Read This: A Drifting Life

I’ll confess: I’d been intimidated by the heft of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life (just over 850 pages!) since it showed up in my mailbox last spring. I knew I wanted to read it, but I just couldn’t work up the courage to start… until this weekend, when I finally plunged in to what turns out to be a real-life Japanese counterpart to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay—a sprawling story about the corporate and creative squabbling of the manga boom of the late 1950s and early ’60s. It’s a coming of age story, a story about sibling rivalry, a love letter to the comics and movies of Tatsumi’s youth, a declaration of artistic intent… with a bunch more crammed in for good measure.

(Although, as you might guess by the artwork I selected above—borrowing from Comic Book Resources after attempts to scan my own version failed—the meta-argument about the aesthetic/artistic character of manga was especially interesting to me. Other readers, of course, might see it as pointless bickering that distracts from the plot about the artists getting jerked around by their publishers…)

And that’s just the story; the artwork is a great example of the manga technique of combining realistic illustration and caricature for emotional effect. While there’s nothing here quite as cartoonish as the characters in, say, Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha (except during those moments when Tatsumi is paying tribute to Tezuka), Tatsumi achieves a great deal of expressiveness while maintaining a simple, elegant line. So don’t let the bulk of this “graphic memoir” scare you off—once you get started, the pages can simply fly.

28 February 2010 | read this |