Tezuka rewired manga and still finished medical school
Osamu Tezuka, 3 November 1928 to 9 February 1989, earned nicknames from Father to God of Manga after New Treasure Island ignited a postwar boom in 1947. Astro Boy, Princess Knight, and Phoenix sat beside a medical degree from Osaka, while Disney films he watched dozens of times shaped the big-eyed look.
Born in Toyonaka, Osaka, the eldest of three in a professional family, with a father in management at Sumitomo Metals, a lawyer grandfather and doctors further back, Tezuka credited his mother for trips to the Takarazuka Revue, whose romantic costumes and performers' large, sparkling eyes entered his style. His father screened Walt Disney pictures, and Tezuka claimed more than eighty viewings of Bambi alone. A ground beetle called osamushi supplied the pen name he grafted onto his given name.
Factory work under a wartime draft in 1944 did not stop the sketching. Osaka University accepted him to study medicine in 1945; Diary of Ma-chan appeared in a children's newspaper in 1946, and Shichima Sakai's pitch yielded New Treasure Island, a loose Stevenson adaptation that became an overnight hit and opened Tokyo publishers to him. While still a student he issued the science-fiction trilogy Lost World, Metropolis and Nextworld, then graduated in 1951, the year Ambassador Atom introduced the robot later remade as Astro Boy. His serial Kimba the White Lion was the most popular feature of the magazine Manga Shōnen, where his column Manga Classroom taught young readers the craft.
Letters from boys about Atom pushed his producer toward a series giving the robot human feelings, and a punch from a frustrated American soldier at a hospital suggested the theme of dealing with outsiders; Tetsuwan Atom began on 4 February 1952. Princess Knight followed for girls in 1953, and in 1954 he started Phoenix, the work he considered his life's project. That year he handed his Tokiwa-sō apartment to the young duo Fujiko Fujio. Stomach cancer killed him in 1989, leaving the final Phoenix chapters and several animations unfinished, and a museum in Takarazuka now honours him.
Source: Osamu Tezuka
