Back in the mid-1980s, when English-language translations of classic Japanese manga first started appearing in American comic book shops, Frederik L. Schodt‘s Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics was a semi-sacred text for thousands of comics fans like me. If comics like Lone Wolf and Cub and Mai the Psychic Girl were the tip of a mountain poking through the clouds, Schodt’s book was a map to the territory that awaited us. (OK, so it’s not the most elegant metaphor in the world, I admit.)
Last Wednesday, Schodt lectured at San Francisco’s Japan Society of Northern California, his topic the life and influence of legendary manga artist, Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy, who not only revolutionized graphic storytelling as a Japanese art form but became a public figure in his homeland on the scale of Walt Disney. Schodt is eminently qualified to speak on the subject, since he’s not only the translator of Dark Horse‘s multi-volume translation of the comic book, but has just published a scholarly work for Stone Bridge Press called The Astro Boy Essays: Osamu Tezuka, Mighty Atom, and the Manga/Anime Revolution. Stone Bridge publicist Ari Messer reports that anime and manga industry folks came to hear Schodt speak, including translator Dana Lewis and artist Tomoko Saito. “Schodt’s lecture focused on how Tezuka’s passionate humanism and pacifism came through much more clearly in the comic books than in the animated versions of Astro Boy,” Messer summarizes. “Readers of Tezuka’s Buddha series might like Astro Boy more than they’d guess.”
(Vertical has published an English translation of Buddha, an 8-volume graphic novel about the religious leader’s life that is by turns playful and heartbreaking, along with several other major works, including last month’s release of the dark thriller MW. All of them are excellent showcases for Tekuza’s ability to create emotionally arresting imagery out of a simple, almost cartoony drawing style.)