by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
English translation by Akemi Wegmuller
Edits/Design/Lettering by Adrian Tomine
Title logo designed by Tim Hensley
Published by Drawn and Quarterly in March 2010.
Original Japanese language publication by Hinomaru Bunko in 1956.
. . .
"If you ask me, the only way we're getting apart is if one of us loses his hand."
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
Black Blizzard is a film noir on paper. Full stop. It's not an homage. It's not a pastiche. It's not neo-noir. It is full noir. It was created in 1956. It has the melodrama, the psychodrama, the romanticism, the haunted pasts, the moral gray areas, and the (except for the opening pages) black and white visual scheme. Get Seijun Suzuki on the horn and have him shoot it in Nikkatsu Scope. It's ready to go.
Black Blizzard is, actually, a manga. A comic book. 128 pages all from the mind and hands and sweat of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who would go on to have a long and influential career in Japanese comics. But in 1956 he was in his twenties, just in the first act of his career. All by himself he crafted a feature length crime thriller worthy of anything produced by Nikkatsu or by the various Hollywood studios that fits between two covers. That's the power of a manga writer/artist firing on all cylinders. Writer, director, actors, crew all in one furiously scribbling man. How about that? It's kinda neat.
Much like the genre crime films of yore, Black Blizzard uses crime and criminality most interestingly as a way of exploring moral confusion within people through various melodramatic situations. This isn't about strict realism so much as a hard-boiled sort of romanticism. Doom can be averted only by proving oneself before the eyes of fate. To this end, we have two men-one a young musician recently convicted of murder, the other a middle aged career crook facing a life sentence-handcuffed to each other as they are transported by train to prison. An avalanche derails the train, and our handcuffed pair escape the wreckage to go on the lam. The musician is trying to hold on to his old identity as a respectable young man with a future. The career crook is on a defiant death trip, seeking nothing more than to evade the law for as long as possible, perhaps visit his daughter one last time, and then die in a shootout with the cops. It occurs to the career crook that one of them will probably have to cut off the other guy's hand if they are both truly going to be free. The musician is appalled by this idea, and keeps fighting for a way to break the chain without either of them losing a hand.
The conflict resolves itself in an unexpected manner which some may find a bit over the top, especially for those who are more familiar with Tatsumi's later, more sophisticated character studies like The Push Man or Abandon the Old in Tokyo. Black Blizzard has two protagonists who seem to represent different aspects of one person, whereas later Tatsumi works would follow singular characters roiling with inner strife and loneliness. Tatsumi started here under the heavy influence of the melodramatic variety of film noir and would later be writing stories comparable to Taxi Driver-but this is a very crude comparison. Tatsumi has his own voice to be sure. Also, I think Black Blizzard stands on its own as a legitimate expression of genre crime fiction. It's fun and stylish in the way those old timey black and white crime flicks could be, even if the ride is more fun than the eventual destination. The plot is a framework for the tormented characters to struggle with existential dilemmas and the burdens of the past.
Tatsumi's art is stripped down, propulsive, with lots of slashing lines. When we dive into bitter memories from the past those are just as sharp; no dreaminess to these flashbacks, no easy escape. There's even a jolting nightmare sequence evoking the fatalism of noir crime fiction.
Black Blizzard could, if followed exactly, be a ready to go blueprint for a new cult classic film noir. It also stands on its own as a comic book.
