By Natsu Onoda Power
University Press of Mississippi, 208 pp.

This book takes a scholarly, topic-by-topic look at Tezuka, his influences, and how he influenced comics, animation, and storytelling that came after.The different sections include chapters on the environment in post-WWII Japan, explaining why manga appealed to people so much during that time, movies and their general and specific influences on Tezuka and individual works, his Star System, how he was viewed by other artists and how he responded to movements like gekiga, his work in shojo manga, his transitions between adult and children’s manga, his work in animation, and a final chapter that takes a look specifically at a one-volume work called The Curtain Remains Blue Tonight.

This is an incredible book, and I was very impressed by all of the information it provided. There’s not much I can say by way of criticism and comparison since I am not an expert on Tezuka and have not read the only other truly exhaustive resource available in English (Frederik Schodt’s The Astro Boy Essays), so the best I can do is share some examples of what’s in the chapters. For instance, one chapter discusses the possibility that Tezuka’s career took off when it did because he came at just the right time. During World War II, Japan had lost its access to American movies (and all movies in general, for that matter), and after the war was over, citizens were incredibly eager to get their hands on anything and everything about cinema. Tezuka was also fascinated with the medium, and he used film as inspiration for his manga, both the techniques (such as “deep focus” and showing action across multiple panels from a “camera angle” rather than just a static shot) and by “quoting” scenes from movies (Power points to a scene at the end of Monster on the 38th Parallel, which is nearly identical to a scene in The Third Man). Comparisons like that are particularly interesting to me, because I would not catch them myself as I read the comics, nor would a lot of modern readers, I think, since we’d be far less aware of those movies than Tezuka’s contemporary, intended audience.

All the chapters are engaging, though, including the chapter on the Star System and the analysis of The Curtain Remains Blue Tonight (a shojo mystery that takes place at a theater), where Power discusses the theater vs. movies influence over manga, the Takarazuka theater influence in Tezuka’s work, the female role, and how, rather than a resolution, the characters reveal that they were Tezuka’s “stars” reenacting a play for us, and what additional layers that adds to this story and others.

The worst thing I can say about it is that it makes for dry reading, and that the analysis sometimes drifts off on strange tangents (particularly when discussing character/”star”/actor relationships and implications). There’s not much to offer the casual reader, which is one of its strong points since it doesn’t take the time to explain things the audience already knows. Aside from Tezuka, the book is also the best resource I’ve seen in English on the cultural impact of manga just before and during World War II, so look here for that information, as well.

For most people, I think it’s more important to read Tezuka’s manga before something like this. But for those who have read everything available in English (which, judging by the book, seems like a pretty decent cross-section of work), you’ll definitely want to give this a look.

God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-WWII Manga is available now.