A review by cijojump
Red Colored Elegy by Seiichi Hayashi

4.0

I paired this book with a sleepy Friday night and some Explosions in the Sky - which I think were the best possible conditions under which to read it. It's a deceptively simple story of two lovers in their small apartment struggling to make ends meet. They're tempestuous and angsty, and they're together, and then they're not. However, this narrative is couched in an avant-garde illustrative style that elevated manga as an art form. The pages are really beautiful and evocative of a certain time and place, and I learned a lot of the context and benefited from reading the essay by Ryan Holmberg that's published in the 2018 Drawn & Quarterly edition of this book. I'll definitely be going back to spend some time in the visual world that Seiichi Hayashi created, and that, on the whole, more than balanced out the somewhat pedestrian story that it seems like other reviewers have gotten hung up on.