The novel follows his drifting life in England, a botched return home, and more drifting.
Fly is a kind of flâneur, and his story is a meditation on a drifting life.
Writing the book, he thinks, would be a way to define his increasingly drifting life.
In one scene in "A Drifting Life," a publisher delivered a watermelon to one such apartment to "keep up your morale".
A Drifting Life, published by Drawn & Quarterly in 2009, traced his time as an aspiring manga author from his first childhood drawings through to his early 20s.
At hatching, the young may closely resemble the adult and assume the adult habitat or they may differ from the adult and spend a considerable time in the plankton as part of the drifting life.
In his books, teeming with characters, the one that stood out was always him, whether hunched over a low table in A Drifting Life, worrying, sweating, and working, or reflected in the faces of the characters he drew.
As a striving journalist still in my early 20s, A Drifting Life showed me the paradox that often lies at the heart of success: that someone as talented as Tatsumi did not recognise his own skills.
In the nicest possible way, "haphazard" isn't a bad description of Stanton's slightly drifting life until the point that You're a Bad Man, Mr Gum was published, with a string of casual jobs following a swift and unexpected departure from Oxford university.
Red Snow Susumu Katsumata Drawn & Quarterly If you liked A Drifting Life then check this out.
I couldn't find a copy of the graphic novel/memoir Drifting Life, but the animated film Tatsumi could be a treat as it celebrates the life of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, the artist who revolutionized manga.
