"I saw it": A comic about Hiroshima bombing

Academic writing has now became the main part of my life. I need to have the draft ready by the end of this month for clarity passing and proof reading. Hope nothing will interfere with my writing, nothing that will cause changes to the results and no more major operation, aiyah... eh...amin....

So, why am I here, I should give full concentration on the writing. isssshhhhh....Well, actually I really have a story to write here, at least for my record. I was searching for the meaning of a word at answers.com, when I saw the main page of that website highlighting about the nuclear bombing at Nagasaki and Hiroshima in WWII. Yesterday was the 65 anniversary of the bombing. Each town was destroyed by a nuclear bomb, named "FatMan" and "Little Boy". When I read the highlight on answers.com, quickly flashed in my mind a comic that I once read when I was small about the survivors of that catastrophe. I then immediately goggle for that comic, using any logical keyword that I could think of. I succesfully found what I was searching for using "a comic about hiroshima bombing" and skimmed through to find the exact comic that I had. Hmmm wonder if the comic is still around at Mak's house? Will try and look for it once I am back in Malaysia. It's worth a keeper.

Now where was I...Oh yes...about the comic. Almost every day abah brought home something for me to read, anything from a magazine to a newsletter from his office. And one day he brought this comic home. What attracted me to the comic at first is..of cause the fact that it is a comic. Secondly, the artwork, that includes the colors and the illustrations. Thirdly, the story. And fourthly, the comic was translated to our local language, Bahasa Malaysia. I can't really recall what was the title in BM, I might be wrong here, but I think it was "Dari mataku"...but I am positively sure it was not the direct translation of "I saw it". From "I saw it" I knew about the bombing, the suffering of the people at these two towns. The drawing in the comic were so dramatic, as if you can feel the pain, for example the scalding and maximum burning of the victims skin, like a melted candle, distortion of some victims faces. I may be exagerating a little, but I had actually smell burning skins when I read the comic. This is because I had experience on scalding my lower leg to a motorcycle exhaust before, thus I knew how burnt skin smell like. Yup, a good story really made me going and over imagining a little.

OK here is a short intro about the comic.

I saw it by Keiji Nakazawa

"This single-issue comic book was the precursor to Keiji Nakazawa's longer masterwork, Barefoot Gen. A survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, Nakazawa wrote and drew this comic book in 1972 about his own life and experience in Hiroshima before, during, and after the atomic bombing. In it, he rages not only against the bomb, but also at the militarists who led Japan into war. His editor encouraged him to create a longer work based on this comic, and Nakazawa began work on Barefoot Gen. An intensely personal, child's-eye view of the horrors of the atomic bomb, and of war in general."

(source:http://www.lastgasp.com/d/24170/)

I definitely will ransack my room at Mak's house once I get home to find this comic. Hopefully it is still somewhere in the house.

yours truly,