Barefoot Gen, Volume One by Keiji Nakazawa

The diversification is so profound that manga covers everything from dystopian sci-fi tales to slice-of-life social dramas. The Japanese graphic or comic novels, known as manga, don’t confine themselves to superhero saga and risqué adult stories. But in Japan, anime and manga have long been major cultural forces, and in the 21 st century have gained admirers and fans across the globe. In cinema, animation is reduced into a genre for family entertainment. Or so I thought until I became more aware of Keiji Nakazawa’s career.Animation is repeatedly misunderstood as a medium for kids. Perhaps it was necessary to have a concept of comics as suitable adult fare for the medium to move toward autobiography. Rarer still are works that overtly grapple with the intersection between personal history and world history. It’s odd that, until the development of underground comics in the late 1960s, overtly autobiographical comics have not comprised an important genre. Comics have often demonstrated how well suited they are to telling action adventure stories or jokes, but the small scale of the images and the directness of a medium that has something in common with handwriting allow comics a kind of intimacy that also make them surprisingly well suited to autobiography. It seems to me that this is a model of how the brain formulates thoughts and remembers. Or, more accurately, it emanates from something intrinsic to the comics medium itself and from the events Nakazawa lived through and depicted.Ĭomics are a highly charged medium, delivering densely concentrated information in relatively few words and simplified code-images. I’ve just reread the books recently and I’m glad to discover that the vividness of Barefoot Gen emanates from the work itself and not simply from my fever. There are no irradiated Godzillas or super-mutants, only tragic realities. Gen deals with the trauma of the atom bomb without flinching. I will never forget the people dragging their own melted skin as they walk through the ruins of Hiroshima, the panic-stricken horse on fire galloping through the city, the maggots crawling out of the sores of a young girl’s ruined face. I’ve found myself remembering images and events from the Gen books with a clarity that made them seem like memories from my own life, rather than Nakazawa’s. Gen burned its way into my heated brain with all the intensity of a fever-dream.

I had the flu at the time and read it while high on fever.

The first time I read it was in the late 1970s, shortly after I’d begun working on Maus, my own extended comic-book chronicle of the twentieth century’s other central cataclysm. Barefoot Gen: Comics After the Bomb An Introduction by Art Spiegelman

Barefoot Gen, Volume One by Keiji Nakazawa