Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Shikakui Senjo - The Square Battlefield p36 (Tokyo Top Publishing Co., 1962)

Description from the seller:

Been working as an editor/researcher/agent/coordinator of Japanese manga for more than 20 years. This time I decided to sell some of my collections because I can't take them to my grave!

If you are familiar with Gekiga, you may have seen a picture of him wearing boxing gloves in Yoshihiro Tatsumi's book "Gekiga University".

At the end of 1957, Tatsumi moved from Osaka to Kokubunji, about 20 km from the central Tokyo, and later moved to Hakusan, Bunkyo-ku, closer to the city center, in 1959.

There was a boxing gym near Hakusan, and Tatsumi started going there.

Using this experience, he created a number of boxing-themed works between 1960 and 1962.

"Shikakui Senjo - The Square Battlefield" (144 pages) was written in September 1962 as the fifth volume of "Yoshihiro Tatsumi Dynamite Magazine" by Tokyo Top Publishing Co.

The most famous boxing-themed manga is "Tomorrow's Joe" (written by Asao Takamori and drawn by Tetsuya Chiba), which was serialized in "Shonen Magazine" from 1967 to 1973, but Tatsumi took up boxing as the subject of his work much earlier.

The story of "The Square Battlefield" is a dark, yet fine piece of work with Tatsumi's typical perfection.

Three siblings were orphaned during the war. The eldest, Shoichi Kokubu, succeeds as a boxer, but his unreasonable fight schedule causes him to become a punch-drunker. The younger brother, Shinji, who cannot bear to see his brother become a cripple, and runs away from home and tries to become a boxer in order to take revenge on the opponent who made his brother a cripple.

Tatsumi transplanted and reused the character of Shinji, the second son, and his determination to "kill" his opponent in his later works.

This is the case with "Ten Gong" ("Weekly Manga Times," Hobunsha), which he drew in 1979.

I feel that Tatsumi had some "dark passion" for boxing. In my opinion, "The Square Battlefield" is one of the most important works among Tatsumi's early works that expresses his dark inner world.