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![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Gen and Kimie are forced to watch their burning death, as his father demands that they survive in order to save the unborn baby. Gen’s mother, Kimie, is eight months pregnant when the bomb hits, and his father, older sister, and young brother are caught in the rubble of their crumbled home. But, as Spiegelman also points out, “… it performs the essential magic trick of all good narrative art: the characters come to living, breathing life.” Volume by volume, these images of death and destruction that young Gen and his remaining family and friends somehow survive will haunt you forever, too.īecause Gen’s father actively opposes the war and he condemns the political machines that make victims of ordinary families, the whole family is labeled as traitors and constantly suffer abuse from their neighbors and local officials. The strangely repetitive pose of the characters with their arms thrown behind their head to signify joy is definitely disturbing, not to mention the abundance of casual violence the characters seem to unthinkingly inflict on one another. “His drafsmanship is somewhat graceless, even homely,” Spiegelman admits of author Nakazawa’s simple drawings … and you can’t help agreeing. “ Gen haunts me,” the legendary Art Spiegelman, creator of the Pulitzer-winning Maus, begins his introduction to the new translation of the Japanese original, Hadashi no Gen. Keiji Nakazawa was six when “Little Boy” decimated the city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. ![]()
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