By Helen McCarthy
Abrams ComicArts, 272 pp.

Creator, perfectionist, producer, naturalist—The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga takes readers on a chronological tour through the life and works of one of Japan’s preeminent manga creators. Tapping into Tezuka’s own private collections of sketches and drafts along with a motley assortment of popular goods and studio files, Helen McCarthy has assembled a staggering compilation of work rarely mentioned outside of Tezuka academia (and often scarcely even within).

There’s no denying that McCarthy and Abrams ComicArts’ paving-slab sized Tezuka monograph is a formidable thing of beauty; with lush inks and oversized illustrations, the book seems designed to send the visually-minded Tezuka fan into conniptions of happiness. As a pick-up-and-flip monograph, God of Manga is unmatched in its visual splendor—but let your eye begin to slide along the text accompaniment and watch the cracks begin to appear amidst the perfection. With odd flow, occasionally comical or jarring stops and sometimes puzzling grammatical structure, McCarthy’s textual contributions range widely between serviceable and just plain awkward. It’s never out-and-out terrible, but one can’t help but think what a book it could have been in the hands of a deft and fluid writer.

There’s a sense of missed opportunity that wends its way through all of God of Manga, a lurking feeling that just one more thorough canvassing and smoothing out by an editor could push the book from the realm of the “pretty good” into that of the “shelf worthy.” It’s one thing to capture Tezuka’s magic, but entirely another to play at it with the readers: witness a vanished picture, a mismatched caption, an inconsistency of text! All that’s missing is the rabbit-pull to complete this discomfiting sideshow, and one hopes that future editions will ameliorate these small but noticeable errors.

Textual problems aside, God of Manga is a resounding success in at least one of its stated goals: to craft a catalogue of Tezuka’s work in English in a non-scholarly format. Page after page of descriptions, covers and sample pages aim to introduce American audiences to the startling variety and depth of Tezuka’s work, even then only a small sample of the nearly 700 titles he completed in his lifetime. Paired with scans of his early journals and childhood comics, God of Manga makes both an excellent reference guide and a fascinating bit of pop-biography.

The icing on this rather uneven cake is the accompanying 45-minute documentary of Tezuka himself at work, as filmed by an NHK crew in the 1980s. Perhaps nothing in God of Manga can be recommended more highly than its small back-cover disk; in an at times comical blending of stakeout, interview and animal-blind, the crew captures Tezuka at work and home to spectacular ends. Tezuka’s perfectionism and unceasing work schedule, merely grasped in the abstract through the text, snap clearly into focus as he labors for hours over pages, foregoing sleep and decent meals to meet deadlines. When he turns to the camera and says simply “I just need more time,” or states his intention to draw to the age of one hundred, the poignancy of his early death from stomach cancer takes on a new degree of tragedy. It’s compellingly watchable, and certainly one of the book’s highlights.

Despite chinks in the armor, God of Manga is a serviceably strong entry to the body of Tezuka work in English, and certainly fills a much-needed position as thorough catalogue-vis-à-vis-monograph. The coffee table skimmer will delight in the lush illustrations and full-page art; the devoted fan can relish the childhood doodles and medical school paintings of the master himself. With a bit of smoothing and sanding, God of Manga could have been a definitive work—but it nonetheless manages to be a competent and engaging portrait of the artist as a real man.

The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga is available now.

Review copy provided by the publisher.