Darkest and most politically-conscious yet! "Hell" is a little offensive though, and it does suffer from the same pitfalls as the previous books, but I do love seeing how Tatsumi evolves as an artist. His panels are so gorgeous now! ( )

There is a line that runs through our lives. It is where we would like our lives to go. We straddle it as best we can. Some gifts of birth make it easier, some make it virtually impossible. Then life intervenes. Somewhere along the way most of us fall off that line to the one side or the other--by events we couldn't foresee or the myriad choices we are forced to make. Some stray so far from that line that they forget it may have ever existed. That describes many of the characters in Yoshihiro Tatsumi's GOOD-BYE. A ground-breaking writer/artist who re-imagined what comic books could be in Japan the way western writers did by differentiating Graphic Novels from Comic Books. The writing is sparse, the images seem simple but as they flow one to the next the stifling frustration and angst, desperate grasping for hope beyond their reach....seeps into the reader. It is sad but beautiful in it's honesty. A fine collection of stories...my favorite being the first entitled HELL set right after the atomic bombing of Japan but they all are marvelous. There is hope here....but it costs...and it's worth it. ( )

Good, but I've now lost interest in Tatsumi. ( )

This is the second volume by Yoshiro Tatsumi that I've read, in the same series as 'Abandon the Old in Tokyo'. There are similarities and differences between the two collections. Both books deal with everyday Japanese people coping with urban life in postwar Tokyo. They show how Japanese social conventions created crippling existential prisons for people. Tatsumi's protaganists struggle against (and often as not, give in to) an indifferent world. They sweat and suffer guilt, worry and a sense of futility, always alone among crowds. The stories have a backdrop of a slummy, rapidly developing Tokyo. However, this collection of short graphic stories has less of a horror component than its predecessor (with the possible exception of 'Sky Burial'), which in several stories crossed the line from existential horror to actual horror. The mood of Good-Bye' is melancholy while 'Abandon the Old in Tokyo' is downright disturbing. As with the first volume, Adrian Tomine's postscript interview with the author is very interesting. ( )

These stories are set in postwar Japan. Tatsumi's style is almost woodcut: stark, heavy, black&white, and bleak. And yet he never looks away, even while the reader at times can hardly bear to look. In "Hell" a nuclear shadow depicts a secret past that is very different from the past it seems at first to represent. And in "Good-Bye" the post-war world, squalid and nightmarishly small, seems to depict a country that has become unmoored, brutally severed from its connections to its own history, unbearable but still without any livable alternative it can embrace. ( )