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Crime fiction aficionados: this unabridged reprint of a landmark Japanese manga might just hit your G-spots.

Manga, you say? All that saucer-eyed waif and Pokemon bosh? Well, yes, but that’s a small part of an art that’s become well absorbed into North American culture. What the “legendary” 1956 Black Blizzard illustrates is how much earlier some Japanese comics reflected a more adult sensibility.

In an effort to expand the possibilities of manga, writer/artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi borrowed heavily from cinematic conventions. The influence of film noir is plain, with the plot fleshed out from pulp crime novels. 

Even the book’s design recognizes its tradition: the very paper is (intentionally) yellowed and coarse. That’s the appeal; the look and physical feel enhances the reading experience.

Perhaps you’ve tried and liked other graphic novels. You’re aware of their visual and literary evolution. 

Still, you might never have considered picking up a cultural and historical curiosity like Black Blizzard. But if you appreciate mature comics, you may equally enjoy this early manga as the vehicle for a rip-roaring crime yarn.

The plot: a grim-faced, trenchcoated cop tracks down piano player Yamaji. The flatfoot has come to bring him in – for murder. “I killed someone! It can’t be…It can’t be true!” Yamaji says, not really believing it.

While in transit by train, however, there’s a crash, and Yamaji and the criminal he’s handcuffed to escape into a snowstorm. Our protagonist tells his story while they hole up in a cabin: he fell for a circus ringmaster’s daughter, and believes he killed the man to free her. 

In truth, he’s uncertain, and whether he’s really a killer is the whole reason to read the book. Another reason, though, is to acquire a deeper understanding of exactly what works best in comics storytelling.

The noir influence is conspicuous in the long shadows and gloomy urban tableaus. But Tatsumi also incorporates the very grammar of film, as exemplified by the cross cutting, dramatic angles, and successively vtighter compositions of the opening sequences.

Are these effective? Absolutely: the train crash is particularly outstanding. Yet it’s nonetheless true that such techniques don’t work as well as on film.

Why? As Watchmen writer Alan Moore has said, if comics are but movies on paper, then at best a comic is a movie that doesn’t move. Tatsumi himself recognized the limitations in his graphic autobiography, A Drifting Life: “Manga is a print medium, after all. It’s not the same thing as film!”

By no means does this make the book not worthwhile; we still watch old, less cinematically sophisticated movies, after all. And several panels still shine as striking examples of minimalistic comic art.

Black Blizzard is no mere academic exercise either. It’s genuinely gripping, the artwork painting a bleak, threatening wilderness, the story featuring equal parts romance, tragedy, and honour.