I Saw It!

I Saw It by Keiji Nakazawa is one of the most compelling anti-war comics ever created. It gets its potency from the simple fact that the author witnessed and survived the Hiroshima bombing, an attack which killed his father and two siblings immediately and took its toll on him, his older brother and especially his mother for the rest of their lives. What makes this story so memorable is the somewhat banal way in which it is told. We meet our protagonist first as an adult who has regrets about the way he has treated his mother. Then we meet him as a naive young boy, part of a poor family seemingly always on the search for food. His dad was an artist of sorts and his mother was the tie that bound the family together with relentless labor and unquenchable love. 

The reason I Saw It gets to this reader is that the bombing is just one event, life-changing as it was, in the story which follows the young boy into his twenties and sees him married, A marriage which makes his mother very happy. This could've been a screed, and the artist given us page after page of horrific imagery, but the  simple images of people walking with melted flesh and finally down to their deaths is weirdly compelling. The intent is not to gross out the reader, but to render the events in a matter-of-fact way which becomes brutality when brutal things are described and shown. The tone is the same for most of the story and you wait for the breaking to come. 

If you haven't read this before you must. I have a copy of the American original in this house somewhere, but I read it this time in The Mammoth Book of Best War Comics in black and white, which is apparently the way it was originally printed in Japanese. 

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