Yoshihiro Tatsumi - The Pushman and Other Stories

Here's another artist from Japan that has a lot less orthodox art style from the usual art that we see in manga books. Actually, it looks very European influenced (to me at least.).

Yoshihiro Tatsumi is in fact quite an icon in the underground (so to speak) comic scene. He's credited for starting the Gekiga style of manga. I don't know a lot about it but it seems to be Osamu Tezuka was influenced by Gekiga and because of his it spread a bit more to the audience.

The Pushman and Other Stories is a compilation of his works released in 2005 worldwide but probably a lot earlier in Japan. His stories are about daily life and seemingly normal people. By daily life I mean the daily life of for example a sewer cleaner who now and then finds a dumped dead baby in the sewers. Often his main characters look similar and don't talk a lot. It's always the lower working class like factory workers, cleaners, hookers and so on. Also I noticed some sort of hatred towards women. Perhaps it's just my mind making fun of me but in pretty much every story all the female characters are nagging bitches who only care about their interests and they always act mean towards the protagonist. Maybe the artist is projecting his own experiences through these short stories heavily mixed with fantasies.

The art is very simple but clean. It has that daily newspaper comic look. It's nice to look at it but it's not that very artistic but it doesn't matter because dark humor and irony is what dominates here.
Download.