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Tezuka Is Dead Date: 11/7/2005 |
| There's a new book making waves in Japan by author Go Ito called Tezuka Is Dead: Postmodernist And Modernist Approaches To Japanese Manga. The title seems to be a play on Friedrich Nietzsche's "god is dead" quote and the fact that legendary creator Osamu Tezuka is known as "manga no kage samma" (the god of manga). The book's premise looks at the "Tezuka Belief" of animation / comics production and examines the almost supernatural power the master wielded within both industries while he was alive. It's mentioned the state of these industries were entirely different before Tezuka's professional dominance took hold and indeed following his demise. The phenomena is said to be hardly talked about because his influence was so strong. Manga existed in Japan popularly before Tezuka but his influence and movie techniques were considered precedent-setting and revolutionary. However, after Tezuka's death in 1989, manga in the 90's was seen by some critics as trivial. Ito asks if there are manga titles being talked about as much these days as there were in Tezuka's time. He points out the quality in manga expression has undergone a true paradigm shift in these 15 years since Tezuka's death. One such phenomena that has emerged in the manga field in this period is MOE which is being pursued in such a way as to satisfy some pseudo love demand in readers. Ito says this is part of "change in sensibilities" from the sense of a conventional manga reader though this is a degeneration of the medium. NTT Publishes the book, it hit the market in Japan on Sept. 26th and is priced at 2520 Yen. |
| Source: Anime News Service |
