You da Manga!

I haven't been a big fan of anime and manga during most of my adult years. Around the time, "Battle of the Planets" came out, it just seemed like a way to unload a lot of bad Asian product on non-discerning western audiences. Plus, I hate the deliberate sameness of most manga artists that have come up in the digital age. Even though I own Manga Studio software, I've never used it as I want my artwork to look like it came from my own hand not some indescript storyboard artist. So, I've missed out on the whole recent wave of Sailor Moon and other recent works.

That being said, my first artist heroes as a little kid were the manga and anime artists who were behind the wave of syndicated Japanese cartoons to hit the U.S., post-World War II. Here's a nice story about one of those artists, Osamu Tezuka, who was behind a lot of those early imports that Cold War era kids like me loved in the age of first-run Bruce Lee movies, such as Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion (COUGH COUGH **ripped off by Disney** COUGH COUGH).

Osamu Tezuka was the "Walt Disney of Japan." His beautiful manga biography shows why.




Some early great anime imports in the 1960s and 1970s included Tobor the 8th Man (the inspiration for the movie RoboCop twenty years later), Marine Boy, and of course, Speed Racer. My favorite as a kid, however, was Prince Planet. Watching reruns on YouTube is one of those few times I wish I had kids; I'd swing my son around and sing the catchy theme (below) to my favorite preschool hero. The style and excitement of early Japanese anime, I have no doubt, probably also forced Hanna Barbera, Filmation and Rankin-Bass to step up their game in domestic cartoon offerings in the pre-cable era.

 

Thanks for the suggestion, keep 'em coming. I will definitely at Phoenix to my queue! Was the anime/manga course an art class (i.e. you do manga yourself) or a humanities course?

 

Yeah, that's what I've loved about rediscovering on YouTube the first wave of imports that I watched as a kid (with, of course, no cognitive depth other than action and excitement). Astro Boy certainly was a lot different to me as an adult.

I've always been an admirer of Japanese pen and ink illustration and ink wash. It's why I still own a set of art ink pens even in this day and age of Wacom tablets. It's amazing how, to modern eyes, how detailed and understanding of form, structure and abstraction even 17th or 18th Century Japanese art is compared to ink work done by Europeans and early Americans at the time.