46 BAREFOOT GEN
sexualized art in which Baker specialized, and was designed for and marketed to adults.
Only two Picture Novels were published before the line was cancelled due to poor sales.
Baker acted as St. John Publications’ art director from 1952 to 1954.
While other cartoonists left the industry for other pursuits when jobs dwindled dur-
ing the 1950s, Baker continued to illustrate for various companies, including Atlas, the
precursor to Marvel , for which he lent his pencils to various romance and science fi ction
titles while working for Vince Colletta’s studio. He continued to freelance until his death
in 1959 from a heart condition complicated by a childhood bout with rheumatic fever.
His fi nal confi rmed published story, a six-page romance story titled “I Gave Up the Man
I Loved!” appeared posthumously in Atlas Comics’ My Own Romance #73.
Ed Cunard
BAREFOOT GEN is the English title of the long running—but oftentimes
interrupted—Japanese manga Hadashi no Gen (1973–87), by Keiji Nakazawa (1939–)
about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima at the end of World War II. Nakazawa had
previously created some short fi ctional manga about the war and a 46-page autobio-
graphical story Ore wa Mita ( I Saw It ), which prompted Tadasu Nagano, one of the
editors of the comic magazine Shonen Jump , to invite the artist to develop a much longer
version. Th us, in June 1973, Hadashi no Gen began to appear in this popular Japanese
magazine for boys, but the longer series incorporated more fi ctional elements than
the initial Ore wa Mita. Meanwhile Shueisha, the publisher of Jump , refrained from
collecting the episodes in a tankobon book edition, considering it potentially too risky
for their reputation. Additionally, in September 1974, they canceled the serialization in
Jump. Afterwards, new episodes of Gen were successively published in three leftist and
non-manga publications: Shimin [Citizen] (1975–76), Bunka Hyoron [Cultural Criti-
cism] (1977–80), and Kyoiku Hyoron [Educational Criticism] (1982–87). By 1987,
Chobunsha had published the 10 volumes in book form.
Hadashi no Gen was also one of the fi rst Japanese comics to be (partly) translated
into other languages, including English and French. At fi rst this manga was used in
Europe and the United States as an activist tool against nuclear weapons, but a rela-
tively wider readership arrived with the Penguin Books editions (of 1989 and 1990).
Finally, from 2004 on, Last Gap set out to publish the complete cycle in English in
10 volumes, as Vertige Graphic already had done in French. Even before the end of the
serialization in Japan, Hadashi no Gen was adapted into a live-action movie (1976),
followed by two animated fi lms (1983, 1986); in 2007 a new live-action adaptation
was broadcast on Japanese television as a miniseries. Nakazawa’s strong criticism of
Japan’s wartime leaders was usually subdued or erased in these fi lm adaptations. On a
political level, Barefoot Gen is an explicit anti-war comic: Gen’s father blames not only
the rich upper class and the military (Vol. 1, plate 13), but also every citizen who is
cooperating with this regime (Vol. 1, plate 168). Th e manga also sheds a critical light
on some dark elements of Japanese history, like the maltreatment of Korean workers
during the war. Th e central theme remains the natural will to live and to remain true to
