Mangaka Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s newly published 800-page autobiographical manga, A Drifting Life, resembles less the comics memoir of a fellow auteur like Harvey Pekar, and more the Homeric legends of Greek myth. And this isn’t just a matter of quantifying the nature of tragedy as defined by these two late blooming comics icons (both world-renowned for their misanthropic characters). Published this month by Drawn & Quarterly, A Drifting Life contains a lion’s share of manga anthropology, making the book an artifact in and of itself. Not only is it the story of Tatsumi’s coming of age as a manga artist and creator of the gritty, awkwardly realistic style of manga known as Gekiga, this book is a detailed history of the development of the manga industry in post-WWII Japan. It’s the story of Tatsumi’s growth as a man and an artist as well as the epic retellling of the growth of a manga culture in Japan.

Just as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have come to inform so many classics historians of ancient Greek manners and lifestyle, A Drifting Life graphically depicts life in the post-WWII Kansai region of Japan, exactly as it would have been lived by another kind of mythic hero: the manga pioneer. A Drifting Life actually begins with the end of World War II and the dawn of pop culture and entertainment. Milestones in each realm open each episode in the book, clearly demarcated in photorealistic illustrations not typical in Tatsumi’s more symbolist drawing style. Set up against this background, manga heroes of yore stand out in the memoir like a Trojan army, fueled most notably by the Zeus of all manga gods: Osamu Tezuka.

Tezuka is invoked at every turning point of manga history in this memoir, even though his actual interaction with Tatsumi is comparatively limited. This tugboat anchor of a book pays direct homage to Tezuka’s awesome powers, from his first tutelage of “Hiroshi” (as Tatsumi calls himself in the book) as a budding adolescent wannabe manga artist, to a post mortem invocation in the epilogue. The flux of Tezuka’s career arc as a prolific artist, author, editor, teacher, animator and filmmaker, drives the entire manga industry as Tatsumi knows it, and is matched in awe only by the dawn of animation, television, and to some extent, pop music.

Just as in Homer’s Iliad, however, the hero’s journey detailed in Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life, sustains a simultaneous sense of both the heroic and the mundane. If Tezuka is the god of long form manga, Tatsumi makes it clear he is the Achilles of comic strips. Constantly battling his need to support himself with illustration work-for-hire, Hiroshi dreams every single day between boyhood and manhood of drafting something bigger. Much bigger.

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By subtly detailing his suffocating lower middle class eternity at home, a publisher’s check for a chintzy comics strip (such as the ones “Hiroshi” writes as a high school student) ends up feeling like the proverbial heel, when for anyone else his age it would have been tantamount to reaching third base. But for Hiroshi, the question remains: if a legendary manga artist draws an amazing graphic novel that never gets published, does the graphic novel exist?

And Hiroshi’s brother Okimasa is always there to answer him.

Okimasa may be one of the most complex comics characters ever written. Appearing regularly in the corners of each manga frame, Okimasa’s sickly creepy look always hints at some dramatic emotional denouement, to the point that when Okimasa proffers generosity or kindness, the reader can’t help but be surprised. A more volatile figure you will not meet. This is sibling rivalry on meth, and deserves a place right next to Castor, Pollux, Cain and Abel, to further this analogy to ancient myth. In one horrifying scene, Okimasa has taken one of Tatsumi/Hiroshi’s first comics manuscripts and ripped it to shreds. Okimasa then comfortably goes to sleep, practically smiling as Hiroshi wails away right in front of him upon discovery of the destroyed work. Many chapters later however, after Hiroshi has become an established cartoonist, Okimasa functions more as a weight-lifting spotter, down to the reverse-psychological taunts (e.g. “What are you, a wimp?”).

In fact, despite war and economic depression, the most palpable narrative tension in this memoir is still in the scenes with Hiroshi’s brother and occasionally his inept father, clearly the prototype for many of Tatsumi’s later anti-heroes. Yet all fraternity is volatile in this book. Even after Katsumi Hiroshi leaves home, people continue to deceive and disappoint him. A Gekiga Workshop he forms in Tokyo dissolves almost as soon as it is formed, and as you feel the last 100 pages of the memoir thin out rapidly thereafter, you wonder if our Achilles will ever win. Does gekiga thrive, in this memoir of its greatest master?

Sing, goddesses, the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus.

Thus begins The Iliad.

Anger!

That’s the element that gekiga has forgotten

Thus ends A Drifting Life.

The tentative last chapter of Tatsumi’s memoir shows our hero marching forth into the anti-Security Treaty demonstrations of 1960, which many contemporary Japanese historians consider the breaking point of the people’s movement (akin to the Berkley and Paris student demonstrations of 1969). This is the last battle at Troy in many senses, except instead of bloodshed, we are left all the rage of a young artist who has gone from unlucky bystander to angry citizen. An epilogue sends us 35 years forward, in media res, to Tezuka’s funeral. Katsumi Hiroshi—our Tatsumi—is no longer angry. He is just tired of it all. He has birthed the legend, the myth of gekiga manga, as author of its greatest examples, and as bard of its history. This may be why heroic legends are left for the storytellers of later generations—heroes can’t write their own conclusions. But Tatsumi has penned a magnificent new historical artifact. It captures the entirety of a nation’s creative spine and leaves its future wide open. Pretty heroic after all.