Yoshihiro Tatsumi

As a lonely, comics-loving teenager in '80s Sacramento, Adrian Tomine went through what he describes as a crisis of faith in the field that had long sustained him. Until, that is, he stumbled on a bootleg printing of a Japanese cartoonist he'd never heard of. Through smudgy art and bad translations -- the text had passed through Spanish on its way to English -- this work by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, penned several years before Tomine's birth in a country he'd never visited, spoke to him directly.

The date: Aug. 15, 1945. The country: Japan. Following a series of nuclear and firebomb attacks that laid waste to dozens of cities and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, Emperor Hirohito finally announced Japan's surrender in World War II, leaving his subjects to deal with the death and disease of loved ones, the rebuilding of the country's infrastructure and rampant shortages of food and medicine. They were, to be sure, bleak times.

The date: Aug. 15, 1945. The country: Japan. Following a series of nuclear and firebomb attacks that laid waste to dozens of cities and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, Emperor Hirohito finally announced Japan's surrender in World War II, leaving his subjects to deal with the death and disease of loved ones, the rebuilding of the country's infrastructure and rampant shortages of food and medicine. They were, to be sure, bleak times.

As a lonely, comics-loving teenager in '80s Sacramento, Adrian Tomine went through what he describes as a crisis of faith in the field that had long sustained him. Until, that is, he stumbled on a bootleg printing of a Japanese cartoonist he'd never heard of. Through smudgy art and bad translations -- the text had passed through Spanish on its way to English -- this work by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, penned several years before Tomine's birth in a country he'd never visited, spoke to him directly.

----- Moomin The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip -- Book One Tove Jansson Drawn & Quarterly: 96 pp., $19.95 ----- Abandon the Old in Tokyo Yoshihiro Tatsumi Drawn & Quarterly: 194 pp., $19.95 ----- TOVE JANSSON, the Finnish writer, died five years ago at the age of 86.