The effect of iconic characters

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud addresses the important role that iconic characters play in encouraging reader identification.  He attaches special significance to the bande dessine work of Hergé and the manga comics of Tezuka.  The latter, he suggests, helped to create what was effectively a "national style" (43) in Japan.  This style, like that of Tardi and Hergé's work, makes use of "masking."   The reader is able to imagine themselves as an iconic character within a visually stimulating world.  For readers of Tezuka and Hergé, this means that they are able to safely enjoy a modicum of involvement in an exciting whirlwind adventure.  Throughout the stories included in Good-Bye, Tatsumi employs iconic characters for a very different kind of masking.  He encourages the reader to involve themselves within a Japan that is characterized by death and depravity.  The iconic nature of his characters does not provide the work with Tintin's charming or whimsical tone. Rather, his characters appear to be alienated, out-of-place within their surroundings.  He does not cater to the reader's thirst for adventure.  He instead seeks to emphasize the degree to which the reader is also alienated, depraved, and unhappy.  The gesture is potent.  It suggests the degree to which the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima have contributed to alienation within the entire human race.  The realistic backgrounds and the one realistically-drawn character (Japan's Prime Minister) bear a distinct otherness.  They, it seems, are unchanged by the event and, as a result,  they further alienate the masses of people that surround them.