsibility) and dharma (duty). It follows a nonlinear path through the relatively short page count where we shift between the perspective of a drugged up Rudyard Kipling and a reborn "Karmanaut" who may be the mythical, time-travelling warrior known as the "Rogan Gosh". It's all highly weird and nonsensical, but throughout the story there is a smattering of deities from across the Hindu pantheon like Kali and Hanuman, who translate very well with McCarthy's delightful brand of acid psychedelia. It's the most brazen effort by the British comics duo since some might find this be some kind of perverse appropriation, I actually found their approach to be surprisingly respectful and well-researched. It's not to say that this has anything meaningful to say on Hindu scripture, but rather the representation itself is very positive stuff. I'm only raised Hindu though and not practicing so take my opinion on this with a grain of salt.

Rogan Gosh is a beautifully bizarre and psychedelic experience that is well worth checking out. The story here won't really win itself many fans I imagine since a decent chunk is nonsensical and meandering, but the artwork is truly sublime and unique throughout. It's also rare representation of a culture that is often completely ignored in contemporary mainstream comics, and I'm always happy to find my way back to this rare, hidden gem of a comic.

[zxvasdf · Rating 5 out of 5]

A little bit of Cities of the Red Night and a little bit of Michael Moorcock, and entirely Milligan and McCarthy.

It is an ambiguous telling of several twisted souls whose stories merge in a hallucinatory montage that renders the reader confused as to the real plot. The real question here is, who's dreaming who?

Rudyard Kipling, guilt ridden about the suicide of a servant boy with whom he had improper relations, goes to the House of Smoke. He descends into a drug haze and dreams. He finds Rogan Gosh, a karmanaut who takes on the bad karma of others, and commissions his services.

Raju a waiter of the Star of the East, an Indian eatery, encounters customer Dean Cripps who is heartbroken over a recent break up. Their world is ripped apart by relentlessly pursuing hallucinatory visions, with Hanuman the monkey god as their unreliable tour guide.

The Boy is missing his girlfriend. He reads a comic book about the adventures of Rogan Gosh, karmanaut. He experiences a brightly swathed descent into depression.

Their tales bleed into each other, and roles are exchanged, stolen, shared. Always the Ditko and Vedic, Buddhist mythology inspired art of Brendan McCarthy tells as much story as the Milligan words. Of everybody running from something, trying to find something that they do not exactly find.

IT is a story about lives within Maya. You live to forget, and forget to live. You ride the wheel of karma for countless lives, on a rising and falling helix. When you do break through, you break through the white noise of Life and its temptations. Like the television channel left to static. It is nothingness, but abstract forms rise. Such is the nature of reality.

[Lanny]

I'm looking at a 1984 comic called Strange Days that I found while moving some boxes. I remember thinking when I bought this in high school it was the best comic book I had ever seen and expressed every idea I had had up to that point but in a way I could never hope to achieve. I think I am having a similiar experience just looking at the cover of Rogan Gosh. Who in the hell is Brendan McCarthy, and why don't I know more about him?

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

****1/2 stars. ROGAN GOSH is basically everything I wanted THE INCAL to be - psychedelic, mind-expanding, hurtling through multiple levels of reality at once. Although nowhere near as well known, Milligan & McCarthy surpass Jodorowsky & Moebius on almost every front, crafting a dizzyingly complex feat of simultaneous storytelling and myth-making that's also radically distilled into 60 pages.

[Chloe McGenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read this in Revolver many years ago. I liked that nothing made sense and it was beautifully illustrated. I found out it had been released as a bound comic so I bought it and read it again and it STILL makes no sense and is still beautiful. But I “understand” it more now than when I was 16/17. I can’t say I recommend it, as such, but it will always have a place in my heart, particularly Raju

[Timo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe Milligan knew what was going on but I think not too many other did not. Maybe I should have taken some drugs to understand this but that is way too much effort for a comic.
Just crap this was.

[D.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

To say I like or dislike the book seems a little beyond the point. Even saying I understood this book or didn't seems past it. I suppose the only thing to say is I experienced this book (repeatedly) and didn't dislike the experience.
Rogan Gosh is one of those psychedelic mindfucks that we have grown accustomed to at the hands of someone like Grant Morrison, who does it quite well. In the hands of Milligan & McCarthy, it's handled ably, but too often comes off as a little too self-aware. It's fun, and I appreciate the attempt at trying to turn us on to Indian comics, but really this just ends up kind of an Eastern Jerry Cornelius adventure. Not that that's bad, but it means I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone but old heads.

[Alec · Rating 2 out of 5]

Most of the comic is incomprehensible, the result of intertwining 6/7 different stories and trying to fit them all into 50 pages of comic. I was promised Indian sci-fi, and Karmanauts, but most of the ideas end up unrealised. All colour theory is thrown out the window, and the psychedelic style is alluding to the acid house era of the early 90's. What a lovely era to remember!

[Fugo Feedback]

De los laburos de Milligan que aun no leí, este pinta como uno de los más desafiantes, sobre todo teniendo en cuenta que está sólo en inglés y parece que el guion viene bastante loco. Después me tengo que acordar de volver a subir la edición que algún Librarian pelotudo eliminó.

[daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

welcome to neither-nor: you ain't; we ain't

[Steven · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pretty pictures but mostly acid inspired mystic bullshit

[Lawrence · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://gnomeship.blogspot.com/2015/10...

[Erik · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great art and fantastic colors, but the story is terrible. Written for a very specific audience, which obviously isn't me.

[Alexander Lisovsky · Rating 1 out of 5]

Безумный кислотный сон в индийских декорациях о неумолимости колеса сансары, о жизни и смерти, любви и одиночестве, о бессмысленности всего и условности реальности. И сам комикс точно такой же буйный, мятущийся, неудобоваримый. Серия андерграундных восьмистраничных зинов, изданная в начале 90-х большим издательством ради эксперимента.