Wednesday 3 December 2008

Yoshiharu Tsuge - L'Homme Sans Talent


When I first read this I was thinking it was too wordy to try and read in French, and that I should have waited for the possible English language version to maybe come out one day. But then I read a proper review of it here at Indy Magazine and all of my guesses as to what was going on were right, so I have changed my mind. It’s surprising how easy manga is to read in a foreign language, it’s a good sign about the cartooning I think.

The story is about a depressed and miserable bloke who has given up a life as a commercial manga artist to try lots of different crappy dead end sort of jobs. He is constantly trying to think of get rich quick schemes all of which are doomed to failure, as they are not very good. He is constantly listening to people listing the prices of things. He tries selling birds but his main try for making a living is looking for valuable rocks, the zen Buddhist kind of rocks that look like little mountains. He has a miserable wife and a small annoying child with a constant dribbling nose. The drawing is interesting and very strange, for instance we don’t even see his wifes face for the first 100 or so pages, just the back of her head. There is always a lot of mixing of realistic drawing and very cartoony drawing often in the same panel.

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