Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Drawn & Quarterly, $29.95

You are lazy.  You are.  I don’t care if you’re Barack Obama or a single mother burdened with seven babies under the age of three, compared to Yoshihiro Tatsumi you have accomplished little.  While you’ve frittered your life away on video games and beer pong, Tatsumi spent his revolutionizing manga, producing thousands of pages of the weirdest and most disturbing comics ever made.  He’s a master of crafting stories infused with creeping doom and real emotion, examining the psychological toll on the working class Japanese citizens post WWII.  And he’s been doing it since he was a child.
A Drifting Life, his new memoir, dispels the image of his persona that the casual reader may have held, that he’s some kind of twisted hermit, living beneath the streets of Tokyo and emerging only for strange sex or to delight in the struggles of the proud and the damned.  Instead, Tatsumi is revealed to be an extremely hard working ordinary Joe, deeply in love with manga and driven to create a new form that will push the medium in a new, vital, and more adult direction.  SPOILER ALERT:  he totally does it.

A Drifting Life is much more than a portrait of an artist, though, it’s also a history of manga and a study of the Japanese national character post-WWII. In over 800 pages Tatsumi weaves together the personal and the political to create a coming of age tale for the medium itself, showing how manga grew from adventure yarns for children to an art form capable of telling mature stories that capture the concerns of the average citizen.  It’s one of the few books available in English to offer some insight into the history of manga and its creators, and that would be enough to mark it as important even if Tatsumi didn’t manage to make the story deeply felt, humane, and incredibly inspiring.

Great Review Tom - describing 800 pages in 2 paragraphs is no small feat. I don’t know a damn thing about Manga and I’m interested now.