To escape the perception of comics as whimsical children's entertainment, Tatsumi coined 'gekiga' (dramatic pictures) to name a style using cinematic framing, gritty realism, and adult subject matter. Naming the form was itself the mechanism of legitimation: giving disreputable work a distinct label created space for it to be taken seriously and to attract like-minded practitioners.
Tatsumi grew up in bombed-out postwar Osaka, submitting cartoons to newspaper contests as a teenager and breaking into the cheap rental-book (kashibon) market that supplied poor readers. His development as an artist was shaped by this specific low-prestige, high-volume commercial channel rather than by elite institutions.
The rental-manga industry existed because postwar readers could not afford to buy books, so they paid small fees to borrow them. The content and gritty tone of gekiga developed partly in response to this working-class, cash-strapped readership rather than from pure artistic choice.
Tatsumi interleaves his personal milestones with dated external events: occupation, economic recovery, political upheaval, celebrity deaths. Reading an individual life this way reveals how private ambitions are timed and enabled by the surrounding national moment, making biography inseparable from its era.