Is the astroboy movie any good? Hope they live up to how great the manga/anime was!
Foreign correspondents arriving in Tokyo to cover the State funeral of the Showa Emperor in 1989 were surprised to find almost as much media attention, and public grief, focussed on the death of a comic artist.
Osamu Tezuka died shortly after Emperor Hirohito. His funeral cortege passed through street lined with grieving fans: grandparents who read his early comics accompanied by grandchildren who were fans of more recent TV shows, respected film-makers and science fiction authors alongside office workers carrying posters of their favourite Tezuka characters. An American serviceman stationed in Yokosuka recalled walking through the city on the morning Tezuka’s death was announced: people clustered around TV stores, weeping at the news.
Tezuka’s precocious talent for art and storytelling helped him overcome bullying at school and survive the war years. Those early experiences created a lifelong determination to speak against war and injustice, constant themes in his work.
His early comics made him a teenage superstar while still in medical school. On graduation, he chose comics over science, but his passion for medicine crops up in many of his works. His career output is staggering, one of the largest in comics – around 170,000 pages. Like fellow-workaholics Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill, he slept in short stretches and worked almost non-stop.
But his interests went far beyond comics. He was an accomplished animator, illustrator, designer, film critic, essayist, novelist, director, screenwriter, radio and TV pundit and advertising icon. He had a wide circle of friends in the arts, sciences and media, and communicated directly with his fans – a 21st century celebrity far ahead of Twitter.
via The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God Of Manga – Telegraph.