A promising young doctor, Kirihito Osanai visits a remote Japanese mountain village to investigate the source of the latest medical mystery. While he ends up traveling the world to discover what it takes to be cured of such a disease, a conspiracy back home attempts to explain away his absence. Hinging upon his fate are those of his loved ones: an unstable childhood friend and colleague trapped between factions of the medical establishment that nurtured him; a fiancée emotionally transformed by Kirihito’s mysterious disappearance; and a stranger who becomes his guardian angel, a sensual circus-act performer with volatile psychological secrets. From plutocratic Taipei and racially divided South Africa to backwater Arabia and modern Osaka, ambition and desire beckon “normal men” to behave uglier than any beast. Riveting our attention on deformity and its acceptance like The Elephant Man by David Lynch, Ode to Kirihito examines the true worth of human beings through and beyond appearances.
A MISGUIDED LOVE, TRAMPLED BY DREAMS... Tetsu is a seemingly normal student whose passionate love for his teacher turns violent in the most unexpected of ways when another suitor attempts to stand between them. Haunted by his family's past, Tetsu must learn to navigate his desire and quell his rage if he hopes to find peace and solace in his relationships with others. Osamu Tezuka's masterful artwork and irrepressibly creative page layouts reach a feverish peak in depicting the manifestation of the tortured youth's explosive angst. Thematically rich yet instinctively relatable, Bomba! deftly weaves an exploration of the complex nature of friendship and the lasting psychological ravages of war into its tale of love, jealousy, revenge, and redemption.
Osamu Tezuka has often been called "the Walt Disney of Japan. This work celebrates his work and life and features more than 300 images. Includes an exclusive 45-minute DVD documentary covering Tezuka's prolific career.
Who will stand against invaders from space, robot slave masters, and a dictator producing human clones? Astro Boy, that's who! The most popular and influential creation of Osamu Tezuka, "the Walt Disney of Japan," Astro Boy is all-ages adventure packed with action, laughs, and a few tugs at the heartstrings. Astro Boy Omnibus Volume 2 is 680 pages of Tezuka's classic manga, value priced and ready to rock the 21st Century! Osamu Tezuka is renowned internationally as a master cartoonist, animator, and storyteller. "Tezuka is widely considered the most important and influential figure in post-World War II Japanese animation." -The New York Times "Comics are a bridge between all cultures." -Osamu Tezuka "The Astro Boy stories always end with peace and human supremacy restored, but usually not before both sides, human and robot, have committed great wrongs." -ANIMERICA
Toshiko Tomura is a genius; the darling of the intelligentsia. A modern-day Michelangelo, this twenty year-old is already an established international stage actress, an up-and-coming architect, and the next recipient of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize as Japan's best new writer. Her actions make headlines in the papers, and inspire radio and television programming. And like many great talents, her troubled past is what motivates her to greatness. She has the amazing ability to emulate the talents of others. Toshiko is also the mastermind behind a series of murders. The ultimate mimic, she has plagiarized, blackmailed, stolen and replicated the works of scores of talents. And now as her star is rising within the world of the elites and powerful she has amassed a long list of enemies frustrated by the fact that she has built critical and financial acclaim for nothing more than copying others' work. Neglected as a child, she is challenging the concepts of gender inequality while unleashing her loneliness upon the world as she climbs the social ladder one body at a time. One of Osamu Tezuka's most wicked tales, The Book of Human Insects renders the 70's as a brutal and often polarizing bug-eat-bug world, where only those willing to sell their soul to the masses and become something less than human are capable of achieving their wildest dreams
Set in a medieval fairy-tale backdrop, Princess Knight is the tale of a young princess named Sapphire who must pretend to be a male prince so she can inherit the throne. Women have long been prevented from taking the throne, but Sapphire is not discouraged and instead she fully accepts the role, becoming a dashing hero(ine) that the populous is proud of. The playful cartooning style of Princess Knight is comparable to that of Disney, à la Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Considered by many as one of the first major shojo works, inspiring comics for girls such as Revolutionary Girl Utena, Cardcaptor Sakura and Sailor Moon for generations to follow. A rare shojo property from the godfather of manga, Princess Knight has been long considered one of Tezuka's most popular works worldwide.
Black Jack is a mysterious and charismatic genius surgeon who travels the world performing amazing and impossible medical feats. Though highly trained, he freelances without a license because he disdains the medical establishment. This leads to run-ins with the authorities and unscrupulous, sometimes criminal, individuals. Because Black Jack keeps his true motives secret, his ethics are perceived as questionable and he is considered a selfish, uncaring devil.
Comics god Osamu Tezuka's darkest work, MW is a chilling picaresque of evil. Steering clear of the supernatural as well as the cuddly designs and slapstick humor that enliven many of Tezuka's better-known works, MW explores a stark modern reality where neither divine nor secular justice seems to prevail. This willfully "anti-Tezuka" achievement from the master's own pen nevertheless pulsates with his unique genius. Michio Yuki has it all: looks, intelligence, a pedigree as the scion of a famous Kabuki family, a promising career at a major bank, legions of female admirers. But underneath the sheen of perfection lurks a secret with the power to shake the world to its foundations. During a boyhood excursion to one of the southern archipelagos near Okinawa, Yuki barely survived exposure to a poison gas stored at a foreign military facility. The leakage annihilated all of the island's inhabitants but was promptly covered up by the authorities, leaving Yuki as an unacknowledged witness--one whose sense of right and wrong, however, the potent nerve agent managed to obliterate. Now, fifteen years later, Yuki is a social climber of Balzacian proportions, infiltrating the worlds of finance and politics by day while brutally murdering children and women by night--perversely using his Kabuki-honed skills as a female impersonator to pass himself off as the women he's killed. His drive, however, will not be satiated with a promotion here and a rape there. Michio Yuki has a far more ominous objective: obtaining MW, the ultimate weapon that spared his life but robbed him of all conscience. There are only two men with any hope of stopping him: one, a brilliant public prosecutor who struggles to build a case against the psychopath; the other, a tormented Catholic priest, Iwao Garai, who shares Yuki's past--and frequently his bed. Serialized beginning in 1976 in Big Comic magazine, where Tezuka's trailblazing medical thriller Ode to Kirihito had appeared a few years earlier, MW probes the complexities of homoeroticism as well as the reality of extensive U.S. military presence in Japan. The result is as bracing today as it was thirty years ago. “Darker than you think—than you want to think […] MW took on the stuff of today’s headlines some thirty years ago.” —The Agony Column “MW is the newest of those masterpieces to be translated into English, and like everything else with [Tezuka’s] name on it, you are cheating yourself out of one of the best graphic novels out right now if you don’t read it.” —Advanced Media Network “Tezuka spins an entertaining, slightly preposterous yarn, serving up more plot twists, car chases, and gender-bending costume changes than Dressed to Kill and The Manchurian Candidate combined.” —popcultureshock “You’ll stare at the page, eyes popping and muttering, ‘I cannot believe I just read that.’ But you did, and it worked, and you turn the page.” —David Welsh, Comic World News
Shogo, a young man whose abusive childhood left him with a loathing of love, begins to see the virtues of love as he experiences love and loss repeatedly through the ages as a punishment from the gods.
