A short life of the author
Yoshihiro Tatsumi (1935–2015) was a Japanese manga artist who invented the term gekiga (“dramatic pictures”) in 1957 to describe a new form of manga aimed at adult readers — darker, more psychologically complex, and more socially engaged than the dominant Osamu Tezuka tradition. His short stories from the 1960s and 1970s — collected in English by Drawn & Quarterly as The Push Man and Other Stories (2005), Abandon the Old in Tokyo (2006), and Good-Bye (2008) — depict the alienation, sexual frustration, and economic precariousness of ordinary Japanese workers during the country’s postwar economic miracle.
A Drifting Life (2009, Drawn & Quarterly) is his 800-page autobiographical manga tracing his career from wartime childhood through the gekiga revolution, providing the most detailed first-person account of postwar Japanese comics history.
Collecting Tatsumi
The Drawn & Quarterly English-language editions are the primary collectibles in the Western market. The Push Man (2005) first editions bring $30–$80. A Drifting Life (2009) is more widely available. Japanese originals from the 1960s–70s gekiga magazines are extremely rare and collected as cultural artefacts.