Osamu Tezuka

The Storm P. Museum in Frederiksberg, Denmark is currently hosting the exhibit Osamu Tezuka - Mangaens Mester (English title: God of Manga).

Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989) grew up with parents encouraging him and his siblings to be creative - pen and paper were always next to their beds in case they should wake up, be unable to sleep and not to be bored. He became the manga no kamisama (God of Manga) - published more than 170.000 pages with manga drawings in more than 700 titles. He is known as the Japanese Walt Disney, and often people claim that he was inspired by the American cartoonist.

 

The boy on the exhibit poster is Atomic boy, one of his most famous characters starring in 73 stories.

 

Japanese is traditionally read backwards - at least to us in the west - as a book is read right to left and not left to right, as you are doing right now. Having studied Japanese and read several manga stories, it was really annoying when they flipped the drawings so novices could read it the western style - the exhibit actually mentioned how a manga cartoon is traditionally read, so why not let the museum goer read it like it was supposed to be read (translations into Danish were available next to the original drawings)... get people into the traditional way?

 

Amazing to see some of the drawings, that have been much inspirations to Japanese manga artists.