The God of Manga

Modern manga owes its current shape to the man known as the God of Manga (manga no kamisama), Tezuka Osamu.

Tezuka was born in Osaka in 1928, and grew up in the city of Takarazuka.  He was small and slight and bullied by classmates as a kid.  He escaped from the rigors of his day-to-day life in stories: his mother loved telling stories and took Tezuka and his sister to movies, concerts and plays, including the Takarazuka Revue, which I talked about in a previous column.  His father read manga, and encouraged him and his sister to create their own.  Manga became a gateway to acceptance by other kids, after he drew a cartoon of his teacher.

The natural world fascinated him as a child, as he watched insects in the countryside around his home.  When he created the pen-name Osamu Tezuka, it was partially in homage to his favorite bug, the ground beetle (osamushi).  Tezuka watched the destruction of nature in his surroundings as he grew up, and ecological themes became one of the influences in his work.

He debuted in 1946 with a newspaper comic strip titled “Diary of Ma-Chan,” and followed it up in 1947, when he was in medical school, with the book-length New Treasure Island.  This one was a groundbreaking work in terms of style.  Tezuka said that he was frustrated with the limitations of manga as they were at the time, and started experimenting with cinematic techniques.  He would take several panels to depict one small motion, or pull the “camera” back for sweeping vistas and then zoom in close to focus on one small aspect of the scene.  He also stretched out the length of a story, which would take hundreds or thousands of pages to come to an end.  These techniques have become the foundation of manga as we know it today.

Throughout medical school, he continued drawing manga. He became a fully-licensed physician but finally decided that his heart lay in manga and put his medical training behind him.

Tezuka eventually moved to Tokyo and was commissioned by Manga Shonen magazine to draw the full-length serial Jungle Taitei (known in the U.S. as Kimba, the White Lion), which became his first well-known work.  He worked at a breakneck pace, turnign out manga after manga, many of which became classics of the genre, including Ribon no Kishi (Princess Knight), Tetsuwan Atom (Atom Boy), Buddha, and Phoenix.

His output was prodigious, writing over 700 stories and creating 170,000 pages of manga over his lifetime.  In the 1980s, he turned out as many as 300 pages of manga per month, even while keeping most of the creative work in his own hands.  His assistants filled in black areas, applied screen tones, and drew minor details in the art, but Tezuka wrote the stories, laid out the page, and penciled and inked the characters and backgrounds.  He has been accused of lifting elements of stories from other mangaka, including his assistants, which is ironic given that Disney has been accused of lifting large elements of The Lion King from Jungle Taitei.

Not content with manga alone, Tezuka formed an animation company, Mushi Productions, in the early 1960s and set about revolutionizing anime.  He streamlined the animation process by creating cels with stock expressions and movements on them for each production, and re-used them throughout the show.  This saved time and money, since the total number of cels that needed to be drawn and painted was significantly less, and created much of the static look of classic anime.  Mushi Productions’ anime of Tetsuwan Atom sparked the anime boom in Japan and was the first Japanese anime to be shown on American television, albeit in edited and re-scripted form.

In the same spirit of re-using cels, Tezuka also re-used characters.  His characters would often show up in other of his manga, usually in a transformed state, with their roles reversed.  A cop chasing a robber in one manga might show up in another as a robber being chased by the former thief, now a cop.  This was one way he explored the theme of reincarnation, which showed up in many of his works.

Tezuka worked up until the end of his life, dying in 1989 at the age of 60 of stomach cancer.  He served as the mentor and inspiration for generations of aspiring mangaka, many of whom trace their desire to create manga to reading Tezuka stories. 

Of all his works, he considered Hi no Tori (Phoenix) to be his life’s masterwork, working on the story from 1956 up to his death.  Over the course of 12 volumes he examines themes that show up throughout his work in a set of individual stories that concern the quest for immortality.  Several of the stories in the Hi no Tori cycle have been adapted into anime, and one was made into a game.

Hi no Tori remains unfinished today.

Further reading:

Official website of Tezuka Productions, Inc., in both Japanese and English:  http://www.tezuka.co.jp/

Tezuka in English - http://tezukainenglish.com/