For the English-language reader interested in learning more about Osamu Tezuka, there’s a growing body of scholarship exploring his life and work. Frederik L. Schodt, who was a personal friend of Tezuka’s, has done more than just about anyone to introduce Tezuka’s manga to Western audiences, writing in an accessible style that eschews academic formality but is nonetheless rigorous and well-researched. Schodt reproduced a chapter from Tezuka’s Phoenix in Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (1983), paid tribute to Tezuka’s work with an essay in Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga (1996), and devoted an entire book to one of Tezuka’s best-known characters in The Astro Boy Essays: Osamu Tezuka, Mighty Atom, and the Manga/Anime Revolution (2007). Readers who find Schodt’s approach congenial should also investigate Helen McCarthy’s recent book The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga (2009); like Schodt, McCarthy is interested in bringing Tezuka’s work to a wider audience of comics fans and moviegoers, rather than subjecting Tezuka’s work to close readings.
Academics, too, have been exploring Tezuka’s work from a variety of perspectives, as numerous articles in The International Journal of Comic Art, The Journal of Popular Culture, and Mechademia attest. Natsu Onoda Power’s God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post World-War II Manga (2009) is among the most user-friendly of these recent scholarly tomes; she writes in a clear, unfussy style that provides readers insight into the historical, social, and economic conditions in which Tezuka lived and worked. Readers may also find Philip Brophy’s Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga (2007) a helpful bridge between mainstream and academic discourse about Tezuka. Though Marvel of Manga is as much a museum catalog as a scholarly work, Brophy’s contextual essays do a fine job of introducing the different stages of Tezuka’s career, as well as some of the themes that were central to Tezuka’s work.
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