![\"drifting-life-debate.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/02\/drifting-life-debate.jpg\")
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I’ll confess: I’d been intimidated by the heft of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life<\/i><\/a> (just over 850 pages!) since it showed up in my mailbox last spring. I knew I wanted<\/i> 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<\/i>—a sprawling story about the corporate and creative squabbling of the manga<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n (Although, as you might guess by the artwork I selected above—borrowing from Comic Book Resources<\/i><\/a> after attempts to scan my own version failed—the meta-argument about the aesthetic\/artistic character of manga<\/i> 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…)<\/p>\n And that’s just the story; the artwork is a great example of the manga<\/i> 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<\/i><\/a> (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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}