Week 4

I Saw It by Keiji Nakazawa is a story about the survival of one of the modern humanities most gruesome tragedies. The writer/comic artist was brave to illustrate his first-hand experience with the bombings in Hiroshima, Japan. When he was just a small child, a bomb was dropped on his home, and everything he knew in life came to a completely changed for the worst. It must have been difficult to explore his own emotional relationship with the tragedy, and the gravity of this kind of trauma, through creating a comic about it. It's strange to view his child perceptions and coping methods, and how a child was able to overcome it against the odds. In this comic, we see his tragic loss of family, home, and how quickly he was forced to grow up in a dying environment. The viewer goes through his painful experiences and an internal crisis of why he made it out alive, why not his father or anyone else. He grows into someone that resents the dead, and those who did not experience the bombing, and those who support any form of war. But he also grows into a comic artist, one that creates powerful stories that warn people of the price of war.