Hokusai

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"If I could only have one more day, I could do a great painting."
- Katsushika Hokusai


Hokusai is a gekiga, more specifically a jidaigeki written ... by none other than the king of manga, Shotaro Ishinomori (creator of Kamen Raider and more than 700 other titles, in his career he made about 128 thousand pages, being the mangaka with the largest numbers manga in history).
This series is a biography of Hokusai, one of the greatest artists in the history, as his works served as inspiration for artists at the level of Vincent Van Gogh.
Hokusai lived for art, self improvement was his biggest goal in life. An example of this is that in his life he signed with about 30 names, each name was a renaissance for him, with that he ended up abandoning all the fame and money of the previous name but what mattered to him was just one thing: drawing.
Basically the history of the manga is a brushstroke in some moments of the life of Hokusai in different years. Because the focus of the story is on the Hokusai and the drawings, the other characters are very one-dimensional, and that is not bad since it is not the focus of the story and the Hokusai is captivating.
The art of this manga is beautiful, the scenarios are extremely detailed and the characters are in the retro manga style and of course the manga has several legendary drawings by Hokusai, for example "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" and "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife "(one of the first sexual arts with octopuses, yes it came from that time).
This manga is nothing that will blow your head or anything, it is a short reading (about 600 pages with short texts), very light and pleasant. For those who like art, mainly Japanese is a great read, I had a lot of enjoyment with this, I don't know how much creative liberties the manga takes but surely what you have here is a great tribute to the genius Hokusai.

"I have drawn things since I was 6. All that I made before the age of 65 is not worth counting. At 73 I began to understand the true construction of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes, and insects. At 90 I will enter into the secret of things. At 110, everything - every dot, every dash - will live. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age, I used to call myself Hokusai, but today I sign myself The Old Man Mad About Drawing."

Spanning through decades of the life of the legendary artist known for "The 36 views of Mount Fuji" (The great wave of Kanagawa being the most famous of them), "Hokusai" is in some ways The Citizen Kane of the manga world. It knows it can't tell you the whole life story of this widely complex man and it doesn't try to, instead, it marvelously achieves the feat of printing the soul and ideals of the man in the manga pages. Hokusai is an absolute must read if you're looking for complex characters with even more complex philosophies with very interesting discussions about art.