"I SAW IT" by Keiji Nakazawa

"I Saw It: The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima: A Survivor's True Story", titled "Ore wa Mita" (おれは見た) in Japanese, is a one-shot manga by Keiji Nakazawa that first appeared in 1972 as a 48-page feature in the magazine Monthly Shōnen Jump. The story was later published in a collection of Nakazawa's short stories by Holp Shuppan. "I Saw It" is an autobiographical piece following the life of Nakazawa from his youngest days in post-war Hiroshima, up until his adulthood. "I Saw It" became the predecessor for Nakazawa's popular manga series "Barefoot Gen". The volume was released in North American in a colorized English translated volume by Educomics by courageous and insightful publisher, Leonard Rifas who also published Corporate Crime Comics. Like Art Spiegleman's "Maus", "I Saw It" shows one of civilization's great horrors in an entirely new light. Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" clearly explains how sequential art gives a new and powerful vision to nightmares that can never be realistically portrayed in any media.

This excerpt was taken from the back cover:

"8:15 am, August 6, 1945. Six miles above the city of Hiroshima, bomb bay doors snapped open to release Little Boy, a code name for the world's first atomic bomb. In an instant, thousands of lives were destroyed, while the city's buildings, books and paintings caught fire and burned. The survivors discovered later that the bomb had permanently tainted them with its invisible contamination.
Keiji Nakazawa was 6 years old when he experienced this holocaust. He survived to write and draw this story."




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