He certainly had endurance. He created both huge, sprawling epics and humbler, more personal comics during a career that lasted over 40 years. With hundreds of volumes of collected works that all uphold high standards of craftsmanship and reveal a deeply felt compassion, Osamu Tezuka was, is, the presumptive God of Comics in Japan.

Tezuka continues to be well-loved and praised: His complete works have prominent displays at bookstores and his characters have more and more been the subjects of animated films, with recent updates of Blackjack (1973-84), Astro Boy (1952-68), and Phoenix (1954-1955, unfinished). Nonetheless, though he may be well loved, the scope of his achievement makes him hard to reckon. He freely used different genres, catered to different audiences and tastes, and often enough reworked his own ideas in different forms, as with both Phoenix and Princess Knight (1953-56; 1966-68). In such a confusing, complex mass, where to start?

One good place is his life, in some sense less complicated than his art. His humanist concerns grew out of his experiences during World War II, but well before he devoted himself to comics and film, he was a young man devoted to drawing. Born in Osaka, he moved soon thereafter to Takarazuka, where he took in their famously transvestite musicals and lost himself in the abundant natural surroundings. He had always been interested in art, and journals from his middle school years show both strikingly realistic drawings of insects, one of his early passions, as well as long story comics, prototypes for his earliest published works. He wanted to be an animator, a dream fostered by his father's habit of renting films and projecting them for his family. Yet he only realized that dream, and then only in part, after revolutionizing the history of the comics form. Were he simply the most influential artist in the world's largest comic industry, he would rest secure in history, yet the real value in his work lies in its deeply moral commitment to exploring the human condition, always using demotic forms. That he did so across tens of thousands of pages only makes his work that much more daunting. Thus, an article like this one can only sketch an outline of the whole, no matter how enticing parts of that whole may be.

Now that some of Tezuka's best work has started to appear in English, the Western reader can sample it. Still, the vast majority of his work remains untranslated. Since Frederik Schodt has already written a fine encomium to Tezuka's life and most famous works in the book Dreamland Japan, I would prefer to consider some of this other work. There's certainly an enormous amount to choose from. Fortunately, the majority of his works remain close to his concerns as an artist and compassionate human being. And his works in English span the years from 1949 to 1985, allowing a look at his full development. After all, he wasn't born the "God of Comics," and his earliest works differ from his later ones. This development is considerably interesting, because it shows the growth of not only a master comic book artist, but also a master cartoonist.

I.

Tezuka's cartooning style resembles that of his heroes, animators like the Fleischers and Ub Iwerks, yet ultimately it is his own. His characters have a physicality to them -- they carry their bodies with weight and balance, with a sense of the world they're in. Furthermore, he makes use of all the visual vocabulary of the animator: his characters stretch and squash, to borrow Shamus Culhane's terms, even in his most serious works. Their bodies change shape, flowing with their motions. They frequently transform from panel to panel, as in the "wild takes" of a Tex Avery. Certainly, Tezuka's early ambition to be an animator determined how he approached his art as a cartoonist, making for a remarkably rich and varied style unique among cartooning's greats. Even when he varied his artwork for different projects, the core of solid cartooning showed through. A serious, novelistic work such as Adolf (1983-85) still resorts to elastic characters now and then, while comics like Rally Up Mankind! (1967) and Fusuke (1971) utilize a stripped-down gag style that wouldn't look out of place in The New Yorker. What all his drawings hold in common are their form and mercurial movement. They marry the clarity of Floyd Gottfriedson to the kineticism of Milt Gross.

Even though the comics will always tower over anything else he did, perhaps film offers the best point of entry into Tezuka's work. Originally, he had hoped to make films. Once he had established himself as a successful cartoonist, he dabbled in film throughout his career. He first used the form in 1960, when he co-supervised the long TV special Journey to the West. He formed a production company, Mushi Pro, and created the first animated series to appear regularly on Japanese television, the 192-episode Astro Boy (1963-66). While these programs became popular outside Japan and sowed the interest in Japanese comics and animation that has now come into full bloom, his other, more personal projects basically siphoned off the money he made with his comics. Short films like his French fantasy "Tales of the Street Corner" (1962) and the wildly inventive "Memory" (1964) kept alive his dreams of making film art, yet they never approached the popularity or artistry of his comics, and their primitive means didn't live up to the standard of fluid Disney-style animation. He was most prolific in animation in the '60s, never matching that output later, though his works of the '80s are often satisfying. Had he been born in a different country, with an economy capable of supporting his independent ideas, perhaps he would have abandoned comics entirely. Since that was not the case, his primary form chose him as much as he chose it.

[To read the full version of this essay, please see The Comics Journal 2005 Special Edition.]

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