The Schulz Library Celebrates the work of Yoshihiro Tatsumi – Black Blizzard

The originator of the gekiga style of Japanese comics, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, died on March 7, at the age of 79. We’ve set up a small display of his books in his honor.

What’s crazy to me is that I only just discovered this guys work a few weeks ago when I grabbed this book off the shelf, on a whim, BLACK BLIZZARD. It looked pulpy and weird and those things tend to attract me.  I had no idea I was reading the early work of a comics legend.

Published by Drawn & Quarterly, Tatsumi made this story in 1956 when he was twenty-one, a year before he started making gekiga. In an interview with Adrian Tomine (included in this volume) Tatsumi says it took him twenty days to complete the 128 pages that make up this story.

For this post I just wanted to show off a sequence from the book.  Keep in mind that this has been “flipped” so it can be read from left to right.

I love the slapped together feel of this comic, and it amazes me that at that age, Tatsumi had the confidence and ability to bang this out in an extremely readable fashion. At the time, he had already done seventeen books in the span of three years. This fast pace must have instilled in him a rigid discipline that is inspiring to me, a new cartoonist who is terrified to lift his pen.

Come see the work for yourself at the Schulz Library.