The Occidental Tourist: Ancestor Worship

He was called the God of Manga. And he earned that title. Rob Vollmar presents an introduction to Osamu Tezuka, a master of sequential storytelling whose great works truly demand your attention.
03 June 2002

As someone who works behind the counter of a comics store seven days a week, please take me at my word when I say that historical comics (that is to say, comics that are part of the medium's history, rather than comics with historical themes) are among the very hardest to sell, generally in direct proportion to their age. In the direct market, the comics companies that have access to what I would deem historical material employ a wide-variety of marketing strategies to bring it to market in a profitable manner, with varying degrees of success.

The reasons for this phenomenon are plain enough. An average purchaser of monthly comics pamphlets has the choice of focusing on the ever-widening pool of new comics available to them once a week and spending a good deal of money without ever stopping to wonder what might have come a year before they started reading. If, like many, their primary, and, perhaps, only interest, is in superhero comics then it is doubly likely that their interest in comics will stretch back no further than their own childhood favourites.

As a result, the ranks of comics fans that can get wound up about greats like Roy Crane and Bernie Krigstein are quickly dwindling, as their respective generations continue to age and, inevitably, pass, like those two artists, into memory.

Some artists with traditions that reach back into comics proto-history, like the late Jack Kirby, who was still producing comics during my lifetime (I'm 30) and was the go-to man, or Will Eisner, whose output continues to run circles around Rob Liefeld, are able to move product in some numbers on their name alone. For the most part, however, the history comics market operates on the will and wallet of a small cult of believers within the already cult-like comics market.

But, I didn't sit down to talk about Bernie Krigstein.

Osamu Tezuka is Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, and Walt Disney rolled into one. Beginning in the middle 1940s, Tezuka began creating the infrastructure that would become the manga - and, subsequently, anime - industries in Japan through a series of landmark works that made him a media superstar. As a pioneer, Tezuka fearlessly staked an ever-widening territory for his manga experiments, starting, like American comics, with adventure serials aimed at children, but eventually finding equally fertile ground in historical fiction, social protest, epic dramas, mystery/crime, fantasy, and biography, all drawn in his unmistakably friendly style.

He died in 1989 to acclaim and reverence generally reserved for the Emperor.

And, as you might have suspected, before this year, there was almost none of Tezuka's work available in English. Tezuka's works, like many manga, utilise the decompressed pacing that sees a story that would warrant no more than 100 pages in comics often cross the 1000 page mark and, in some cases, not look back for some time after.

In his defense, it was Tezuka himself that conceived and perfected this delivery intrinsic to manga that moves "at the speed of life" as, presumably, the most effective method of involving the reader in the story. That fact didn't improve any company's chances of moving multiple volumes of "historical" manga to what, only five years ago, was still a fringe audience (manga readers) within the not-much larger scope of the rapidly imploding direct market.

Laying aside the demands of bringing the best of Tezuka's work, which were excessively lengthy in competition with comparable Western comics, the two manga of his that were extant at the time, BLACKJACK and ADOLF, illustrate the difficulty in presenting his works to a Western audience largely lacking in the context necessary to appreciate it. Tezuka's aforementioned visual style is a product of an earlier generation and what we perceive as its "cuteness" seems oddly juxtaposed in relation to the weighty themes he often appropriated into the morally and emotionally complex tales of his middle to late periods.

ADOLF, despite this contextual hurdle, is undeniably brilliant, as Tezuka examines the social and cultural factors that saw Japan ally itself with Nazi Germany in a bid to definitively rule Asia once and for all. It is the seamless interaction between historical fact, buoyed, one must speculate, by Tezuka's own first-hand experiences, and a compelling, human fiction, that grounds us in the consequences of the earth-shattering events taking place (having already taken place) before our eyes.

Despite its appeal on a number of levels, ADOLF was (and remains) a difficult sell due to the lack of similar manga both visually and narratively. Most of the people I got to try it out liked and/or loved it but they were inevitably people interested in reading good historical comics (fans of books like BERLIN, FROM HELL, AGE OF BRONZE) rather than manga fans branching away from their INU YASHA fixations.

Beginning in April of this year, Dark Horse Comics followed up on its immensely successful reprint of LONE WOLF AND CUB with ASTRO BOY (TETSUWAN ATOM), Tezuka's most revered manga, which ran for decades and spawned the first, serial Japanese cartoon.

This material, at press time three volumes deep, is a miracle to behold as Tezuka synthesises his love for Western cartoons (including the aforementioned Disney and Max Fleischer as well) with a groundbreaking visual dynamism that defies Western standards of excellence at the time. Like all the great Disney films, ASTRO BOY is unbearably cute, but at the same time he is the bearer of a deep and personal sadness that affects his every move, not unlike Stan Lee's dysfunctional superheroes of the Silver Age.

Most importantly, ASTRO BOY provides much-needed context to properly place any one of Tezuka's other works on a continuum of activity, rather than as a definitive statement of his prowess, as is only proper for a gentleman whose output stretched over four and a half decades. While the stories within are easily dismissed as childish in a modern context, this is the place where Tezuka largely works out the problems of telling a story in a uniquely Japanese way for all the generations to follow. You can trace the influence running forward into every popular manga that proceeded from it. But, the bounty does not end there.

Even more recently, Viz Communications released PHOENIX: A TALE OF THE FUTURE in English for the first time. PHOENIX, a loosely interconnected set of eleven and a half (Tezuka died before the 12th's completion) self-contained stories that represented, by his own admission, the God of Manga's life-work. Deeply philosophical and filled to bursting with Tezuka's own pungent criticisms on the shortcoming of humanity, PHOENIX is, like ADOLF, moving and, by that virtue and a hundred others readily evident from even the first read through, truly worthy of the term "literature" as applied to graphic fiction.

So, in a still-expanding Direct market being fuelled in no small part by an explosion of translated manga, it seems that Osamu Tezuka may not be a mere footnote to a conversation about anime much longer.

While the number of readers familiar with Western legends, deprived of their copyright and largely left to die penniless, continues to dwindle every year, Tezuka, who also pioneered creator-ownership of manga to the benefit of everyone who followed, left behind a multi-million dollar empire and a legacy that continues to spread ever further, now some thirteen years after his death. With a veritable flood of good Tezuka coming out now monthly in the form of ASTRO BOY, I invite each of you to find that which suits your reading tastes the best, and indulge.

Recommendations:

Manga: Read PHOENIX: A TALE OF THE FUTURE (Viz/Pulp)

Anime: Watch METROPOLIS on DVD, adapted from Tezuka's adaptation of the Fritz Lang classic and just released in English.

Rob Vollmar is the Eisner-nominated writer of THE CASTAWAYS and the recently released BLUESMAN: BOOK ONE.

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