Osamu Tezuka

[tegan]

So one thing that I may or may not have made apparent during my time here is that I fucking love Osamu Tezuka.

 

A brief rundown for those who need it: Osamu Tezuka was a Japanese comic creator, animator, and doctor. He's best-known in the west as the creator of Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion, but is recognized in his homeland as "god of manga." He possessed an inhuman work ethic that drove him to produce a body of work that averaged out to four completed pages of material for every day of his life, having his first work published as a teenager and continuing to work until the week of his death in 1989. The influence of Tezuka's trademark Disney-inspired drawing style can still be seen in anime and manga today, as can his efforts to elevate comics and animation to legitimacy in the art world by expanding their audience and infusing his telltale optimism in the human spirit.

 

 

So yeah.

 

I have a nearly-complete collection of every Tezuka work published in English (the only ones I'm missing are the out-of-print Metropolis, a rare bilingual version of Crime and Punishment released in Japan more than 20 years ago, and a handful of earlier translations of work that I possess in their modern form). Fortunately there's been a gradual Tezuka resurgence over the past few years, with more and more efforts by publishers to localize his endless body of work. In the next few months alone Digital Manga Publishing will be releasing Triton of the Sea to fulfill a Kickstarter stretch goal, Picturebox will be releasing The Mysterious Underground Men as part of their Ten-Cent Manga line, Vertical is putting out a release of bizarre spin-off series Twin Knight, and Kansai Club will be distributing their stupidly-limited run of The Crater (which I will almost certainly miss out on due to severely limited availability ).

 

I just thought I'd see if anyone else here is a Tezuka fan. I just recently read Unico (a full-colour childrens' fairytale with a somewhat melancholy tone) and Atomcat (a kitschy, surreal Astro Boy spin-off about a superhero cat) I'm rereading a volume of Phoenix (an unfinished twelve-volume epic about life, death, and reincarnation told with the same cast of characters reincarnated across the entirety of human history) right now, so Tezuka's fresh in my mind. For new readers, I highly recommend any of Vertical's recent 17-volume release of Black Jack (a morally-ambiguous medical drama about a hardass miracle surgeon), since printing is being ceased and it's gradually becoming hard to find. It's so good that I personally even tracked down one each of the extremely limited hardcover editions of the first three volumes. He's also given countless nods and commendations in Scott McCloud's indispensible Understanding Comics, so you can get a good feel of why his work is so effective from that book alone.

[colinp]

I used the first volume of Phoenix to practice my Japanese alphabet reading skills a few years back. Couldn't understand the words, but helped increase my reading speed, hah! Is the English edition easy to find? Would be interested in getting it someday.

[tegan]

I ordered it through a bookstore with no problems a few years back, but I think it's out of print by now. It looks like amazon has the whole series available, but prices vary wildly from volume to volume.

[colinp]

Yeah, I think I remember that being the case when I looked in to it previously. Frustrating! I just want the first and the price is crazy.

[tegan]

So I special ordered Tezuka's Midnight through the library and picked it up today. I didn't recall ever hearing about an English release, so I figured it would be in French and I could fumble my way through (for whatever reason there's a lot of Tezuka stuff released in French). Nope! It was an actual Japanese copy of the first volume with no translation whatsoever. It's a series that I know very little about (I know it's about a cab driver who exclusively works the graveyard shift and that's about it), so I'm equally tempted to try following it with no understanding of the text whatsoever or alternatively track down a script or a scanlation and read it alongside the book.