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“Tatsumi's timeless, and mordant, portrayal of modern urban life and its sordid underbelly remains strictly for adults.”
Review
At age 14, bored with the latest superhero editions, the precocious comic artist Adrian Tomine suffered a "crisis of faith." In his introduction to Yoshihiro Tatsumi's The Push Man and Other Stories, Tomine describes how discovering Tatsumi's work "re-ignited my passion for comics." In tribute to his idol, Tomine has edited
the first English-language collection of Tatsumi's terse and gritty tales from the late 1960s.
In an illuminating interview with Tomine, Tatsumi reveals that he draws his inspiration from police reports and human-interest
pieces in the newspaper. In 1957, while working as a manga publisher, Tatsumi coined the term gekiga to describe comics, including his own, whose brutal realism distinguished them from the fantastical, youth-appealing stories of manga. Tatsumi's timeless, and mordant, portrayal of
modern urban life and its sordid underbelly remains strictly for adults.
Limited to eight pages by the men's mag where he originally published, Tatsumi learned to craft economical narratives rendered
in drawings as efficient as his characters' abrupt dialogue. Each of these 16 tragic tales, first published in 1969, features a male
protagonist with a working-class job — factory employee, mechanic, sewer worker — or no job at all, who is beset with a deep-seated
rage. Their wives, lovers, and girlfriends, who work as barmaids, prostitutes, or office clerks, are the frequent victims
of male aggression, both from their partners as well as their lecherous employers. In "Black Smoke," an impotent sanitation
worker flies into a rage when he spies his unfaithful wife leaving an abortion clinic. As vengeance, he incinerates their
apartment while she naps. From a distant hillside, where he ventures to watch the conflagration, he remarks: "It's a filthy
city. Everything here is trash. Eventually someone's gotta burn it."
Tatsumi depicts the unnatural conditions of city life and the concomitant degradation of human dignity and morals: rats invade
apartments, women discard babies into the sewers, and a man kills another to steal his concubine. The lone bright spot comes
in the curious tale "Make-Up," where a married, cross-dressing office employee falls in love with a young trophy wife, who loves him as a woman.
- H.G. Masters
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“Nadel makes a convincing argument that these yellowing artifacts demonstrate that comics are a hybrid form with malleable
aesthetics and storytelling conventions.”
Review
A wizard perches on a rock above a rainbow and negotiates with his weather-making sprites about the payroll; a sorcerer prepares
to devour Frankenstein's monster, slathered in mustard and lying on a hot-dog bun; an elongated superhero named Stardust suddenly begins releasing his powerful retarding rays — these are some of the surreal images permeating Dan Nadel's anthology of long-obscure comic artists.
Nadel edits the annual art-comics collection The Ganzfeld and runs the Grammy-winning "visual culture" studio PictureBox. Here, he has assembled samples from 29 forgotten four-color masters, some well-known to enthusiasts and some plucked from
obscurity by archival research. The results are both revelatory and genuinely strange.
In his brief notes and introductory essays, Nadel makes a convincing argument that these yellowing artifacts demonstrate that
comics are a hybrid form with malleable aesthetics and storytelling conventions. Rather than present the work chronologically,
Nadel offers thematic rubrics, such as "Exercises in Exploration," "Slapstick," and "Words in Pictures," to explore different
aspects of cartooning. These categories are not rigidly defined, however. Regardless of which heading the strips fall under,
however, readers can find affinities between, say, Herbert Crowley's 1910 rhyming fantasy The Wiggle Much and Gustave Verbeek's proto-Sendakian The Terrors of the Tiny Tads, from 1913.
The variety of artistic styles on display, from Jack Mendelsohn's purposefully primitive scrawl to Walter Quermann's delicate line, bolster Nadel's contention that the alternative comics of the 1960s were hardly sui generis and should instead be seen as a continued part of a long-standing and ongoing investigation into the formal properties of
a limitlessly expressive medium.
- Gregory Zinman
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