I Saw It (The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima) - Keiji Nakazawa, 1972

Keiji Nakazawa was just 6 years old when the atomic bomb struck his hometown of Hiroshima. By sheer luck he survived but his father and two siblings were killed, pinned under their collapsed home and unable to be freed before fire destroyed everything. His mother, pregnant at the time, in shock, gave birth, but the baby died due to complications only a few months later.

'I Saw It', later expanded into the 'Barefoot Gen' series, is sometimes credited as the first example of comics used to document factual events that went on to influence works such as Art Spiegelman's Maus. This first-person account of the events from August 6th 1945 onward is utterly unforgettable. Nakazawa's images use the comics medium to convey the internal and external horror in a way that photography cannot.

Nakazawa's father was an artist and craftsman opposed to Japan's imperial system, known for his left-wing and anti-war views. As a young boy Keiji was dimly aware of his father's views, but growing up in the grinding poverty and struggle of post-atomic Hiroshima, his perspective matured and he became determined to make a living as a cartoonist and use his skills and experience to warn the world of the horrors of nuclear war.

Keiji's first experience of comics was in 1947, reading Osamu Tezuka's 'New Treasure Island', the first ever hit full-length graphic novel. Tezuka would soon go on to his greatest success with Astro Boy ('Mighty Atom' in Japanese). Nakazawa's life itself is like an inverted version of Astro Boy. In Astro Boy, a grieving father re-creates his dead son in robot form using atomic power, whereas Nakazawa was a boy who lost his father due to the atomic bomb and seeks to honour his memory by spreading his anti-war message.

Related to 'I Saw It', is Studio Ghibli's profoundly moving animation 'Grave of the Fireflies'. The definitive account of why Hiroshima was destroyed, not in fact to avoid the US a costly ground invasion, as many have been taught to believe, but as the first blow in the coming Cold War with the Soviet Union, can be found in Gar Alperovitz's 'The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth'.