Who Invented Manga Art

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Aja Romano writes about pop culture, media, and ethics. Before joining in 2016, they were a staff reporter at the Daily Dot. A 2019 fellow of the National Critics Institute, they’re considered an authority on fandom, the internet, and the culture wars.

Osamu Tezuka: Father Of Manga And Scourge Of The Medical Establishment

The combined aesthetic of anime and manga may be Japan’s greatest and most influential cultural export, but it wouldn’t exist without one man — a man who looms over Japanese pop culture and who is known throughout Japan as its most legendary modern artist. That man is Osamu Tezuka, frequently nicknamed the god of manga, the godfather of anime, and the Walt Disney of Japan.

At long last, a new biography of Tezuka has arrived in the US — 14 years after its Japanese debut. Recently translated by Frederik L. Schodt and released by Stone Bridge Press,

— first published serially in Japan between 1989 and 1992 — is a massive, 900-page tome that explores Tezuka’s life, Japanese postwar society, and the way Tezuka changed Japanese culture forever.

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Is a must-have for die-hard Tezuka fans. But it’s also essential reading for anyone who already loves or wants to understand the history of manga and anime, as well as anyone fascinated by postwar Japan and its transition into a major modern industrialized society.

Always arrayed in a beret, thick-rimmed glasses, and a smile, Tezuka was an artistic genius who created more than 700 manga titles — comprising 150, 000 pages of hand-drawn art — and more than 60 anime in his lifetime, making him one of the most prolific Japanese manga creators in history.

The impact of Tezuka’s career on Japanese culture far exceeds his actual artistry, though his artistry is incredibly influential. But of equal importance is his role in creating the longstanding industry around taking Japanese comics, or manga, developing them into animated Japanese TV series, or anime, and exporting them around the globe.

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, which he adapted into a wildly successful anime. This process of close adaptation, along with the many animation techniques Tezuka pioneered in Japan to speed up the adaptation process, started an industrial tradition that continues into the present; the manga/anime industry, with its distinctive Japanese artistic style and identity, has profoundly shaped Japanese culture.

But despite Tezuka's status as an artistic legend, the vast majority of his work remains unpublished in America — both because there is so much of it and because the process of licensing, translating, and publishing manga overseas is an arduous process.

But even though he isn’t a household name, Tezuka’s influence in the US has been palpable — most notably in the works his art style and stories have influenced. Stanley Kubrick admired Tezuka and asked him to serve as the art designer for

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The famous cloud scene from Tezuka’s Jungle Emperor manga (1950–1954), which was later animated as Kimba, the White Lion, and which may have inspired a similar scene in Disney’s The Lion King. Tezuka in English

While Tezuka’s influence on the landscape of American animation has mostly been indirect, his fans have been doing their best to make up for this deficit. In the age of the internet, manga fans have crowdfunded new editions of several of Tezuka’s works, which still retain, even after all these decades, unique and visceral emotive properties:

A panel from Phoenix, a manga that Tezuka wrote and drew for nearly four decades, from 1956 to his death in 1989. Tezuka in English

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Tezuka’s love of cinematic action translated into his unprecedented use of action in his comic illustrations, a technique that became a fundamental part of manga storytelling. Tofugu

First began publishing in serial installments in 1989, shortly after Tezuka’s death. It began as an actual manga — an educational, serialized Japanese comic — and ran in a Japanese newsweekly starting in 1989. The final version was first published in full book form in 1992, the year the serialization ended.

The lack of easy resources for publishing manga overseas may be why it’s taken 14 years for the book to reach the states. Of course, there’s also another reason: It’s huge — a hefty 928 pages in all, and an impressive addition to a bookshelf.

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The book is read as all traditional manga is read, from right to left and back to front instead of left to right and front to back. It is a Japanese comic, but it’s not a work of fiction; rather, it’s an embellished true story that goes into breathtaking detail about Tezuka’s life and, crucially, the background context of the Japanese political tensions and cultural shifts in which he began his work.

The entire work was written and drawn by the mangaka (manga artist) Toshio Ban, who worked as an assistant to Tezuka for the better part of 15 years. As a longtime colleague and friend of Tezuka’s, Ban bore the responsibility, while working on the manga, of not only faithfully recounting his former boss’s life but also capturing the essence of his incredibly distinctive drawing style.

To achieve the goal of historical accuracy, Ban meticulously researched the historical and visual settings of Tezuka’s manga, often using interviews with people close to Tezuka and basing manga panels on real-life photographs. He also worked direct historical quotes and images from Tezuka’s manga into his panels — nearly all of which are packed with visual and factual detail:

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To achieve the goal of affecting Tezuka’s style, Ban used one of Tezuka’s own characters, a pleasant old man with a deceptively gruff mustache, dubbed Shunsaku Ban, or Mustachio. Mustachio serves as the narrator for the reader’s journey through Tezuka’s rich life.

The book often seamlessly blends Tezuka’s own artwork into the mix with Ban’s, indicating the transitions only in small print. Occasionally Ban will use Mustachio to comment on the development of Tezuka’s artwork, drawing Mustachio commenting on a reprint of Tezuka’s art, in one of many moments where the past and future of manga artistry seem to converge in a literal conversation.

Like Ban, Schodt, the translator for the new English language-edition, was a longtime colleague of Tezuka’s who began translating his work in the late '70s, after Tezuka had begun making a name for himself overseas. In the foreword to the book, Schodt notes his surprise at discovering, while translating the manga, that he was actually drawn into it at one point — he’d become a background character in a broad and monumental life.

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Serves three functions. It’s an entertaining tale of a hardworking visionary, a biographical account of Japan’s most famous artist, and an in-depth history of 20th-century Japan, starting before World War II and continuing into the modern era. It’s hardly a surprise that manga fans in the US have been looking forward to the English-language publication of this tome with something like holy reverence.

Beginning with Tezuka’s childhood and his fascination with the famous all-female Takarazuka Revue, the biography follows Tezuka’s life as closely as possible: chronicling his time at a rigorous military academy as Japan was on the brink of war, his first forays into drawing, his discovery of American comics, his experiences in medical school, and his pursuit of and lifelong passion for his art.

Through it all, the wider global and political context — the international theater of war, the postwar industrial boom, and Japan’s emergence as a modern nation — rotates in and out of the detailed focus on Tezuka’s career.

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The comic manages to encompass the unbelievably small and the unbelievably huge all at once, sometimes within the same frame — for instance, sequences like the one that lays out Tezuka’s love for insect collecting against the backdrop of Japanese imperialism and the march of the war through the Pacific Theater. Ban often dramatically renders these war scenes in jutting, uneven panels filled with darkness.

Ban takes pains to spell out the influences that marked Tezuka’s path along the way, both Japanese and multicultural. Schodt’s translation and Ban’s artwork easily convey the glee and sense of joy Tezuka gets from his interactions with Western culture — for example, his ongoing interest in international classical composers or his love of international cinema, as we see in this depiction of Tezuka watching Carol Reed’s famous film noir

Moments like these provide stark contrast to the scenes that depict Tezuka’s experience with the atrocity of war. The backdrop of the war takes up about a fourth of the entire volume — both because of its impact on Tezuka individually and its impact on Japanese society as a whole. Often, Ban lets Tezuka’s autobiographical art speak for itself, particularly in a harrowing sequence featuring panels reprinted from

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It’s striking, then, that

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