THOUGHT BALLOONISTS

Deep Tezuka

 

I recently read Natsu Onoda Power's God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga (2009), a good introduction to Tezuka's career and achievements. The back cover text promises an in-depth study of Tezuka's oeuvre, which is misleading. God of Comics reads more like a generalist overview, and as such is ideal for a manga gaijin like me.  

At one point in chapter three (titled "Movie in a Book"), Power's arguments and observations intersect with my own interests in film studies. Specifically, Power claims that Tezuka was heavily influenced by the visual aesthetics of Hollywood films of the 1930s and '40s, and beginning with Metropolis (1948) began to incorporate "a more solid vocabulary of 'cinematic techniques'" into his manga (God 54). One of these techniques is the use of moment-to-moment transitions between panels that mimic the infinitesimal passage of time between frames on a strip of motion picture film (Metropolis 19):

Highlights of 2008: Black Jack, Volume 1

by Osamu Tezuka. Translated by Camellia Nieh. Vertical, publisher. $16.95.

I'm on record that Tezuka gives me nightmares, Black Jack in particular. What a pleasure it is to see a new and more thorough English edition of this jaw-dropping serial masterwork.

Black Jack is a long string of short, self-contained medical thrillers about a dashingly Byronic outlaw surgeon, with the requisite mysterious past and a slashing stitch-mark scar from brow to left cheek:

The Black Jack series, reported to be Tezuka's most popular among adult readers in Japan, perfectly distills what I've come to expect from him: a volatile, superheated mashup of melodrama, moral fable, philosophical problem-posing, and jouncing, unexpected humor; a rough mix of chain-jerking sentimentality, lancing cruelty, jolting plot twists, occasional raw horror, and broad, broad cartooning.