18 Facts About Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Yoshihiro Tatsumi was a Japanese manga artist whose work was first published in his teens, and continued through the rest of his life.

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

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

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

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

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

At this point, Yoshihiro 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.

Yoshihiro 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.

Black Blizzard was created during a boom in short story magazines, so Yoshihiro 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.

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

In 1970, Yoshihiro Tatsumi published a number of stories that, according to him, "marked a breakthrough and rekindled [his] passion in ".

Yoshihiro Tatsumi's approach was to use a "bleak story" style without the gags and humor in mainstream manga.

In 1971 and 1972, Yoshihiro Tatsumi transitioned from rental comics to publishing in magazines.

One of his stories, "Hell," was inspired by a photograph Yoshihiro Tatsumi saw of a shadow burnt into a wall by radiation heat of the nuclear bomb.

Yoshihiro Tatsumi spent 11 years working on A Drifting Life, a thinly veiled autobiographical manga that chronicled his life from 1945 to 1960, the early stages of his career as a cartoonist.

Yoshihiro Tatsumi attempted to combine the humor of the stories with the visual language of, two forms which he thought were incompatible, but he later realized that they both rely strongly on timing and that has much more depth and variety, forcing him to reevaluate the form and see that it was closer to than he thought.

Yoshihiro Tatsumi died of cancer at the age of 79 on March 7,2015.

The film, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, is directed by Eric Khoo and The Match Factory handled world sales.