This week's comic to look for is The Push Man and Other Stories by Yoshihiro Tatsumi.

Tatsumi is considered the "grandfather of Japanese alternative comics" but his work has never appeared in English or been published in this country before. The Pushman is a beautiful hardcover collection of some of his comic short stories that were originally published in 1969. Optic Nerve creator Adrian Tomine has helped champion the cause of reprinting Tatsumi's work and provides not only a foreword but has also designed the book.

The content of the stories collected here are steeped in dark, psychological, sexual situations. One story is about a man who keeps a mutilated sex slave in his apartment, another is about a man who dresses up in his wife's clothes and has an affair with another woman, and another follows a projectionist who screens porn for embarrassed and titillated office workers. In the many stories collected here, Tatsumi tackles themes of sexual depravity but depicts it with subtle economy. "All of the stories hint at much more than they make explicit, which rewards repeated reading," Tomine said of Tatsumi in a recent Village Voice interview.

Look for this book at your local comic shop or bookstore.