Fair enough on the Tezuka book. For what it’s worth, most of what’s covered isn’t translated into English, and whenever anything is discussed the author does a pretty good job of walking you through what’s going on. I even liked the chapter on animation, which I almost skipped, but was funny because apparently a lot of animation critics blame Tezuka and his company Mushi Pro for inventing a lot of the cheapest animation techniques and lazy shortcuts that are used to this day in animation. I had to laugh and look up an old episode of Astro Boy to see how bad it was.

And ouch, those first volumes of From Eroica With Love. The psychic teens are only really in the first story. Caesar sticks around for the second story, but is unconscious almost the entire time. They come up briefly in the third story, but are literally never mentioned again after that first volume. Hilariously, it ends on a cliffhanger that is also never spoken of again, and the second volume starts in on what’s normal for the rest of the series (avoid the unrelated Ivy Navy one-shot in the back, I read it for the first time last month and it was about as terrible as I had imagined). The awesome Trans-Europe Express story starts in volume 3 and finishes in volume 4, and the end of that story was what made me love the series forever.

The Tezuka book would make me feel guilty for failing to read most Tezuka and not having seen The Third Man :)

Yeah, I presume that A Drifting Life assumes a lot more familiarity on the part of its audience. I wanted to know about the snow storm story Tatsumi does, for example – what was it that was so impressive to the other mangaka? Layout? Pacing? Arrgh.

My sister and I got very good at combing second-hand shops, school fairs etc for comics – she currently has all the boxes of them, because I keep shifting countries and have more than enough stuff already. However, Misty at least has a website – http://mistycomic.co.uk . Originally all the back issues were up (unfortunately, this was when I had a dial-up connection, and I didn’t get very far), but then the original owners of the magazine showed up and argued rather vigorously over copyright. However, if you go into “Cavern of Dreams”, there are scans up of some of the longer storylines. Sadly, they have yet to put up the one about a swim suit that made the wearer hallucinate sharks chasing them, thus making them win all their races (controlled by evil scientists), and I can’t see any of the other ones I never tracked down endings for, but Winner Loses All is about a girl who sells her soul to the devil to win an Olympic medal in showjumping and save her drunk and depressed father, Moonchild is psychic powers and a teenage outcast, and Four Faces of Eve has a main character created from the bodies of four dead girls by non-ethics board approved surgery.

And I have tracked down v1 & 2 of From Eroica with Love and am wondering just how long the unfortunately named psychic teenagers are going to hang around (at least as far as page 17, apparently)…

Yeah, wanting more was the main feeling I went away with, too. Panel layout especially, as you say. The Tezuka manga I’ve seen from that time period are dynamic in a way that is very much like watching stills from a movie scene, it’s kind of weird and novel to read them since they are quaint and the motion is captured so well, in an extremely amazing and excessive way. I can see why Tatsumi was criticized for “wasting space” since what I’ve seen of the very early Tezuka work does spend a lot of time on strange things, but it makes me want to see Tatsumi’s work even more, since I know the techniques would have grown more sophisticated and been informed by more action movies by the time he was drawing them. I suspect a lot of detail may have been left out of A Drifting Life with the assumption that the Japanese audience might be familiar with the history, and yet there was so much there that being completely uninformed was no problem.

I was really disappointed that it cut off where it did, because he had just started talking about meeting Sanpei Shirato, which is the beginning of Garo and the underground manga movement. I would have absolutely loved to hear more about that, especially how things like that tied into the student movement at the time. It was strange that it cut off right there, because I imagine that being another fascinating chapter of his life. I think the transition from that protest to Tezuka’s funeral made the epilogue a lot more jarring and sad, too.

I have an embarrassing lack of knowledge of European comics, mostly because the ones I want to read seem to be out of print and expensive. I don’t know much about British comics at all, but Misty sounds like my sort of thing. It makes me think of a mix of House of Mystery and the weird 60s romance comic serials I’ve read bits and pieces of. I like the American horror anthology series I’ve read, but I can agree with Tatsumi’s view on them 100%. I’d be very interested in seeing the European counterparts now, just to see how they compare.

If you’re interested, I just read a book on Tezuka called “God of Comics – Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-WWII Manga” that goes very, very indepth with adaptations of cinematic techniques to manga. Tatsumi’s method of telling the story, where he talks about the movies and how they influenced him and his work is infinitely more interesting, but there were lots of discussions in that book about how Tezuka started incorporating a deep focus-type technique in manga after it started appearing in Hollywood movies, and how movies may have influenced his busy crowd scenes, and how he “quoted” scenes from movies. It has a side-by-side comparison of a “direct quote” where he concludes one of his stories with a scene identical to the ending of The Third Man. It was pretty fascinating. That book also discusses a Tezuka autobiography manga that sounds an awful lot like A Drifting Life that I would absolutely love to get my hands on.

And also from the manga nonfiction I’ve read, you might like “Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics,” which is a really old book (I think the first edition came out before I was born), but still very good. I was thinking of writing about it soon, but there’s a section on sound effects in manga and how they got to their modern state. You’re right about that, too, I more or less stopped noticing them in manga, but I definitely miss them when they’re absent in other comics.

And yet I still wanted more! I really wanted to see more about the changes in style, both in terms of art and narrative – one of the things Tatsumi’s character keeps talking about is wanting to do longer narratives, rather than the stories, and as that’s what I prefer to read I wanted to hear more about how these started becoming an option. But also, as you said, the references to movies that run right through the story, and implementing movie techniques – I wanted more like the bit where he slows down the action, cutting between the wheels and the guy waiting. I really feel lacking in vocabulary when it comes to describing this sort of thing, or even details like panel layout, and I always end up using movie references because at least I have slightly more idea about that (maybe it’s time to re-read Scott McCloud, although I don’t actually remember that much about those ideas in particular). Also, the use of sound effects is one of the things that really struck me when I shifted to reading manga (and threw me when I went back – I remember reading Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home after a manga binge, and feeling like I had cotton wool stuck in my ears), and I would love to know more about whether that’s always been there, or if that was also an innovation.

I loved the brother. I thought he was a great character.

American superhero comics not changing – again, I don’t think I know enough about the art, but definitely the narrative model for these is why I no longer read them – the never-ending storyline, with reset always available. I started reading in British comics, and I’ve often felt that manga was more like them in some ways (black and white art, but also something like Misty, a girls’ horror comic from the 70s, which mixed short stories that all tended to end badly and multipart narratives where good usually got around to triumphing seems to hang around when I’m reading something like After School Nightmare).

I found the epilogue very sad, somehow, particularly with Tatsumi scribbling over the face of his character. I was really hoping I would find a “to be continued”, actually – I’d love to read another couple of volumes going on with things. However, as I haven’t actually done more than flick through The Push Man, maybe I should start by reading his other translations.

(sorry for going on all over your comments! I really enjoyed reading this, and no-one else I know has read it, although I plan to force it on at least one person very soon)