Check this out, it comes out April 14:
This is what avclub had to say about it:
Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s reputation as a manga pioneer stems from his involvement with the development of the “gekiga” genre, dedicated to more realistic depictions of the trials of everyday existence. For the 800-page epic A Drifting Life (Drawn & Quarterly), the everyday existence Tatsumi depicts is his own, ranging from his boyhood interest in comics to his attempts to make his own name in the profession. It’s a passionate, personal book, lovingly and gorgeously rendered, and it’s informative reading both for fans of Japanese comics and those who’ve always kept manga at arm’s length. All of A Drifting Life’s small cultural details—the book-rental shops, the four-panel-comics contests, the juvenile manga clubs, the controversies over gekiga’s adult content—merge with the story of Tatsumi’s troubled family life and his addiction to western popular culture. A Drifting Life bears some similarities to Will Eisner’s autobiographical graphic novels both in its subject matter and its bluntness, but Tatsumi shows more ambition in trying to show a person and a country in transition. The story is all about developing new models for personal and artistic behavior in the wake of international disgrace. A Drifting Life is as involving and thorough as any prose memoir, while remaining as immediate and concise as the best comics. It is, honestly, one of the most significant works the medium has ever produced… A
Tatsumi's work border between chilling and realistic portrayals of life. His characters often look the same, but the stories in each new story is always different yet always thematically similar. The characters in his books are always products of failed relationships, or failing from the added stress of modern society.
His work was made in the 60's and 70's and they're still relevant today.
If you want a good starter place for Tatsumi check this book out:
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Tatsumi's brief, disturbing stories, originally published in 1969, have a tone somewhere between contemporary short fiction and EC Comics' old "shock" comics. Each hinges on some kind of prurient or sexually twisted situation: a man's bedridden lover turns out to be a physically mutated sex slave; an office worker puts on his girlfriend's makeup and clothes and has an affair with another woman; a man who disinfects telephones for a living calls a prostitute, but can't think of anything to do but pull out his disinfection kit. Produced over a short period of time, the stories are variations on a theme of social maladjustment. Tatsumi draws marvelously evocative settings, and his stories flow with dreamlike ambiguity, speeding toward the inevitable tragedies at their ends, but his characters appear practically identical. This reinforces both the repetitive nature of his themes and Tatsumi's view of the common man's continuing struggle in a merciless world of menial jobs, impotence and abortions. Tatsumi is known as the "grandfather of Japanese alternative comics," and this is the first in a proposed series of authorized English-language collections of his work. His work anticipates American alternative comics, making it clear why American cartoonist Adrian Tomine, who edited this collection, was attracted to the work. (Sept.)
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* Tatsumi has drawn groundbreaking comics in Japan since the 1950s, but Americans have had few opportunities to view his work. As the first in a proposed Tatsumi series edited by admiring alternative comics artist Adrian Tomaine, this volume of stories from 1969 starts to make amends. Tatsumi works in a powerfully straightforward manner that eschews manga's quirks in favor of naturalism. Combining the Japanese words for drama and art, he called his style gekiga to set it apart from the more commercially pitched anga. The latter shows much about Japanese culture, but gekigareveals the nation's psyche as Tatsumi depicts men living lives of quiet frustration--powerless, often sexually impotent, confined by social propriety. In one story, a factory worker mangles himself to collect an insurance payment so his girlfriend can buy a nightclub. Another portrays an auto mechanic fixated on a glamorous TV star. Others feature a sewer cleaner, a porn-film projectionist, and a "push man" who crams commuters into packed subway cars. It took American comics decades to begin tackling subject matter approaching the gravity of Tatsumi's. These 35-year-old stories are the precursors of today's serious graphic novels. Gordon Flagg
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