Seiichi Hayashi’s Graphic Requiem
‘Red Colored Elegy’ is a sentimental one-shot graphic novel by underground manga's distinctive innovator who defined Japanese pop art.
‘Red Colored Elegy’. Courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly.
Emotion pours out of each blank space in Seiichi Hayashi’s minimalist avant-garde comic Red Colored Elegy, originally published in the alternative manga anthology Garo in 1971.
Telling a story with the simplest line-work, its sparse graphics depicts the tense day-to-day of a young couple in frozen moments, containing their overbearing existential anguish. Influenced by fragments of the artist’s own life, its story about a struggling manga artist and his troubled love life is told with the weight of an approach that profoundly changed the field of manga in its entirety.
Depicting by Absence
Notable for the extreme uniqueness of his abstracted art-style, Seiichi Hayashi—born in Manchuria in 1945 and becoming a forerunner of gekiga (gritty manga aimed for adults) during its golden age—has made a considerable influence in Japanese graphic design. A prolific artist—an animator and illustrator, also a film director and children’s book writer—his work defined a moment in the late 1960s and early 1970s when manga’s visual expressions came to be seen as a respected art form.
Though now published 50 years ago—in the midst of a decade of wild cultural and political turbulence—the unparalleled surrealist magic of each frame in his masterpiece Red Colored Elegy has the capacity to stimulate contemporary readers as much as ever. Its cut-and-paste style has a pop sensibility comparable to New Wave Cinema or an instantaneous energy comparable to punk zines, but its modern sleekness, diffused in restrained Japanese aesthetics, draws out a sophisticated elegance. Between the flat, inky darkness of his melancholic figures, blank scenes of nature draw out unspeakable inner worlds.
Red Colored Elegy possesses a sublime capacity, created with a magic substance lying between tradition and modernity, between the tangible and the abstract. Saying a lot in a few brushstrokes, emotional intensity lies within its most sparse pages.
Red Colored Elegy (2008), a manga by Seiichi Hayashi is available through Drawn & Quarterly.
‘Red Colored Elegy’. Courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly.
‘Red Colored Elegy’. Courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly.
‘Red Colored Elegy’. Courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly.
‘Red Colored Elegy’. Courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly.
‘Red Colored Elegy’. Courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly.
‘Red Colored Elegy’. Courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly.
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