Tezuka's Astro Boy and modern manga

In 1952 the young Japanese artist Osamu Tezuka began serializing Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atom, or Mighty Atom) in a magazine for boys. It follows a robot boy built by a grieving scientist, who fights for justice and for the right of robots to be treated as people. Tezuka had scored a hit with New Treasure Island in 1947, and he drew in a cinematic style, with close-ups, shifting angles and panels that follow motion like film frames. Trained as a medical doctor, he treated war, prejudice and technology seriously inside a children's medium, and over his career drew some 150,000 pages.¹²

Postwar Japan was poor, but it had a large reading public, cheap printing and magazines that gave artists a regular audience, and Tezuka had grown up loving Disney films. In 1963 Tezuka's studio Mushi Production turned Astro Boy into a weekly television series, the first popular Japanese TV anime. To save money it used limited animation, reusing frames and moving only part of the picture, a style that became standard in the industry. NBC broadcast it in the United States that same year. Tezuka's story-driven comics set the pattern for the manga and anime industry, with its own genres, magazines and fan culture, which grew into one of Japan's major cultural exports.¹