Shigeru Mizuki’s Hitler

"Recently, the world lost one of its greatest manga artists.Shigeru Mizuki, whose career spanned roughly seven decades and included some of the most prestigious international awards, died on 30 November at the age of 93. The scale of Mizuki’s contributions will only continue to become evident to western readers with time, as more and more of his massive oeuvre is translated into English. The latest offering—released by Drawn & Quarterly a little over a week before his death—is the first ever English translation of Mizuki’s fascinating and engaging manga biography of Adolf Hitler . . . The manga (first published in 1971) was originally intended to introduce young Japanese audiences to a historical figure many of them were not familiar with, but it offers potent parables for the present day . . . Mizuki’s life’s work spanned a broad range, but much of it was dedicated to confronting the evils of militarism and the glorification of war. He witnessed the consequences firsthand, fighting in some of the most horrific arenas of the Pacific War and losing his arm to Allied bombs. His struggle against militarism and the patriotism which inspires it marked some of his finest work, and his presentation of Hitler offers an important effort to situate these themes in a broader, universal historical context . . . The story of Hitler is not a horrific quirk of history, but a very real lesson for the present, and Mizuki succeeds most ably in conveying his warning through this incredibly powerful work."—Hans Rollman, PopMatters