"In 2019 the Anime Expo attracted over 115,000 people from all over the world to the Los Angeles Convention Center. The expo, which is the largest anime convention in North America, would not exist without Japanese comics called manga. While appealing to the masses, most mangaka work alone. They write the scripts for the stories and draw every panel themselves. Because manga are a black-and-white medium, most mangaka shun computers and digital art...

"Acclaimed for his visionary short-story collections The Push Man and Other Stories, Abandon the Old in Tokyo, and Good-Bye -- originally created nearly forty years ago, but just as resonant now as ever -- the legendary Japanese cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi has come to be recognized in North America as a precursor of today's graphic novel movement. A Drifting Life is his monumental memoir eleven years in the making, beginning with his experiences...