Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Yoshihiro Tatsumi (辰巳 ヨシヒロ) was a Japanese manga artist whose work was first published in his teens, and continued through the rest of his life.

One of the members of Ōshiro's dojo showed Tatsumi's Children's Island to the publisher Tsuru Shobō, which ended up publishing it in 1954.

Tatsumi eventually attended college instead of apprenticing with Ōshiro, studying for entrance exams, but purposefully didn't finish the exam.

He met with the publisher Kenbunsha, which commissioned him to create a detective story similar to the fictional French thief Arsène Lupin, but the company reduced its payment offer so instead he published Thirteen Eyes with, with whom he would go on to publish many works.

At this point, Tatsumi embarked on a three-year period of producing manga for the rental book market; during this period he produced seventeen book-length manga and several volumes of short stories.

Hinomaru Bunko's editor established a new monthly collection with its top authors titled Shadow (影).

Although influenced by Tezuka's cinematic style, Tatsumi and his colleagues were not interested in making comics for children.

They wanted to make comics for adults that were more graphic and showed more violence.

Tatsumi explained, "Part of that was influenced by the newspaper stories I would read. I would have an emotional reaction of some kind and want to express that in my comics."

In short, Tatsumi aspired to create an "anti-manga manga", against his friendly rival and colleague Masahiko Matsumoto.

Some of Tatsumi's first "anti-manga" mangas were published in Shadow.

Because Shadow was reducing its artists' output, however, Hinomaru asked his authors to also work on full-length stories.

Tatsumi yearned to do such a story, and he pitched the idea of adapting Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo into a ten-volume Japanese period piece, but his boss did not feel he was skilled enough or had enough time.

The publisher put Tatsumi, Matsumoto, Takao Saito, and Kuroda in a "manga camp," an apartment in Tennōji-ku, Osaka.

After his brother Okimasa's hospitalization, however, the 21-year-old Hiroshi left the "manga camp."

Back home, he experienced a burst of creativity and created the manga he wanted to, titled Black Blizzard.

Black Blizzard was created during a boom in short story magazines, so Tatsumi tried to come up with new forms of expression, such as conveying movement realistically, though his art was rough and used a lot of diagonal lines.

Published in November 1956, Black Blizzard was well received by Hiroshi's fellow authors, with Masaki Sato (佐藤まさあき) calling it "the manga of the future".

He is widely credited with starting the gekiga style of alternative manga in Japan, having allegedly coined the term in 1957.

His work frequently illustrated the darker elements of life.

Tatsumi grew up in Osaka, near a U.S. military base called Itami Airfield.

As a child, with his old brother Okimasa, Tatsumi contributed amateur four-panel manga to magazines that featured readers' work, winning several times.

After corresponding with like-minded children, Tatsumi helped form the Children's Manga Association.

This led to a round-table discussion for the grade school edition of Mainichi Shimbun with pioneering manga artist Osamu Tezuka.

Tatsumi formed a relationship with Tezuka, who encouraged him to try making longer stories.

Another well-known manga artist,, also gave Tatsumi feedback and advice.

Ōshiro later asked to redraw and publish Tatsumi's immature work Happily Adrift, but did not end up doing so.

Ōshiro offered Hiroshi a chance to live at his home "dojo" with other aspiring manga artists, but Tatsumi postponed the offer until he graduated from high school.

In 1957, Tatsumi coined the term gekiga to differentiate his work from the more common term manga, or "whimsical pictures."

Other names he considered include katsudōga and katsuga, both derived from katsudō eiga or "moving pictures," an early term for films, showing the movement's cinematic influence.

Tatsumi's work "Yūrei Taxi" was the first to be called gekiga when it was published at the end of 1957.

In 1959, the Gekiga Kōbō (劇画工房) formed in Tokyo with eight members including Tatsumi, Matsumoto and Takao Saito.

The group wrote a sort of "Gekiga Manifesto" that was sent to various publishers and newspapers declaring their mission.

Some authors use the term gekiga to describe works that only have shock factor.

In the late 1960s, Tatsumi worked on a series of stories which were serialized in the manga magazine Gekiga Young as well as in self-published dōjinshi magazines.

During this period, Tatsumi was running a publishing house for manga rental shops so he did not have time to work on his own manga; he felt like an outcast in the manga industry.

The monthly magazine Garo, devoted to publishing gekiga, was founded in 1964.

Tatsumi and other influential gekiga artists contributed to Garo.

In 1968, Tatsumi published Gekiga College because he felt gekiga was straying too far from its roots and wanted to reclaim its meaning.

In 2009, he said "Gekiga is a term people throw around now to describe any manga with violence or eroticism or any spectacle. It's become synonymous with spectacular. But I write manga about households and conversations, love affairs, mundane stuff that is not spectacular. I think that's the difference."