Mechademia 8

Tezuka’s Manga Life

2013

Frenchy Lunning, Editor

Provides new perspectives on the renowned anime and manga creator, Tezuka Osamu, and examines his legacy

Contributors to volume eight of Mechademia analyze Tezuka Osamu and his complicated approaches toward life and nonlife, as well as his effect on other manga artists. Using essays and reprints of Japanese manga on Tezuka, this volume questions his influence and attitudes toward the nonhuman, the sexual politics of manga bodies, and the origins of the moe culture, among others.

Reaching beyond the stated topic of one particular artist, and even of cartooning, Tezuka’s Manga Life sheds light on Japanese culture and the worldwide appeal of its cultural exports.

Shepherd Express

Known as the “Walt Disney of Japan” it is no surprise that Tezuka Osamu is still the best-known manga creator to Western fans. Current scholarship has uncovered the profound complexity and ambiguity not only of his work but of the man, the artist, and his life—dismantling his position as the god of manga.

Contributors to this volume of Mechademia—a series devoted to creative and critical work on anime, manga, and the fan arts—analyze Tezuka and his complicated approaches toward life and nonlife on earth, as well as his effect on the lives of other manga artists. Using essays and reprints of Japanese manga on Tezuka, this book questions his influence and attitudes toward the nonhuman, evolutionary theory, the aesthetic lineage of contemporary manga, incipient feminism in the reinscription of the nonhuman feminine, the sexual politics of manga bodies, the origins of the moe culture, and the styles of didacticism revealing the digressions of insects and classical modes, among others.

The authors offer varying perspectives on the historical transformations in production, distribution, and reception that gradually integrated and differentiated an overlapping series of markets and readerships in the postwar era. Divided into four sections that explore different “lives”—“Nonhuman Life,” “Media Life,” “A Life in Manga,” and “Everyday Life”—Mechademia 8 serves as a prehistory of the impersonal politics of the present while tracing Tezuka’s legacy.

Contributors: Akatsuka Fujio; Anno Moyoko; Linda H. Chance, U of Pennsylvania; Jonathan Clements; Hideaki Fujiki, Nagoya U; Patrick W. Galbraith; Verina Gfader, U of Huddersfield; Alicia Gibson; G. Clinton Godart, USC; Yorimitsu Hashimoto, Osaka U; Ryan Holmberg; Hikari Hori, Columbia U; Mary A. Knighton, College of William and Mary; Thomas Lamarre, McGill U; Christine L. Marran, U of Minnesota; Natsume Fusanosuke, Gakushuin U, Tokyo; Ōtsuka Eiji, Kobe Design U; Baryon Tensor Posadas; Renato Rivera Rusca, Meiji U; Frederik L. Schodt; Marc Steinberg, Concordia U; Tezuka Osamu; Toshiya Ueno, Wako U, Tokyo; Matthew Young.

Frenchy Lunning is professor of liberal arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Reaching beyond the stated topic of one particular artist, and even of cartooning, Tezuka’s Manga Life sheds light on Japanese culture and the worldwide appeal of its cultural exports.

Shepherd Express

Contents

Introduction. Manga Life: Tezuka . . .
Thomas Lamarre

Nonhuman Life

“Becoming-Insect Woman”: Tezuka’s Feminist Species
Mary A. Knighton
Diary of an Insect Shôjo’s Vagabond Life
Tezuka Osamu
Translated by Mary A. Knighton
Tezuka Osamu’s Circle of Life: Vitalism, Evolution, and Buddhism
G. Clinton Godart
Atom Came from Bugs: The Precocious Didacticism of Tezuka Osamu’s Essays in Insect Idleness
Linda H. Chance
On the Fabulation of a Form of Life in the Drawn Line and Systems of Thought
Verina Gfader
The Metamorphic and Microscopic in Tezuka Osamu’s Graphic Novels
Christine L. Marran

Media Life

Where Is Tezuka?: A Theory of Manga Expression
Natsume Fusanosuke
Translated by Matthew Young
Phoenix 2772: A 1980 Turning Point for Tezuka and Anime
Renato Rivera Rusca
Copying Atomu
Marc Steinberg
Tokiwasou Story
Akatsuka Fujio
Translated by Matthew Young

A Life in Manga

Toward a Theory of “Artist-Manga”: Manga Self-Consciousness and the Transforming Figure of the Artist
Yorimitsu Hashimoto
Translated by Baryon Tensor Posadas
Manga Shônen: Katô Ken’ichi and the Manga Boys
Ryan Holmberg
Implicating Readers: Tezuka’s Early Seinen Manga
Hideaki Fujiki
Tezuka’s Anime Revolution in Context
Jonathan Clements
Designing a World
Frederik L. Schodt
Unico
Anno Moyoko
Translated by Matthew Young

Everyday Life

An Unholy Alliance of Eisenstein and Disney: The Fascist Origins of Otaku Culture
Ôtsuka Eiji
Translated by Thomas Lamarre
Osamu Moet Moso: Imagining Lines of Eroticism in Akihabara
Patrick W. Galbraith
Tezuka, Shôjo Manga, and Hagio Moto
Hikari Hori
Out of Death, an Atomic Consecration to Life: Astro Boy and Hiroshima’s Long Shadow
Alicia Gibson
Wolf Head in Phoenix
Toshiya Ueno

Contributors
Call for Papers