The Lives of Eccentrics

Template:Book The Lives of Eccentrics (変人偏屈列伝, Henjin Henkutsu Retsuden) is a manga, written by Hirohiko Araki and illustrated by him and his 4 assistants, released between 1989 and 2003.

The manga explores the lives of several famous eccentrics and bizarre real-life people.Each chapter features a different story and concludes within the same chapter. The only exception is Ty Cobb's Story with two chapters.

Characters

File:Tesla.jpg

Nikola Tesla, one of the eccentrics on which the series is focused

• Ty Cobb: A famous American baseball player renowned for his performances and his irascible character.
• Kou Yoshio: A promoter wishing to sell the strangest events to people, the latest of which is the discovery of "Oliver", the so-called "missing link" between apes and humans.
• Typhoid Mary: An ordinary woman who was a carrier for typhoid, yet didn't suffer from it, leading to her infecting dozens of people while she was cooking for them.
• Sarah Winchester: The widow of William Winchester of the famous Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Supposedly haunted by those killed by the weapons her husband sold, she had a mansion with improbable layout built in order to confuse them.
• Collyer Brothers: Two brothers who were unremarkable except for their obsessive hoarding, resulting in their house being full of junk and deadly traps to ward off intruders.
• Nikola Tesla: An eccentric scientist mostly known for inventing alternative current and his feud with Thomas Edison.

Manga Characteristics

1. All the stories are based on real life persons. While the story of each character is respected, Araki takes liberties necessary to impregnate his narrative style and its grand amount of detail.
2. Another characteristic of this manga is the different art for each chapter. The art varies greatly throughout the course of the manga seeing how the gap between the release of the first and the last chapters is notably wide. The series starts in a style Araki used in his early career during Part I: Phantom Blood's run while the later chapters have slight art elements similar to Parts IV - VI. The manga's unique style of art almost separate from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure demonstrates Araki's ability to vary his own art style to a degree that it would otherwise be hardly recognizable as his work. This is therefore a great example of the his artistic skill and more significantly, evolution.