Barefoot Gen はだしのゲン

Summer 1945, the daily harvest, the concern of feeding all the mouths of the Nakaoka family. Then, the suddenness of the disaster, August 6th and chaos. The author  Keiji Nakazawa (1939-2012), who lost his father, sister and younger brother in the bombing of Hiroshima, describes with brutal sincerity the misery that followed, the charred corpses and the rude awakening. The awakening of a nation that had lost the war, with its victims obliged to flee a ravaged land, infected with diseases that continued to develop many years later. Through an almost autobiographical manga, the author, in addition to describng the bombing, narrates the post-August 6th with its exodus, crime and the instrumentalization of poverty by yakuzas ... Nakazawa depicts everything, shows everything. Thick, simple, violent, the drawings accurately illustrate what has become a reference in historical manga. The work inspired Art Spiegelman and the equally famous Maus, the cartoon that traces the Jewish genocide. The great power of images, not to put in the hands of the young.

Ten volumes, complete series. First book published in Japan in 1973.