[1] As a child, with his old brother Okimasa, Tatsumi contributed amateur four-panel manga to magazines that featured readers' work, winning several times.
[citation needed] This led to a round-table discussion for the grade school edition of Mainichi Shimbun with pioneering manga artist Osamu Tezuka.
[3][4] Hinomaru Bunko's editor established a new monthly collection with its top authors titled Shadow (影, Kage).
Tatsumi yearned to do such a story,[7] and he pitched the idea of adapting Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo into a ten-volume Japanese period piece, but his boss did not feel he was skilled enough or had enough time.
[8] The publisher put Tatsumi, Matsumoto, Takao Saito, and Kuroda in a "manga camp," an apartment in Tennōji-ku, Osaka.
Black Blizzard 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.
[10] Published in November 1956, Black Blizzard was well received by Hiroshi's fellow authors,[11] with Masaki Sato (佐藤まさあき) calling it "the manga of the future".
Other names he considered include katsudōga and katsuga, both derived from katsudō eiga or "moving pictures," an early term for films, showing the movement's cinematic influence.
[18] In a 2007 interview, Tasumi described Gekiga Young as an erotic "third-rate magazine" with low pay, which gave him freedom with the types of work he could create.
[1][18] As a result, he started to tackle social issues in his gekiga work, and his editors gave him complete creative freedom.
Due to Japan's political atmosphere at the time, Tatsumi felt disillusioned by his country's fascination with its own economic growth.
One of his stories, "Hell," was inspired by a photograph Tatsumi saw of a shadow burnt into a wall by radiation heat of the nuclear bomb.
[20] Nine of the stories he worked on during this period — which were created without assistants — were published in 2008 by Drawn & Quarterly in the collection Good-Bye, which was nominated for the 2009 Eisner Award for Best Archival Collection/Project—Comic Books.
One of Tatsumi's last major works was Fallen Words (劇画寄席 芝浜, Gekiga Yose: Shibahama), a collection of rakugo short stories published in 2009 by Basilico.
[24] Publishers Weekly complimented the humor and relatable nature of the fables, concluding that Tatsumi's "flat yet expressive drawings" help move the stories smoothly.
[25] Garrett Martin of Paste called the manga "a slight work, but fascinating as a historical and cultural artifact", comparing it to as if Robert Crumb adapted traditional folk songs.