Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Black Blizzard is published by Drawn and Quarterly,
but looks and feels unlike any of the author’s other works previously
released by the publisher. The Push Man, Abandon the Old in Tokyo and
Good-Bye were all stately hardcovers, elegant and thoughtfully designed,
obviously worthy of the visionary comics they contained.
Tatsumi’s
mammoth autobiography A Drifting Life was published in paperback
(albeit one the size of a canned ham), but its rambling narrative and
epic sweep demanded a different presentation than Tatsumi’s hardcover
anthologies of short fiction.
Black Blizzard arrives garish and
lurid, feeling cheap and disposable. There’s a yellow ink
applied around the edges of the book that makes it feel like the 75 cent
paperbacks people read decades ago, the ones that today are piled up by
their millions in used bookstores everywhere. That’s my initial
impression of the presentation of Black Blizzard, and I am quite certain
the publisher, Drawn and Quarterly, and the designer, Adrian Tomine,
intended just that. For the comics within were created a half-century
ago by a young manga-ka working at unbelievable speed (the book’s 128
pages were crafted in less than three weeks) for an audience of children
buying books like this in the rental book market: garish, lurid; cheap,
disposable.
I mean none of these adjectives in a perjorative
sense. Like Tomine’s brilliant book design, they are rather intended to
celebrate the look and feel of Tatsumi’s work in Black Blizzard. He
wasn’t new to comics when he created this book in 1956; rather, he says
in an interview with Tomine that this was his 18th such work. But
Tatsumi was very far, indeed, from the mature and considered cartoonist
he would become in his later years, with work such as that found in
Drawn and Quarterly’s other Tatsumi releases.
Let me say that I
have them all, and I love them all. I have been fairly eager in my
efforts to seek out manga that suits my sensibilities; I have picked up
issues of Shonen Jump, I have bought titles like Battle Royale,
Oishinbo, 20th Century Boys and many others. I have tried very hard to
find manga that speaks to me the way the very best North American comics
and graphic novels have from time to time. I’ve liked some and loved a
few, but no single manga-ka has caught my attention and fired my senses
like Yoshihiro Tatsumi. His work crosses cultural and linguistic divides
in a way no other Japanese comics creator has for me. The brutal
honesty found in his three hardcover anthologies are unmatched in any
comics I’ve read by any other creator, from any continent at all that
you’d care to name. Tatsumi’s finest work is as good or better than that
by the comics creators I admire most in the world, whether it’s Clowes,
Crumb, Ware, or either Hernandez Brother (although he hews closest to
Gilbert’s sensibilities if you ask me).
I say all this by way of
explaining to you that I knew what I was getting into with Black
Blizzard; I knew it was not a “mature” work, and I knew it would not be
as “good” as, say, Abandon the Old in Tokyo. I’ve already seen reviews
that have definitely cast it in a lesser light or found it wanting. And
okay, I get it: Black Blizzard won’t change our world.
But that’s
not the point. The point is, it changed Tatsumi’s; Black Blizzard is a
landmark on the road to his journey from wannabe comics creator to one
of the planet’s greatest living cartoonists. He admits in his interview
with Tomine that this new release is “like exposing something shameful
and private from [his] past.” And with Tatsumi’s monumental body of more
mature and thoughtful work, I don’t doubt that that’s true. But as a
record of an important stage of his development, as a key pre-historic
relic of a very important part of comics history, Black Blizzard is
invaluable.
I’m not saying it’s some boring and bad comic that
we should all have on our shelves to prove how much we know about
comics. In point of fact, Black Blizzard is a fast-paced and
thrill-a-minute crime story about two desperate murderers brought
together by circumstance, unaware of their shared secret history, and on
a collision course that will allow only one of them to truly be free to
enjoy the rest of his life, should he live long enough to do so. In
their way stand cops in hard and fast pursuit, brutal cold and constant
tension that builds and builds as the story is told.
Oh, to have
been a child able to read such violent, pulpy and (yes) romantic fiction
whenever I chose! No wonder manga built such a huge and loyal following
in Japan over the decades it developed and grew into an unstoppable
cultural force. I started reading comics in the early 1970s, and while
Tatsumi was busy then crafting some of his greatest works, as a young
child in North America I had Richie Rich. I had Archie. I had
Spider-Man, but by Gerry Conway and Ross Andru, not Stan Lee and Steve
Ditko. I had crap in 1972. In 1956, Tatsumi was giving young Japanese
manga readers thrills, chills and the possibility of getting one’s hand
hacked off by a desperate, wild-eyed killer with five notches already in
his belt. Black Blizzard is occasionally awkward and not terribly
well-drawn in places, I’ll give you that. But it’s sweaty, breakneck
stuff that absolutely conveys its creator’s passion and desire to tell a
thrilling story. Tatsumi says he didn’t get much reader reaction to it
at the time, but I can tell you if I had read it when I was ten years
old, it would have blown me away and made me love comics far more than
Richie Rich and Cadbury’s tame and bland adventures ever could have
done.
So yeah. Garish and cheap, lurid and even amateurishly
drawn; Black Blizzard is all that. And I had one hell of a good time
reading it, and I love how it’s presented and how its creator
acknowledges all its flaws, and how its publisher and designer rightly
celebrate those flaws and create a conduit through which all Tatsumi’s
youthful vigor and muscular storytelling can awkwardly elbow its way
through the dismissal of history and the wisdom of those who know there
are far better comics than this. But be that as it may, there are also
far, far worse comics than this, and there are far worse creative sins
than the ones Tatsumi committed in creating Black Blizzard.
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I'm Alan David Doane, husband and father of two. I've been a radio broadcaster since 1985 and a writer about comics and graphic novels since the mid-1990s. I created and maintain the website Comic Book Galaxy, which first debuted 1 September 2000, and I have written The ADD Blog for Comic Book Galaxy since 2002. I am also a contributing writer for The Comics Journal, and the former reviews editor for Silver Bullet Comic Books (now Comics Bulletin).
I've also contributed editorial material for Alan Moore's Yuggoth Cultures collection from Avatar Press and consulted with other creators and publishers on a number of projects.
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