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Post by arecomicsevengood on Mar 7, 2024 19:16:13 GMT
When Groth interviewed Tatsumi for TCJ, he wrote an intro that included this paragraph, which I think is correct...and I appreciate interviewing someone because they're historically important and beloved by many, but still holding on to your idea of them and expressing it. This is wild to me. "Just want to make clear I don't like this guy's work." I think this was around the same time as the Comics Journal "best of the year" issue that interviewed Melinda Gebbie about Lost Girls months after an issue that ran three reviews, all negative, of the book. Also I don't think the tonal uniformity in Tatsumi, at least in the book I read, is so pronounced as to be a problem.
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Post by robindh on Mar 7, 2024 20:31:12 GMT
I Liked his sparring with Woodring and others in the old TCJ Blood & Thunder, though, that was some of his best work. I generally prefer Kochalka's polemic to his actual comics. The Cute Manifesto contains his best work IMO
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Post by dominocorp on Mar 7, 2024 20:37:00 GMT
When Groth interviewed Tatsumi for TCJ, he wrote an intro that included this paragraph, which I think is correct...and I appreciate interviewing someone because they're historically important and beloved by many, but still holding on to your idea of them and expressing it. This is wild to me. "Just want to make clear I don't like this guy's work." I think this was around the same time as the Comics Journal "best of the year" issue that interviewed Melinda Gebbie about Lost Girls months after an issue that ran three reviews, all negative, of the book. Also I don't think the tonal uniformity in Tatsumi, at least in the book I read, is so pronounced as to be a problem. Tatsumi is like Eisner to me: ok, i get it, you want this to be serious, but I don't think the motivation to be serious is beyond...being taken seriously. I don't get the sense that he has something he really wants to communicate to people (beyond that he's deep).
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Post by junkflower on Mar 7, 2024 20:59:14 GMT
I'm willing to give Tatsumi some credit- being a middlebrow guy isn't a crime, and he spells out his influences pretty clearly in a Drifting Life- American movies, hardboiled detective novels, and other manga artists from his own generation. He grew up working class and didn't seem to have much influence besides scrambling to make money for himself and his family.
What I find interesting is that he seems to be historically important for formal innovations made with the Gekiga Workshop crew, over a decade prior to his best-known work in the US. So what's the importance of those three volumes D&Q put out? I'm not sure, other than they were an interesting curio at the time in the US when very few people had any knowledge about that kind of thing at all.
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Post by franlopez on Mar 7, 2024 23:50:24 GMT
I think everyone might be getting that weird critic’s fever that exaggerates positions to a bit of a ridiculous point… I think we all see the shortcomings in those Tatsumi short stories, but to dismiss them to the point of “an interesting curio” seems very misguided to me. (Same can be said about the opposite view, of course.)
Feels to me like he managed to capture something about a time and place that truly resonated with a lot of people and seemed to translate well to different places and times, built mood in those pages and managed to make some very unusual story structures work. Might not be all I want it to be (and some I don’t want it to be) but it successfully does a lot more than most comics I read…
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Post by franlopez on Mar 8, 2024 0:02:45 GMT
I already patiently waited through the over enthusiastic phase with Tatsumi. I’ll patiently wait through this overly critical phase, as much as I wait through the upside with Tsuge and I’m ready to be patient during that downfall. And I’ll keep patiently waiting until you’re all ready to come meet me here in the zone of truth, where we can all finally agree that Cigarette Girl by Masahiko Matsumoto is the best book of the bunch.
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Post by franlopez on Mar 8, 2024 0:28:07 GMT
I Liked his sparring with Woodring and others in the old TCJ Blood & Thunder, though, that was some of his best work. I generally prefer Kochalka's polemic to his actual comics. The Cute Manifesto contains his best work IMO Yeah, I’m not that interested in if American Elf is or not a “good” comic, I just find it interesting that not that long ago a lot of artists would very directly mention it as one of the main things that helped them get started, but if you were to appear today without a memory at all, it’s as if it almost never happened. I find that strange. Sidenote: for a project I was working on, I ended up re-reading the first book after many years… Outside of Kochalka’s own vision (which I remembered as very of the time and simultaneously original), there’s a certain tone that was just part of the “air” then that is now a little hard to recover, and also there’s the whole post-social-media landscape today that makes us relate very differently to that over-shared intimate mundanity from a stranger… But I do think there’s still today something special and infectious about it if you let it get to you.
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Post by calebr on Mar 8, 2024 1:15:22 GMT
I picked up Peter Bagge's Sweatshop 1-6 after the boys on Cartoonist Kayfabe mentioned it in passing on a recent video. Reading #1 tonight.
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Post by bluebed on Mar 8, 2024 15:40:28 GMT
I already patiently waited through the over enthusiastic phase with Tatsumi. I’ll patiently wait through this overly critical phase, as much as I wait through the upside with Tsuge and I’m ready to be patient during that downfall. And I’ll keep patiently waiting until you’re all ready to come meet me here in the zone of truth, where we can all finally agree that Cigarette Girl by Masahiko Matsumoto is the best book of the bunch. 100%, I was talking a while ago about Cigarette Girl being very unjustly sidelined (probably by not being one of the prestige publishers with a 40-page introduction). So much more humane and delicate. Really hope Gekiga Fanatics gets published in English. The Cornelius edition is very nice. I remember reading Tatsumi during the hype and feeling like it's the same churned-out middlebrow New Yorker short story over and over again. And Drifting Life is only good for historical reference... liked it enough on first reading, then reread it years later and thought, how the hell did they make everyone think this is good. Marketing is one hell of a drug.
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Post by junkflower on Mar 8, 2024 16:09:26 GMT
I think there's much to be said about the sociological circumstances of those Tatsumi books that have rung out over the years... these came out at a time when the idea of truly "alternative" manga was a pretty novel idea to most English speakers, with very little published stateside aside from CUJ, SCJ and Sake Jock, which were not very well known or readily available.
The Tatsumi books came out in English just as the first big generation of comics readers reared on manga were reaching adulthood and I think there was a lot of misplaced hype about the IDEA of "Garo" that got associated with Tatsumi, (who himself really had little to do with Garo) perhaps mostly due to the largely incorrect English-language conflating of "Gekiga" with whatever more art-forward work was actually published in Garo. Additionally, the "actual" Garo work from artists like Seiichi Hayashi, Oji Suzuki and others came out at a very slow trickle, and in a confusing order without much additional context to support those works (compared to Tatsumi, whose work is pretty straightforward and easy to understand regardless of context).
All that said, I enjoy Tatsumi and didn't mean to dismiss his books as curios. I just meant that I'm not sure how those came to be the frontrunner for representing this era of work in the first place
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Post by junkflower on Mar 8, 2024 16:21:26 GMT
I would also add re: Drifting Life, while it is kind of a rocky read, it did blow the doors open for the history of manga in the English speaking world, so much so that it was like the discovery of another planet. On those merits I think its hype is earned, though I'd really like to read Gekiga Fanatics as well
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Post by dominocorp on Mar 8, 2024 16:59:59 GMT
Yes, Drifting Life is great for historical reference....but I also think it's much better than the fiction, because I think he's just a normal guy, so when he's just telling the story of his kinda average life, it's much more interesting than him trying to make up some idea about people on the skids or people at their worst, which I don't think he has any real interest in.
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Post by manoopuesta on Mar 9, 2024 0:13:13 GMT
I find Drifting Life good for historical reference but I enjoyed much more Gekiga Fanatics: Matsahiko Matsumoto does a great job making it an interesting story that can stand on its own without taking into account the historical context.
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Post by franlopez on Mar 9, 2024 1:07:46 GMT
I find Drifting Life good for historical reference but I enjoyed much more Gekiga Fanatics: Matsahiko Matsumoto does a great job making it an interesting story that can stand on its own without taking into account the historical context. +1 I liked Gekiga Fanatics a lot (but, for people that have only read Cigarette Girl, might be advisable to curve expectations a bit?). It’s one the many books I can’t believe is not out in English. (Akira Toriyama’s Manga Workshop has never been published in English! Kinda baffling.)
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Post by dominocorp on Mar 9, 2024 22:36:34 GMT
Do any of you read Dick Tracy through the Blackthorne reprints? To me, affordabiliyy goes a long way and i like how they collage the dailes into just a long 24 page comic. They reprinted the years I'm most interested in, but I'm unaware if they tamper with it or whatever. Interested if anyone else has read a chunk of those.
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