Nakazawa (1)

Spiegelman schreef over Barefoot Gen: “Gen haunts me. The first time I read it was in the late 1970’s, shortly after I’d begun working on Maus, my own extended comic book chronicle of the twentieth centruy;s other central cataclysm. I had the flu at the time and read it while high on fever. Gen burned its way into my heated brain with the intensity of a fever dream. I’ve found myself remembering images and events from the Gen books with a clarity that made them seem like memories from my own life, rather than Nakazawa’s. I will never forgeet the people dragging their own melted skin as they walk through the ruins of Hirosihma.”

“… the vividness of Barefoot Gen emanates from something intrinsic tot he comics medium itself and from the events Nakazawa lived through and depicted…Comics are a highly charged medium, delivering densely concentrated information in relatively few words and simplified code-images. It seems to me that this is a model of how the brain formulates thoughts and remembers. We think in cartoons… The smallness of the images and the directness of the medium that has something in common with handwrtiting allow comics a kind of intimacy that also makes them surprisingly well suited to autobiography.”