In May Drawn & Quarterly will release Good-Bye, its third collection of manga short stories by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. The 208-page anthology of stories drawn in 1971 and 1972 provides plenty of examples Tatsumi's gekiga manga. Tatsumi coined the title gekiga (literally 'dramatic comics') to describe his seriously intentioned work in reaction to the etymological roots of the word manga, which means 'irresponsible pictures.' The bizarre and distrurbing short stories in this collection focus realistically on the devastation felt in
Tatsumi eschewed traditional entertainment genres in favor of subtle portraits of desperate people on the fringes of society. Retailers who have had success with Drawn & Quarterly's earlier Tatsumi anthologies, The Push Man and Other Stories and Abandon the Old in Tokyo have told ICv2 that these volumes sell to the same customers who buy alternative or literary comics rather than the traditional manga audience.
