"You Can't Call this Manga": Yoshihiro Tatsumi's Black Blizzard

If Yoshihiro Tatsumi had been born at another time and place I think it likely he would have become a filmmaker. It's become sort of a cliché to talk about comics in cinematic terms but Tatsumi's work has more in common with the works of a whole run of filmmakers than they do with any other comics creators. I've long favored a theory in which Tatsumi's most obvious cinematic counterpart is the late, great Shohei Imamura, but this assessment hinges upon being exposed only to the three collections of the manga-ka's short works published by Drawn & Quarterly. Black Blizzard, as they say, changes everything—well, sorta.

Tatsumi's experimental long-form crime comic has a lot in common with the early genre experiments of the French New Wave filmmakers. Films such as Godard's Breathless and especially Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player originate out of a similar admiration for the crime cinema of Hollywood's golden age as well as their respective creators' refusal to blindly accept formal conventions.

Shoot the Piano Player

Black Blizzard

Tatsumi's story of a down-at-the-heels pianist wrongly accused of murder is as much about how narrative is constructed in comics, that peculiar tension between image and text, as it is about the lives of the characters depicted. As he explains in A Drifting Life, Tatsumi in this period was heavily influenced by movies, particularly in the ways in which characters' emotional or psychological states were communicated by formal means: manipulation of light and shadow, the use of visual elements such as fog and even "camera angles" and framing.

From the story's opening pages, Tatsumi's unorthodox choices concerning panel arrangement, which functions more like montage than simple visual narrative, establish the sense of claustrophobia and menace that will dominate the story. It is interesting to consider the visual narrative of Black Blizzard in terms of its claustrophobia because it's a sort of claustrophobia that comes not from confined spaces—indeed, much of the story takes place outdoors, up in the mountains—but rather from enforced intimacy and imminent peril.

Shoot the Piano Player

Black Blizzard

The pianist and aspiring band-leader Susumu Yamaji has been arrested for a murder that he thinks he has committed, though he is unable to recall the details of the crime due to his intoxication at the time it occurred. As he is being transported by train, presumably to stand trial for the crime, he is handcuffed to a hardened criminal, Shinpei Konta, who is also suspected of murder. When their train is derailed by an avalanche, the imposing and intimidating Shinpei decides he would rather run into the raging blizzard than risk going back to prison, leaving Susumu the choice of going along with him or losing one of his precious hands.

This is just the sort of near-cliché conceit that is common to stories of this type, but Tatsumi doesn't just rely on the artificial suspense and sympathy generated by Susumu's unfortunate circumstances. Instead, he exploits the enforced intimacy between the two characters in visual terms, highlighting the claustrophobia of their situation as well as the sense of confusion that comes from the blurring of the physical boundaries between the two characters.

Tatsumi's superb visual expression of this confused claustrophobia is illustrated in a panel early in the story. After the train derails and Shinpei decides he is going to make a run for it into the mountains, he is forced to drag a reluctant Susumu along with him. As the two trudge up the mountain in the pounding blizzard, Susumu falls in the snow, begging Shinpei to allow him to rest for a moment before continuing their escape. Just to make sure that Susumu grasps the urgency of their situation, Shinpei kicks his chain-mate square in the face. Tatsumi's framing of this moment is superb, giving us the scene roughly from Shinpei's point-of-view. But all that we see is Shinpei's massive shoe crowding out half the frame, with Susumu's foreshortened face reeling from the blow in the other half.


In a diary entry dated 23 September 1912, Franz Kafka writes of the composition of his masterful story "The Judgment" over the course of the evening of 22-23 September:

I wrote . . . from ten o'clock at night to six o'clock in the morning. I was hardly able to pull my legs out from under the desk . . . The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water . . . How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again . . . Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.

There is more than a passing similarity between Kafka's description here and Tatsumi's account of the creation of Black Blizzard over 20 days in 1956 from A Drifting Life. As Tatsumi narrates the scene, "While working on the scenes of extreme cold, Hiroshi felt so involved that he actually shivered. He'd never felt this way before." The experience unsettles the young artist, "So this is the thrill of creation . . . I had no idea." Tatsumi is also similar to Kafka in the nagging feelings of uncertainty he continued to have about his own work, feelings that were only exacerbated in the case of Black Blizzard as a result of the unorthodox techniques used in the story and the equivocal response of his more traditional-minded brother.

Shoot the Piano Player

Black Blizzard

For all that is great about Black Blizzard, particularly when read in the context of the author's mature works from the late-sixties and early-seventies, it is without question an apprentice work. As Tatsumi himself observes to his brother in A Drifting Life, the draftsmanship is at points so sophomoric as to seem almost comical. This is most apparent in the almost laughably idealized Saeko-chan. If the sequence of events portrayed in the author's memoir is to be trusted, Black Blizzard was created by an extremely sexually naïve young man. We are some years yet from the sexually sophisticated women from Tatsumi's later stories.

All the same, Black Blizzard opens up a new facet in the gradually expanding view that American readers have of this still wildly underappreciated artist. To his much lauded mastery of such lurid, social-realist short form works as "Good-Bye," Tatsumi has added a moving and informative autobiographical work of impressive scale and now a formally experimental genre piece that demonstrates the considerable visual acuity that he already possessed at a very young age. One can only hope that there is a lot more where these came from.

Baltimore Comic-Con 2009 - Sammy's Take

After braving the Baltimore Marathon crowds and traffic--cars on the highway literally driving the wrong way to get out of it--we made it to the 10th Annual Baltimore Comic-Con.

Saturday is always a strange experience; the "Collectors", running around with their suit cases filled with newly bought comics and lists in binders, checking things off the list as they flip through the box you're still looking at, the "Dads" ignoring their screaming children while haggling for one more dollar off and of course, the "Wheelers", people in motorized wheel chairs smashing into your legs and looking at you like it's your fault, and then standing up to check on that issue of Cable they are missing.

Sunday is the more fun day in a lot of aspects. You spend all day Saturday mentally preparing your brain to flip through hundreds of dollar priced comics in white boxes hoping to find a "White Box Hero", but by Sunday, the crowds are gone, and you're ready to get down to business. Spending a couple of hours digging through some un-bagged, yellowed issues feels like comic book freedom, the dust blacking the tips of your fingers and the attic smell filling your lungs, that's what it's all about.

Here are my haul highlights:

Good-bye and Other Stories By Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Unfortunately I couldn't even take a picture of my own copy of this book, and the only one I could find available on the internet is actually Brandon's copy. This large format (almost oversized) edition of Tatsumi's Good-Bye and Other Stories allows the art to speak for itself, I love reading manga in a non-digest size and being able to actually see the pictures. It only cost me $2 at Laughing Ogre Comics, which last year I also noted as one of the best booths at the show.

The Thing #3 By John Byrne and Ron Wilson

This was one of the two things actually on my list, along with Marvel Swimsuit issues (that's not a joke), because it's the issue where Lockjaw of the Inhumans speaks, revealing he's not just a big ass space dog, but actually one of the Inhumans who has just been touched by the mists differently. I've been reading a lot of the old Inhumans books lately, and have been thinking a lot about Lockjaw's humanity as an Inhuman, and not just the way sometimes dogs are just plain pals. This essentially completely changes Lockjaw's character and opens up more questions than it really answers.

The Last Generation Published by Black Tie Studios

The Last Generation kinda comes off as a weird Furry comic at first, but once you read the first issue and discover the timeline of events in the back, it completely changes your opinion of the entire story. Karen managed to grab me issues 1-4 for fifty cents each. Being written and published in '86, events in the chronology go all the way to the year 2000, where Russia and the U.S. agree to get rid of all nuclear weapons. An Egyptian God, Angel, Bear and Wolf-Man travel together to discover the secrets of what happened to the world. The art is really incredible in each issue, progressively getting better, and the letters section offers the charm of, well, when comics still had letters sections.

Paul Pope's Solo

Although not that hard to find, Paul Pope's issue of DC's Solo mini series is one of the few ones that I didn't own. I considered buying it at one booth for $10, but felt like I could find it elsewhere for cheaper. While digging through a white box marked "$1" I managed to find it in perfect condition, along with the installments by Howard Chaykin, Darwyn Cooke and Mike Allred. Pope's is particularly good, he takes advantage of the freedom given to the creators more than anyone else, even completely dropping the theme of writing about a DC character and telling the story of a toy he bought out of the back of an old comic.

It was weird to see it a few more times throughout the show, the most expensive was one for $70 signed. I started to take notice of how one retailer would have a comic for cover price or even alphabetized in a white box for a dollar, and another would have the same issues for $16 bucks.

Karen and I saw a graded copy of Bendis' new Ultimate Comics Spider-Man which came out about 2 months ago going for $50. It wasn't signed, or a variant, just graded at 9.8 and in a special sleeve. I almost feel bad for someone who'd buy that and not take the time to go visit a few stores outside of their area, you gotta think about the money you save by literally working to get that issue, digging in a white box or riding the subway to a store you've never been to. Especially at a Comic Convention which is all about digging, you paid to get in there to get deals, to see something you usually don't see, not something you can find at the LCS one town over.

Issues With Reissuing

Due to the echo chamber in the comments section of my last post on reissuing and a post over at Hooded Utilitarian, I decided to touch on what I guess I'll call "ethical issues" or reissuing in hopes to clarify my meaning.

The biggest headscratcher by Hooded's Bill Randall is his frustration with my description of the weird, awkward issues that come up when something is reissued or released for the first time in a new country, time period, etc. We'll ignore Randall's douchey decision to not fix my misspelling of "excitement" because it's the kind of petty aside that this blog has no time for (we overtly insult people we don't agree with), but I'm baffled by his gross misreading of what I said, which was: "the act of reissuing is a mix of hubris, fan boy excitement gone wrong in the best and worst way, and opportunism." That this was taking as some kind of outrageous and malicious statement is weird, that he goes a step further to suggest that this is all a big dumb cover-up for me not liking the design is...well, it's about as insincere as highlighting a typo.

The point of my description of reissuing is that there's a lot of issues, good, bad, and in the middle that come up when someone chooses to reissues another artist's work. On the positive side, reissuing something, at least as a small, undoubtedly sincere company like Drawn & Quarterly goes, stems from an excitement or love of the work and desire to get it out there so more people can read the thing.

However, that doesn't mean problems don't arise and often these problems stem from the same fan-ish glee that moved them towards falling in love with the work and wanting to reissue it in the first place. I'm sure you guys are aware but you know, sometimes when people really like something, they sorta act like they own it or they internalize it and take it over to some extent. And simply put, no matter how great and back-breaking it might be to put out some work of the past--or from another country--that you love, if you got a brain, you feel a little bit icky about the endeavor because you're getting paid or getting publicity or something of someone else's work. This is okay, this is necessary, but it is still true.

To break this down, I'd like to recount the emotions and concerns that raced around in my head when me and fellow writer here, Jesse, went to work on developing a mixtape for a Baltimore hip-hop group called Mania Music Group. This is also good because it moves these issues out of the world of comics...

Enthusiasm
My interest in developing a mixtape for free download of Mania mainly came from the fact that I felt they were incredibly slept-on in Baltimore and depressingly unknown outside of the city. It was not only their talent that grabbed me but the sense that their style intersected with a lot of what was going on in hip-hop right now and that if exposed to the right people, they would become huge.

I got the chance to meet them at a show they performed and ended up eating burgers with them and even going to a party with the group. The next day, a friend of mine--who organized the show they did--interviewed them on his college radio show. The result was an hour of hilarity and insight that gave listeners a great introduction to the group--the hour even ended with a ridiculous 10-minute plus freestyle. I immediately thought of how, it would be hard to get non-fans to listen to an hour with a group they've never heard, but that snippets of this interview, along with their music would provide an excellent introduction, sampler, primer of the group.

Filling A Void
The additional reason for wanting to provide a sampler of the group is that over at their website ManiaMusicGroup.Com, they provide free downloads to all of their albums and EPs. This is both brilliant and a little overwhelming for an uninitiated listener. To be honest, the site is also a bit busy and hard to navigate and I can imagine it at least turns off a few interested internet-ers with poor connections. I decided to take songs from all of their releases and consult a few others to do the same and develop about an hour of their music.

*First Problem: I'm picking and choosing the songs that will define this band to a new audience. My attempt to curtail complete subjectivity was through asking others' input but this is still not the group. I should add, I asked permission from the group about this project and they thanked me and said "Go ahead" but this did not make me less nervous or unsure of my role in regards to defining the group.

How I Profit
No money was made or exchanged in this project but there were a few ways that I was or could be seen as "using" Mania Music Group. The mixtape was going to be a free download on a new Baltimore music website I was developing and so, if the mixtape was passed around at all, it would indeed not only advertise the group but also the website that created the mixtape.

In another way, they could be seen as the first group that I looked to to celebrate over at this website--something of a small honor. At the same time, the mixtape was also posted on my fairly popular hip-hop blog and so, I was handing Mania's music over to my nearly 10K a month readers. Additionally, to a certain group, my name is more well-known than Mania's and so, in one small way, I'm attaching my name to the project. In my eyes, the uncomfortable ways I was using their music to advertise my new website venture was fair and at the heart of it was a sincere love of the group's music.

*Second Problem: Aligning my name and website with the group. Presenting them through my critical lens in a way that's beyond a review or article but suggesting that I'm connected to the group and can restructure and recontextualize their music.

Presentation
And so, it came to designing a cover for the mixtape. For those unaware, a "mixtape" in the hip-hop world is basically a CD or even .zip file mixed by a DJ or group of DJs and released for semi-official consumption. Many of the biggest rappers of this past decade have made their names through mixtapes, some of which were totally created by fans and outsiders with no connection to the artist. One of the staples of a mixtape is a relatively outrageous, crazy Photoshopped cover, often a parody of a movie or other aspect of popular culture and sometimes just plain nutty. Go here for some examples.

It's important to note that this, like all aspects of hip-hop is very self-aware and ironic, and so these are not the acts of a bunch of morons with a computer but a developed and accepted aesthetic...the same way rappers know why it's really hilarious (and really awesome) to wear big-ass chains, do they know why its awesome and hilarious to parody Hulk Hogan on their mixtape covers as Gucci Mane does below:

Below is the cover for Gucci's Murder Was the Case album (different than a mixtape, obviously) and you can see the differences in design and color and overall attitude. Still, there's a common, and delightful disinterest in conventional aesthetics going on here too. That's to say, it's not exactly perfect-looking or "clean" in design.


In terms of designing a cover for the mixtape I made, this was important because Jesse would be designing the cover and while he knows a thing or two about Photoshop, dude's Photoshop game isn't super-great or anything. This was good because it would mean some of the sloppier or imperfect aspects of whatever cover we designed would not only be easily excused, but work right in-line with the general aesthetic of the mixtape. At the same time though, Mania Music have sought to stick out from the crowd, to not follow any rules or expectations and so...

Third Problem: Would it be totally right to make a typical mixtape for a group like Mania? If they were doing their own mixtape would it ever look anything like Guccimania? Probably not. Why am I aligning their music with an aesthetic that though they're a part of, they also reject?

Below is the cover of Midas from Mania Music Group's EP Live from the Arcade. Now, this is not a mixtape, so the outrageous design of mixtapes doesn't apply, but there's something playful and wonderfully absurd about Midas' EP cover which shows the group's willing to have fun with their design.



Audience
The decision Jesse and I came to was that because we were trying to break Mania in some small way to a rap audience nationwide, it would be important that the mixtape signify their creativity but also in some way or another "play the game", which meant: Give this mixtape a typically mixtape cover, but don't make it too outrageous or silly that it might discredit the group. The result is below:


Named after Midas' description of Mania's music (soul food and sushi as seeming opposites, one hearty and comfortable, one clean and precise), Jesse thought of the hilarious idea to present a Baltimore skyline raining down with sushi rolls and fried chicken and ham hocks and stuff. It fit with the absurd expectations of a mixtape but was even more bizarre and batty, fitting Mania's sense of humor. At the same time, we tried to make it look professional and sleek, like the website of some high-power company: Purples and blacks, both Baltimore Ravens colors and undeniably regal.

Fourth Problem: The cover might even be seen as more than a little offensive, as a group of rappers are shown rapping behind a sea of fried chicken etc. Honestly, this wasn't even a debate because we knew it wasn't offensive, that it wasn't intended to be, and that the soul food images are quiet enough to not invoke racial stereotypes. Still, it would not surprise me if others have seen the design as offensive and maybe even members of Mania, who would think it improper to complain to a group of guys making them a mixtape out of sheer fandom. My guess is they're cool with it but honestly, I'd never know unless they complained and since the whole thing was a rap-nerd labor of love, maybe they'd not complain even if it did bum them out because they'd feel like dicks.

Conclusion
I hope I've outlined some of the issues that Jesse and I encountered just in the decision to make a free, downloadable mixtape and you'll see the problems or concerns we worked-out as well as the ones we ignored or justified in one way or another. I'd imagine all of you will have a different impression of whether we succeeded or failed and that's my point in all this: Reissuing or re-releasing something is a precarious balance of a lot of things...when you throw money into it, it only gets weirder.

For anybody interested, you can download Soul Food & Sushi: A Mania Music Group Mixtape here.

***
A Few More Things In Regards to Design
Album Covers
While I understand the want or need to get beyond the original covers for literature (pre-copyright books can be published by many so they need to distinguish, some books are thousands of years old), I do not understand why comics have taken the similar approach and hasn't instead followed the "print the original" route that music reissues follow. Pop, rock, and jazz albums are closer in age to comics than literature and it just seems to make sense. Below's an example of one of the few re-issued albums I can think of in which the cover was changed, Shuggie Otis' Inspiration Information:




Notice how the reissue is sort of frustratingly retro, something that's not only absurd but pointless because you can't get more retro than the actual cover that adorned the album in 1974. This reissue was by David Byrne's Luaka Bop label, mostly known for World Music releases and so, in some attempt at label continuity, Luaka Bop's placed "World Psychedelic Classics 2: California Soul" in the corner even though there's really nothing "psychedelic" about Otis' album and that California Soul, besides not really being a sub-genre, wouldn't properly describe this release anyway. Also odd, this reissue added four tracks from an earlier Shuggie album Freedom Flight and makes them sound like bonus tracks or album omissions. Only after you purchased the album and read the liner notes would you realize that Otis had two previous albums and that these four tracks come from his second album. Huh? Why?

Literature
My attack on "hipster design" stems from this sort of being the default approach to new design in the 2000s. And you don't really need more of a reduction of absurdity of this than these recent-ish covers for Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, originally published in 1774. The first cover, I recall, came out right around the time of The OC which was arguably one of the biggest pushers of "indie culture" into the mainstream. Read this Pitchforkmedia review for a good thinkpiece on the whole topic. I don't think it's too possessive to suggest that the image of a dude--and I use dude advisedly--placing his mouth on a girl's stomach, along with the candy-stripes is pretty silly for turning the novel into what looks like a Young Adult novel for girls or that a teary Calvin Klein model has little to do with Werther's suicidal love.

The Negative Zone: The Problem With Fancy-Pants Reprints

So, I laid-off this "column" for awhile because basically comics people are super-soft babies that gets all scared and upset about any kind of negative criticism unless it's about how Marvel sucks or it's agreeable feminist/racial criticism about Storm (disagreeable feminist/racial criticism, we're all about though), but David picked up an old-ass copy of Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese last week (and I, some ripped to shreds copies of Kamandi) and was talking about how awfully made the thing was and it got me thinking about the low standards of so many of the 70s and 80s reprints--a radically pragmatic attempt to get this brilliant work out, quality and context be damned.

My first thought was a general frustration with the way comics were archived or reproduced in the past and then, my second thought, was a kind of nightmare flash through my brain of brand new "reissues" of Pratt's work from Fantagraphics or Drawn & Quarterly in big, hardback style with nice graphic design and I thought, "give me this ass copy from 1981 any day..." and not because of some curmudgeonly want for the work to remain obscure or inaccessible but because so much of the time, the work's context is not only changed--context of art will always change--but dramatically shifted not by critical voices reevaluating the work, but by publisher and editor concerns about how to brand and sell the shit. Specifically, it was the Drawn & Quarterly reissues of Tatsumi's work that fit this frustration well.

The act of reissuing is a mix of hubris, fan boy excitement gone wrong in the best and worst way, and opportunism. On one hand, it's really cool to know that Tatsumi's work is now sitting at the shelves of Barnes & Noble for any and everybody to pick up and it boils down to a rather small and independent company putting it out because they really liked it and the popularity of Manga might sell some copies, but on the other hand, there's an uncomfortable sense of imperialistic takeover there too.

The reissue of the work's nice, but why must it get forced through a kind of twee, minimalist style of design as if its the same as the "comix" they release? What could Adrian Tomine, who makes Clowes-derivative comics (minus the all important irony) and draws sad bastard indie fucks contribute to Good-Bye & Other Stories than his name? Whether it's intended or not, there's a line being drawn, then connected between say Tatsumi's "Just a Man", which details a man's ineffable contempt for his wife and child and Tomine's "my girlfriend's mean to me but I'm a dick, oh it's so complicated this world" storytelling. Look at the Catalan Communications version from the early 80s and the recent reissue of Good-Bye:



The biggest contrast is the complete lack of subtlety in the new version, a sexually aggressive image clouded by some "hip" graphic design versus the original which simply illustrates a Geisha, back partially turned in front of a black background. It's not that the latter is somehow any less of a manipulation or closer or even more "pure" to Tatsumi's vision--if anything, it's the opposIte as Tatsumi's had something to do with the D & Q reissues--but there's something less intrusive, less subjectivized about the Catalan edition.


Vertical's reissues of the work of Osamu Tezuka are even more interesting because the design isn't terrible or as obvious, and the act of reissuing stuff like Apollo's Song, MW,or Dororo, hasn't recontextualized the work for the The New York Times crowd only (if you looked hard enough, Tatsumi's work was available), but made the creator of Astro Boy's weirder, more "mature" work really easily available for the first time. But there's still something nagging in the cover design, from the Urban Outfitter all-over print hoodie garbage of Dororo to the Manga-Chris Ware sense for the others. It doesn't fit the comics at all and it's sort of hoodwinking more conventional Manga fans who'll expect something a different than inside, and as I said, aligning the work with American "comix" which for the most part, are lighter than these guys uh, grappling with their country being bombed to shits and then rebuilt by the same dudes and all that--a sub-rant could be made about how saying these works are the "grandfather" to modern alternative comix negates their politicism, particularly a politicism that's rooted in the United States committing acts of horror and continues a trend of wiping American hands clean of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but this shit's long already...

So look, I get it. The goal here's to make these works as appealing as possible and therefore, sell more copies which helps the company (and the creator) so that more weird, cool old comics can be put out. I'm just not sure this kind of design really works because a book made in Wes Anderson hues that'll appeal to people who listen to stuff like The Shins will probably be a little disappointed by Tatsumi or Tezuka's work.

And in a lot of ways, if they aren't disappointed, it's in part coming from the fact that Vertical's design recontextualized it and so, they see it in the cartoon cutesy darkness of Wes Anderson or Neutral Milk Hotel or something when what Tezuka (or Tatsumi) are dealing with is simply, heavier and way darker. Less a retreat into retro that paradoxically, pulls out some immediate emotions or just something about living in America in modern times, but narratives that are wrestling around with Japan's odd history--post-WWII Japan under the eye of America specifically--and of course, the dropping of the Atomic bomb. As I said before, to try to even suggest some connection between the work of more recent "alternative comix" and the work of these guys is not only offensive because it's dead wrong, but because it's lessening the depth and breadth of the work by suggesting its an earlier version for what's going on now.

Tomine can cite the influence of Tatsumi on his work but if it influenced it, he grossly misread one of his comic art heroes. And that his way of paying homage is by kinda sorta recontextualizing dude's work is depressing. Perhaps, an easy example for us all to get behind is the Chip Kidd Bat-Manga controversy in which Kidd slapped together a bunch of incomplete Japanese Batman comics from the 60s, didn't put the artist's name on the front, and released the thing.

That all my examples are Japanese artists being pilfered by Americans wasn't intentional nor do I think it's a form of racism--more like mannered xenophobia, once Moebius comics get reissued in America wholesale, the same thing'll happen--but the main issue here's the obsessive desire, even by those you'd assume to be more "respectable" than bigger, dumber companies, to force others' work into their own expectations and comfort zone.