Sunday, August 06, 2006
A Modern Grub Street
LA Weekly on the early years of manga, thanks to godfather Yoshihiro Tatsumi's appearance at Comicon:
His next work is an autobiography that's been eleven years in the making.... presumably not at the rate of 50 pages a night. (Ah, but wouldn't it just be insane if it was?...)
Comic-book artists in Japan, Tatsumi is saying, are workers for hire. He would often be asked to draw 50 pages a night.... Tatsumi talks in the lecture hall about drawing and Japan in the 1940s. “I feel as if I had no choice in the matter,” he says. “The level of poverty in Japan was quite severe. If I was to take up music, I would have to purchase instruments. To me, it seemed the most reasonable thing to create comics, because all you needed was a pen and paper.”
His next work is an autobiography that's been eleven years in the making.... presumably not at the rate of 50 pages a night. (Ah, but wouldn't it just be insane if it was?...)
