Mind Blowing Manga: Tezuka's MW

You know, there are books that really blow your mind, for a variety of reasons. It may be down to the style of writing, or the transgressive nature of a character, or the sexual frankness of the story, or even the unreliability of the text itself. It is not often that comic books do this. I can think of maybe only one or two authors in comic-land who experiment with the sort of knowingness (I don't mean this in a pejorative way, I mean the self-referential knowingness that allows an agreed and enjoyable experimentation between the reader and the author) that one routinely finds in other genres of writing, in the UK and the US; that would be maybe Alan Moore and Charles Burns.

The creators of manga on the other hand, routinely blow your mind. Italian comics can, and Franco-Belgian comics sometimes do; but manga makes a habit of taking characters and subject-matter and just stretching the narrative possibilities to their very limit. Take Osumu Tezuka's MW for instance, while Stan Lee exposes a character to Gamma Radiation and creates, Frankenstein-like, the sympathetic Hulk, or an irradiated intermediary that creates the likable angst-ridden teenage Spiderman, Tezuka's irradiated protagonist becomes an unlikeable, sadistic, guilt-free, murderer.

Commonly described as "the god of manga" Tezuka, the creator of around 150,000 pages of manga, is best known in the West for his creations Astro Boy, Black Jack, Simba the Lion, and Phoenix, less well know, amongst non-aficionados, is his work Adolf and MW. With MW, Tuzuka created a manga style that still looked like the mainstream manga that Yoshihiro Tatsumi and the Gekiga movement so disliked, but which dealt with the sort of adult-orientated themes that the lending libraries of Osaka championed as a new wave.

Originally serialized in Japan's Big Comic, in the 1970s, MW was published in English translation by Vertical Inc. in 2007 and the Japanese movie version of the story hit the cinemas in 2009. It is the story of Michio Yuki, a banker and the son of a famous Kabuki family, who leads a double life as a kidnapper and murderer. The man to whom he regularly confesses his crimes, his surrogate conscience I suppose, is the Catholic priest Father Garai. As boys, the two men seemingly survived a leak of poisonous gas (MW) at a military base on Okino Mafune Island; only to discover some time later that the gas had driven Michio criminally insane. The two men are bound together by this episode, by their relationship forged in the Confessional, and by their shared homosexual relationship. At its core, MW is a story of government cover ups, religious conflict, homosexual love, murder, female impersonation, political machinations, torture, and ultimately the possible extermination of human kind.

Now here's the rub, and it brings us back to one of the Western creators' of comic-lore I mentioned in the first paragraph, Alan Moore. The thing is that whilst the comic version of MW will definitely blow your mind; the movie version probably won't. Moore has several times over the years tried to hammer home the truism that comics and movies are two entirely different art forms, and they are not necessarily compatible. This is certainly true and obvious when it comes to MW. It is one hell of a comic book, but it is pretty much unfilmable, without ruthless and necessary editing. It's understandable really, given the projected target audience, the money a movie has to make today, and the possible future TV release, it was unlikely that this very transgressive landmark in manga could ever make it, faithfully, to the big screen. If you come to this manga only through the medium of the movies, you will have no idea what all the fuss was about. Do yourself a favour - buy the book!

Astro Boy - The Mighty Atom

Oh man, I love this. It's the live-action movie of Astro Boy, which I've scaled down and truncated and reduced to these teeny snippets – which are still incredibly enjoyable. For many of you, the creator of Astro Boy, Kimba, Black Jack, and numerous other titles, Osamu Tezuka needs no introduction, but I'll provide a sort one for anyone new to his work.

Often credited with creating the present form of Manga comics, Osamu Tezuka produced hundreds of different titles and well over 100,000 comic pages (reputedly 150,000). He began his comics career in 1946 with the Osaka edition of Shokokumin Shinbun (now the Mainichi Shogakusei Newspaper), drawing Diary of Ma-chan, whilst still a medical student at Osaka University. A year later his comic, Shin Takarajima appeared, and in 1950 his creation Jungle Taitei, was published in Shonen Magazine. What was to become his greatest creation, Atom(Astro Boy), the jet-propelled robot boy, appeared for the first time as a secondary character in Shonen's adventures of Captain Atom, in the early 1950s. Eventually though, the star of the story broke free, and Astro Boy, along with Shonen's other robotic star turn, Gigantor, became hugely popular and Astro Boy began his rise from bit-part player to cultural icon, and Japanese Government spokesperson.

Set in a world where androids happily live amongst human beings, the story of Astro Boy features the adventures of a powerful robot, created by the head of the Ministry of Science, Doctor Tenma (the later doctor from Uraswa's Monster is an homage). Originally, Doctor Tenma creates the robot to replace the son he lost in a car accident, but realises the futility of the task, and with more than a nod to Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio, Astro ends up in the hands of a cruel circus owner. Eventually Astro is rescued from the circus by the new head of the Ministry of Science, who becomes his legal guardian, and Astro uses his robotic superpowers to fight evil, crime and injustice and giant evil robots.

I love comic work that looks like comic work, you know, with white out, and address labels patching the paper, and razor scrapings to remove ink. It illustrates the thought-process of the cartoonist, and shows that the cartoonist has his or her eye on the final goal; publication - and it shows us how the final printed image is already perfect in the cartoonist's mind-eye. Osamu Tezuka was famous for working and reworking his original drawings and if you ever do get the chance to see them, take it, you will find it a rewarding experience. In the meantime, however, you can make do with the original comics and Dark Horse publishes English editions of the original Astro Boy, and has some really nice preview scans on their website.