Tomorrow, the 6th of August, will mark the sixtieth anniversary of the first dropping of an atomic bomb. It’s a day when what had been science fiction became terrifyingly real and thousands of people in the Japanese city of Hiroshima vanished from the Earth. The world woke up to a new nightmare which would influence SF for decades – nuclear destruction and atomic mutation. Even in the 80s this nightmare’s long reach would appear in seminal works like Watchmen with the threat of global nuclear war and the haunting ‘shadow blast’ images painted on city walls.
It is rather appropriate then, not to mention very welcome, that this year sees Last Gasp republishing Keiji Nakazawa’s classic four-volumes of Barefoot Gen, a cartoon history of Hiroshima and the Bomb. Nakazawa is a Hibakusha, a survivor of the nuclear inferno and this astonishing work is a very important piece of comics history, perhaps the Japanese equivalent of Spiegelman’s Maus or Sacco’s Palestine.
Like those works it may not always be the easiest read (although it’s not all doom and gloom, far from it) but it is an important one.
The Cold War nuclear threat may have gone, but as news stories showcase concerns over nuclear programmes in Iran and North Korea illustrate, there is still much relevance in these books to modern society (over and above the simple act of not forgetting these events).
Which brings me neatly on to a new title from Drawn & Quarterly in which Guy Delisle uses the comic book form for a report of his experiences travelling in that secretive ‘rogue state’; again I suspect readers of Joe Sacco, or Ted Rall’s To Afghanistan and Back will find much here to interest them. Pyongyang – a Journey in North Korea is published in September.
Fri, Aug 5, 2005
Comics and cartoons