Customer Reviews

Good-Bye

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The selections for D&Q's third Tatsumi publishing were mostly taken from 1971 or '72, around the time that he was moving away from rental comics (similar to rental movies in America) and into magazine publishing, which impacted his work greatly.

The stories are mostly concerned with the daily nuances of life; many of the stories end on the exact note that they begin on. Some of them are less serious in tone, but the first ("HELL") and last ("GOOD-BYE") are especially unnerving in one way or another. Without giving too much away, I'll say that the first story immediately brought me into Hiroshima and its aftermath. Tatsumi has a way of bringing readers into his art with his gorgeous drawings and shading. The writing itself is superb, too, with themes being more adult oriented ("gekiga") than typical shonen manga.

War, sex, murder, mystery, fetishism -- Tatsumi covers all the bases of the Japanese underbelly, and in this third volume goes more political than before. This is highly recommended.

His next publishing will be "A DRIFTING LIFE", an 820 page autobiographical work involving a post-war adolescent growing into a budding manga artist.

I've enjoyed all of Tatsumi's published work (that is in English), and purchased the books for my small library. His art provides social commentary in a rare form that could be considered *extremely* offensive to some -- fair warning!

Kudos to Drawn & Quarterly and Adrian Tomine for bringing Yoshihiro Tatsumi's work to the US! Good-Bye is the third collection of Tatsumi's short stories and each collection just gets better. Tatsumi's style that mixes realistic backgrounds with cartoon characters works so well. His stories are darker than typical manga of the time, yet they are so relevant in the present day. I hope D&Q continues to publish his work here.

Yoshihro Tatsumi, Good-Bye (Drawn and Quarterly, 2008)

With every collection of Yoshihiro Tatsumi stories that Drawn and Quarterly releases, I find myself becoming more and more enamored of the man's work. I wasn't really sure that was possible; after all, D&Q's first Tatsumi collection, The Push Man and Other Stories, made my beat-reads-of-the-year list back a couple of years ago. But, yes, they just keep getting better. Good-Bye, which collects pieces Tatsumi wrote in the early- to mid-seventies, does something I'm not sure I thought was possible where manga is concerned: it shows that it's possible for an artist to come up with overtly political stories in the genre that actually still work as stories. Difficult to do in any artistic medium, and thus all the more impressive when they actually work. (Don't try this at home, kiddies; Tatsumi is a professional's professional, and he makes it look easy, rather like Bukowski does with poetry. He gets a lot of bad imitators, too.) If you're familiar with Tatsumi, you've got some idea of what to expect; the characters here are on the fringes and in the lower classes of society, for the most part, and are being acted on by forces over which they have little, if any, control; there are few positive resolutions in a book written by Tatsumi. Depressing stuff, to be sure, but brilliant in the same way that Mishima's stories are brilliant. The destination is not somewhere you want to be, but the journey is exquisite. Drawn and Quarterly's next Tatsumi project is a nine-hundred-page autobiographical comic; I, for one, can't wait. **** ½

Strange tales of obsession and tormented people (mostly middle-aged men) in post-war Japan. The art is a mixture of realistic backgrounds mixed with distorted "Dick Tracy" characters. Most of these short stories are foggy and fairly chilling, almost David Lynch-like. Not for the squeamish.

As much as I like Tatsumi's work such as The Push Man and Other Stories and Abandon the Old in Tokyo, this one was so depressing it almost lost it for me. He has a brilliant way of telling a story. however, and uses the settings in a remarkable way. Many of the obsessions in this book, unlike previous volumes, are more overtly sexual. There is also a thread of political commentary in this book that is largely absent from the others.

This bound book of early japanese comics isn't as entertaining as it is informative. The comics are
grim symbols of a culture recovering from war, reconstructing both cultures and minds. As such, they're more sociology than frivolity.

They're aiming for shock effect, reflecting the cynicism of post-war Japan. Neurotic and erotic in stark black and white renditions their emotions are readily apparent. Anger, frustration and disappointments mark every story. But the harsh art conveying the hopelessness of the characters does cause one to think about how wars go on long after a truce is signed.

Many fine anti-war/post WWII movies cover the same ground.
This one comes to mind: Red Angel It offers
the same kind of angst and hopeless anger from an adjacent
time period. Akira Kurosawa also has several films on this dark
topic.

. . . Not for young people; Maybe just for comics
academics/historians or WWII vets on either side.

Tatsumi's world is a world quite humane. The words "dark", "intense" are thrown around these days too often. This book is a collection of short stories very much like "The push-Man and other stories" and "Abandon the old in Tokyo". It is dark, intense and at the same time very real glimpses of middle class life in a not so inconceivable place. I, for one, would personally recommend any of Tatsumi's books.

This is a brutally gut-wrenching and challenging book exploring the harsh reality of human nature and the human condition.

As with many of this writer's books, this book touches on the after-effects of WWII on Japan.

Readers should see this vision into the everyday lives and experiences of average citizens an excellent companion to any discussion of the history of that turbulent era.

this was really disgusting. some things just really shouldn't be printed. this was one of them. i hate how in all the promotions for this book, the author's work is presented as literary and profound. it's not. it's just really twisted and if you're not already a pedophile, you'll wish you'd never seen these horrific images.