The English translation of what is a truly monumental volume (914 pages, including a short introduction and a comprehensive listing of Tezuka’s manga and anime works) was done by Frederik Schodt, a well-known authority on Japanese comics and a longtime friend and interpreter for Tezuka. It was originally serialized in Japan from 1989 to 1992, in the years immediately following Tezuka’s death. The Osamu Tezuka Story is a biography in manga form drawn by Ban Toshio, one of Tezuka’s closest associates, and the team of illustrators at Tezuka Productions, the comics and animation studio that Tezuka founded. Ranging widely across styles and genres-he was just as comfortable penning sci-fi epics and lighthearted animal tales as hard-edge suspense stories and softcore pornography-Tezuka’s imagination, popular appeal, and sheer productivity drove the postwar boom in manga and anime that swept Japan and eventually spread around the world. Clarke, and Carl Sagan all rolled into one.” 1 A remarkably prolific artist, author, and entrepreneur, Tezuka created a staggering 150,000 manga pages, sixty animated films and series, and a host of iconic characters-from the Jungle Emperor, known to American audiences as Kimba the White Lion, to Tetsuwan Atom, the endearing robot beloved internationally as Astro Boy.
In Japan, however, Tezuka is revered as a “god of manga,” a pioneer in the development of comics and animation, and, as one recent biographer described him, an almost-superhuman figure, “like Walt Disney, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Tim Burton, Arthur C. Tezuka Osamu is hardly a household name in the United States, even in the fan communities that so eagerly consume the products of the Japanese pop culture industry that Tezuka was instrumental in building after World War II.
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