Left with no choice but to escape the handcuffs, Shinpei proposes a game of chance to decide whose hand would be cut off, and in a doctor's office they choose from a cup laced with sleeping pills.

[3] The manga was created during a boom in short story magazines, so Tatsumi tried to come up with new forms of expression such as conveying movement realistically, though his art was rough and used a lot of diagonal lines.

[4] In the autobiographical A Drifting Life, Tatsumi's protagonist Hiroshi reads Dumas' book, as well as a short story by Kazuo Shimada [ja] about "two convicts handcuffed together, who escape while being escorted by police.

[7] After his brother Okimasa's hospitalization, he returned home and started work on Black Blizzard, which went smoothly and Tatsumi felt so involved, he shivered while drawing the cold mountain scenes.

The story follows two repatriated war veterans—one who is a pianist framed for murder, and the other a gambler whose family left him—who are handcuffed together and escape after a train crash.

[15] Drawn & Quarterly licensed and released the manga in North America on April 13, 2010, with cartoonist Adrian Tomine as editor, designer, and letterer.

Joseph Luster of Otaku USA noted that the story is typical for its time, but said that this "is overshadowed by its bold, filmic execution" as well as its insight into Tatsumi's early career.

[22] Greg McElhatton of Read About Comics liked the manga's tense situations, but felt that the second half was slow with a weak ending, and said that Tatsumi's art is "blocky and crude in places, but there's an energy about it that helps propel those early pages forward.

[23] Tom Spurgeon called the manga "a fun but rough work, full of character types and situations entirely too on the nose to reflect the nuances of certain moral questions brought to bear", especially disliking the ending and saying of the art: "the best scenes in Black Blizzard have a physical immediacy that only arises from fundamentally solid cartooning with a corresponding attention to movement".

[24] Publishers Weekly called the story and layouts simple, and the art sometimes crude, but "with a cinematic use of perspective, intensified via the characters and their circumstances, Tatsumi constructs a thrilling narrative with emotional depth.

"[2] Michelle Smith of Comic Book Resources said that the manga is "a quick and fun hard-boiled adventure yarn", feeling that Susumu's story was "silly" and Shinpei's connection "too convenient", but complimenting the "fast-paced narrative" and finding the rough art to suit the characters.

Club described Black Blizzard as a "head-spinning blur of hardboiled suspense", likening the climax to Mickey Spillane's work, and calling Tatsumi's early art "necessarily loose and frantic".