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© Keiji Nakazawa, Holp Shuppan, Las Gasp Publishing
The 2024 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards will induct late manga creator Keiji Nakazawa into the Will Eisner Comic Awards Hall of Fame this year. The judges will also induct Ron Turner, the founder of Last Gasp Publishing which released Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen and other manga in English.
Nakazawa was previously nominated but not inducted for the Hall of Fame in 2020, and nominated but not inducted again last year.
Nakazawa is the creator of the world-renowned Barefoot Gen manga about the Hiroshima atomic bombing and aftermath. Nakazawa was born in Hiroshima in 1939. At the age of 6, he survived the 1945 Hiroshima bombing and the loss of most of his immediate family — his father, older sister, younger brother, and younger sister. Only he, his mother, and two brothers who were not at home survived.
After graduating from middle school in 1954, Nakazawa moved to Tokyo in 1961 and became a published manga creator at the age of 24 in 1963. Last Gasp Publishing republished the Barefoot Gen manga in North America. The story has been adapted into two animated films and a live-action television drama special in Japan. Last Gasp Publishing also release Nakazawa’s I Can’t Forget the Bomb: Barefoot Gen and the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima: A Memoir book, and his I Saw It (Ore wa Mita) manga in April 2023.
Nakazawa passed away in 2012.
The previous Japanese inductees of the Eisner Hall of Fame were Osamu Tezuka (2002), Kazuo Koike (2004), Goseki Kojima (2004), Katsuhiro Ōtomo (2012), Rumiko Takahashi (2018), and Moto Hagio (2022). Akira Toriyama and Naoki Urasawa were nominated in 2019, but were not among the four selected.
Source: ICv2 (Brigid Alverson)