Funny

From The New Yorker:

“The robots have become self-aware and self-loathing. Now all they do is write novels.”

Filed under: Graphic Novel/Comics

The Thrill of Creation

Continued to breeze through Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life. The central theme in this book is about an unceasing passion for manga that drives the main character Hiroshi Katsumi. One of my favorite scenes so far is when he is alone at his desk and deeply involved with his work. “The work was proceeding smoothly… For the first time in a long time, Hiroshi felt he had accomplished something big.”

A panel with a close-up of Hiroshi’s face and a couple of thought bubbles says: “So this is the thrill of creation! I had no idea.” The next page goes on to depict runners experiencing a runner’s high and how Hiroshi, in his productive manga drawing session, experiences a similar light and free feeling.

I’ve been experiencing nostalgia and a bit of regret while reading this book. Scenes like the one I described, where the process of creating brings sheer joy to the artist, remind me of the days in high school and college when I would stay up late into the night writing short stories or working on my personal website. Such moments are hard to come by these days, and it’s frustrating to see myself growing older and becoming less and less enthused about things. It makes Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s work all the more admirable because A Drifting Life is essentially a memoir of how he stuck out with his passion and lived only to create more of what he loved.

Filed under: Graphic Novel/Comics

A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Time flies (on the subway and on the toilet) when you have an engrossing 840-page comic book. You’ve got to love a heartfelt bildungsroman centered on a passion for creating manga.

Also enjoyed New Yorker’s piece on Wes Anderson (“Wild, Wild, Wes”), another passionate artist whose quirks and idiosyncrasies have found their way into making genuine, personal movies. Definitely want to see The Darjeeling Limited now.

Filed under: Article, Graphic Novel/Comics

Good-Bye by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

I’m almost done with Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s 3rd volume of work from Drawn & Quarterly (and edited by Adrian Tomine). I really loved The Push Man and Other Stories when I first read it a few years ago. It was one of those moments when the work made me see the genre of graphic novels in a whole different way. The simplicity of the drawings combined with an unrelenting bleakness made The Push Man an intense experience.

The scene below, from one of his stories called The Burden, shows a husband murdering his wife as she is about to give birth.

In Tatsumi’s world view, it’s hard to really know what a person is capable of doing and many scenarios explore unspeakable acts that may happen in the private lives of people who feel alienated and lonely in an urban landscape.

Good-Bye is the collection of work by Tatsumi from 1971-1972 (Push Man was from 1968). Its stories are longer and, from what I can tell, there’s a bit more sophistication in the illustrations. His stories continue to explore loneliness and tied with it, impotence and the helpless feeling of growing old all alone.

The stories are also a bit more abstract. I didn’t quite understand in one story, how an old man’s attempt to “control” the outbreak of a rash on his body was related to a mushroom he found in the forest. Felt pretty random, but maybe I missed something in my quick reading.

I really liked the story of a man who dreads his upcoming retirement, which will force him to spend the rest of his days living with his unbearable wife (who, he explains, has had an affair with his son-in-law and is an “arrogant, ruthless bitch”). He finally finds the courage to rebel and blows his life savings in pursuit of “passionate love” which, sadly, he never finds.

As depressing (and sometimes shocking) as his stories may be, there’s a seductive and pleasing quality that I feel from Tatsumi’s bleak world — a world where happiness is elusive and people act on their darkest impulses.

Filed under: Graphic Novel/Comics

Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos Papadimitriou

I read this graphic novel hastily a few weeks ago after seeing an article about it in the Times. I bought it right away because it’s about Bertrand Russell, the English philosopher, mathematician, logician, and whatever else you want to call him. I never really knew about his math/logic background and only knew about him through my parents, who both kept their respective copies of History of Western Philosophy nearby at all times and tried multiple times to get me to read it (I skimmed it and fell asleep many times trying).

Logicomix is enjoyable for its biographical dramatization, but my lack of knowledge in logic and the history of its development limited my ability to fully appreciate the efforts of the authors. If anything, I was surprised the book made very little mention of Russell’s work in philosophy. I did pick up on the theme of how tackling the challenges of logic pushed more than a few bright minds to the brink of insanity including Russell himself.

While we’re on Bertrand Russell, I should probably mention that it was in reading his 1927 speech “Why I Am Not a Christian” that I was ultimately convinced that Christianity wasn’t for me. I think this was sometime in high school, when I had already stopped going to church and had serious doubts about religion in general. Here’s the link — http://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html

It’s a nice, easy-to-understand argument against Christianity and religion laid out in Russell’s clear and rationale way, and I can see why it resonated with me so much when I was a teen.

Filed under: Graphic Novel/Comics