Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s manga autobiography, A Drifting Life, was the subject of a major review by Dwight Garner in “The Arts” section of Wednesday’s New York Times.  Garner called the mammoth 840-page A Drifting Life ($29.95), which is edited by Adrian Tomine and published by Drawn & Quarterly, one of manga’s “signal achievements…an insider’s history of manga, a mordant cultural tour of post-Hiroshima Japan, and a scrappy portrait of a struggling artist.”

The article is accompanied by two-full page illustrations from A Drifting Life including one in which the author see’s himself as a lone rebel against the “God” of manga, adrift in “the small boat of gekiga (the realistic strain of manga that Tatsumi championed) amidst the great ocean of Tezuka’s work.”  While Tatsumi’s realistic and socially conscious work could never be mistaken for mainstream manga, in this autobiography, which covers his life from from 1945 -1960 (Tatsumi was born in 1935), he provides a subjective but still immensely useful and fascinating portrait of the development of modern manga.  As Garner put it, A Drifting Life is “a big fat, greasy tub of salty popcorn for anyone interested (as Americans increasingly are) in the theory and practice of Japanese comics.”