Reconsidering Tatsumi

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EARLY TATSUMI: The Push Man and Other Stories (1969)

Everyone has to start somewhere.

For Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Drawn and Quarterly that beginning was the collection of short stories titled The Push Man and Other Stories, an anthology of stories dating from 1969 which was translated and published by Drawn and Quarterly in 2005 [1].

It comes with a prodigious list of accolades. Chip Kidd calls it a “revelation” which “[peels] away the lacquered layers of Japanese social and sexual surfaces to reveal the elemental heart beneath, and with such fearless depth of feeling.” Paul Gravett proclaims Tatsumi “a master of frank, unsentimental exposés of the human condition”, and Jaime Hernandez suggests that “Tatsumi’s comics are clean and straightforward without pretentious tricks. Storytelling at its best.”

The evidence on the ground is less convincing.

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Dragon Nonsense

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This essay first appeared on Splice Today.
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Perhaps my favorite story in E. Nesbit’s Book of Dragons is “The Ice Dragon, or Do as You’re Told.” George and Jane defy their parents by walking out of their English backyard in search of the North Pole. They cross one lawn, then two, and then find the Arctic, complete with a giant ice slide for convenient travel, evil dwarves made out of sealskin, and a giant dragon curled around the North Pole itself. And what does the North Pole look like? Well, as Nesbit explains, “You will hear grown-up people talk a great deal of nonsense about the North Pole, and when you are grown up, it is even possible that you may talk nonsense about it yourself (the most unlikely things do happen) but deep down in your heart you must always remember that the North Pole is made of clear ice, and could not possibly, if you come to think of it, be made of anything else.”
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Gluey Tart: Baseball Heaven

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Ellie Mamahara, Blu, October 2010

I cannot explain my attraction to this book. I do not like baseball. For years, I lived near Wrigley Field in Chicago, an experience I can only describe as somewhat scarring. Indeed, my only interest in sports whatsoever is an admitted and frank enjoyment of David Beckham’s person. I will go further and admit that I am highly suspicious of teamwork, in general.

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Taking the Dick Out of Grayson

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This essay first appeared on Splice Today.
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In D. H. Lawrence’s short story, “The Border Line,” Katherine Farquhar travels back to her native town on the French/German border while musing about her manly and unyielding ex-husband Alan, who died in the war. At the beginning of her journey she thinks of Philip, her second, insistently yielding husband as a better catch, since Alan was “too proud and unforgiving.” But over the course of the trip she begins to wonder…and finally at a train stop along the way Alan’s spirit comes to her and claims her. She swoons before him and becomes a true woman to his true man:

Now she knew it, and she submitted. Now that she was walking with a man who came from the halls of death, to her, for her relief. The strong, silent kindliness of him towards her, even now, was able to wipe out the ashy, nervous horror of the world from her body.

Soon Katherine learns to despise Philip, sneering at him as she looks to catch glimpses of her spirit lover and/or of various phallic symbols that Lawrence thoughtfully places in her way. For example, there’s the

great round fir-trunk that stood so alive and potent, so physical, bristling all its vast drooping greenness above the snow. She could feel him, Alan, in the trees’ potent presence. She wanted to go and press herself against the trunk.

Inevitably, beside such hard, straight thrusting, Philip’s potency flags. He becomes whiny, then ill, and then mortally ill. On his deathbed, he reaches out to Katherine, but Alan’s spirit comes in, his bits swinging beneath a kilt. He pulls Katherine away as Philip ignominiously expires. Then the true man makes necrolove to her “in the silent passion of a husband come back from a very long journey.”

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Grant Morrison’s Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne also revolves around death, journeys, and mastery. Batman/Bruce Wayne is killed, but not really killed; instead he’s sent back in time. Robbed of his memory, he has to travel through the ages to his own era — except that the villainous Darkseid has rigged things so that when Batman gets back to the present the world will end. The superhero’s return from death is an event of such supreme awesomeness that it causes the apocalypse — except, of course (spoiler!) Batman figures out a way to save the world. Phew!


art by Andy Kubert

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