Today on the site we close out the week with Sam Henderson's final diary entry. Thanks, Sam!
And Greg Hunter reviews the stellar collection of Tadao Tsuge stories, Trash Market.
Tadao Tsuge debuted as a cartoonist in 1959, a couple of years after he began work at one of the for-profit blood banks in postwar Tokyo. He would keep the blood bank job for most of the 1960s, long after his first appearance in Japanese comics anthologies. In that decade, he also began to create the stories that appear in Trash Market, glimpses of daily life in the city’s impoverished neighborhoods. A modest cult emerged around the comics—“If Tadao’s readers are few by Japanese standards, his supporters are wholly committed,” notes the book’s editor and translator Ryan Holmberg—leading eventually to this English-language collection (and hopefully not the last volume of Tsuge’s work to reach the US and Canada). Throughout the stories, Tokyo residents—students, hustlers, veterans—argue, make plans, and frequently avoid saying everything they have to say. Tsuge’s comics are often dialogue-driven, and usually dialectic too, charged by tension and contradiction on page after page.
Elsewhere:
It's a sleepy Friday heading into the holiday weekend. Let's see...
TCJ-contributor Prajna Desai reviews Bharath Murthy’s The Vanished Path.
Best news of the month: An online Seymour Chwast archive has launched. Go dive into the work of one of the best illustrators/designers of the 20th century. The way Seymour thinks about picture languages, color, and typography is extremely important to cartooning.
The David Letterman send-off is over, but here's one last bit: A history of Harvey Pekar's appearances on the show.
Two non-fiction graphic novels have been announced, covering the NSA and Edward Snowden have been announced, the latter by Ted Rall.
