Oddly enough, an LA Times profile of manga pioneer Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Adrian Tomine touches on the late Mickey Spillane’s wide-ranging influence:

Tatsumi’s work, appropriately, was shaped less by other Japanese comics than by local police reports and hard-boiled American novelists. “I was very moved by his descriptions,” he says, through a translator, of the work of Mickey Spillane. “For example, in a Spillane novel, a man never merely falls to the floor. Instead, he would write something like, ‘The floor rushed up and smacked me in the face.’ That sort of writing was an enormous influence on gekiga, through which I was trying to find a new mode of expression.

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  1. “ODDLY ENOUGH”?

    Actually, Mickey Spillane was one of America’s early comic book creators. Therefore, for Spillane to have influenced manga is NOT ALL THAT SURPRISING: Spillane’s 1946 paperback action-hero “Mike Hammer” actually BEGAN as a REJECTED COMIC BOOK hero “Mike Danger”. (Starting in 1935, Spillane’s prior action-hero comic book career included Captain Marvel, Superman, Batman, and Captain America.)

    Therefore, Spillane’s influence on manga is NOT SO “ODD” AT ALL . Details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Spillane.

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