I am liking this guy's work a lot. I was impressed with Abandon the Old in Tokyo, but I went to the store today and picked up this:
"The Push Man and Other Stories"
It's just as fucked up as Abandon the Old in Tokyo, if not more so.
I am really interested in seeing more work by this guy, because he's so damn talented and his pieces are really unique.
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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
His stories remind me of Hitchcock but with a much darker, sinister twist.
