The Push Man and Other Stories

After reading his autobiography I thought I'd try his work. It is easy to see why the man is do revered. Fascinatingly he is not influenced by the genre he created, instead his influence came from watching the working class men in the inner city around him as well as the seedy crime stories from the newspaper. It makes his work an absolute contrast to the innocence of the man which makes the stories more absorbing. The stories are like snapshots of lives that tell large stories and are absolute genius

Yoshihiro Tatsumi's "The Push Man" is a collection of 8 page stories detailing the lives of young people in working class areas of a nameless city. As usual with Tatsumi's work the stories are highly imaginative, well drawn, and utterly compelling to read. Once you pick up the book you won't put it down until you've finished. Then you'll go back and re-read some of the more haunting stories.The themes are of betrayal, isolation, revenge, sacrifice, and loneliness. It isn't the most cheerful of books! That said, a lot of the stories will stay with you. "Piranha" follows a factory worker deliberately having his arm chopped off for the insurance money, giving the money to his cocktail waitress girlfriend, who leaves him after he can't take more of her abuse and grabs her arm, thrusting it into his piranha tank."Bedridden" features a mysterious girl in a bed who is apparently the perfect sex slave. Yet each of her "masters" ends up dead. "The Push Man" follows a train worker/student whose job is to push people onto the trains, literally cramming them in so they'll all fit, until one day he gets swallowed by the crowd himself.There are a lot of 8 page stories in the 200 page book so I won't go into all of them. Unwanted pregnancies, cheating partners, confused and desperate young men, are all explored in the book. There are a couple of longer pieces included as well.The artwork is fantastic, in particular the opening pages to the stories which is usually a page long illustration of a shadowy part of a city. Tatsumi does a brilliant job of capturing urban life in Japan albeit slightly dated with massive TVs and a lack of computers, it's fascinating to see how familiar the stories are and how fresh they read despite being decades old. The freshness of the stories reflects the high quality storyteller and artist that is Tatsumi and I loved this book like all the others the brilliant Drawn & Quarterly have been steadily putting out over the last 5 years. An excellent comic book by an incredible artist.

I you thought you'd seen it all from manga, try reading through this. Manga, has a broader range than what has been translated into english. In Japan there is a manga medium that can cater for all target audiences.Tatsumi's work is different from the sci-fi and the fantasy. It has a very dramatic, soap opera feel to it. Each story is a standalone vignette but each links to the other in theme.The stories presented here are bleak and there's little in the way of optimism in each of them.The art isn't very detailed but is appropriate to the story. Its harsh and its rough to match Tatsumi's stories about the seedy side of working class life.I recommend this to anyone jaded by the sometimes samey-look, samey-story world of manga.

Very boring and perverted, not in an artistic way either, Not a fan of his work, if you are reading this and are interested in reading good Alternative Manga, I recommend Taiyo Matsumoto, ( Tekkonkinkreet, Sunny, Ping Pong ) or Yoshiharu Tsuge ( The man without Talent ).

Yoshihiro Tatsumi gives us a classic contemporary view over japanese comics.For fans of more classic-loking comics - buy it.For fans of new stuff - do da same that fans of more classic-loking comics do.

Birthday present for my future daughter in law who loves all things Japanese

Not my kind of thing. Recommended as one of 31 ways to read about Japan in Zoom Magazine to celebrate its 31st issue. It's full of really weird stories that generally include nasty things happening to women. Offers a rather odd and violent view of Japanese society. The author says 'I myself am a very normal person. Please do not interpret these stories as representative of the author's personality' I would say don't see these stories as representative of Japan.