Osamu Tezuka

Check out my conversation with him.

Tezuka, God of Manga, Jason Cohn on Kickstarter, launching soon.

Death of Comics Bookcase, Reign of Comics Bookcases from Zach Quaintance on Kickstarter, also launching soon.

Sooner than soon.

Right? It's a theme.

That story, for some reason, reminded me a lot of Buddha, of Tezuka's Buddha.

And maybe it's the setting, maybe it's some of the costumes, you know, things people were wearing, but there was something about the philosophy of it also that was kind of like, I don't know if philosophy is the right word, the tone of it that was kind of like reminiscent of that for me for some reason.

One of the tales that Buddha might tell his disciples.

the use of uh human ease so

another thing that i noticed was how the art files that were used for this release on k manga had a little bit of like it seemed like they were a little bit dirty or dusty in places as far as like little blemishes on the scans and that's something that i i just wonder like how old the actual like digital files are in terms of like when those were like scanning produced because yes That can vary a whole lot across different things.

I think when I worked on some Tezuka books, those scans themselves were done in 1999 or 2000.

So they had been digitized quite a long time ago, and I imagine this was also digitized a while ago.

What's the film?

[laughs] It's a documentary about Osamu Tezuka, the god of manga and the father of anime.

It sounds like you stay busy.

I do.

Yeah, true.

I mean, mon- manga artists are often like that, even, like, Tezuka.

Mm.

Uh, some of his work-

Video, the character that could kind of star in everything.

It goes back to, uh, like Tezuka's manga, how we had like a cast of characters he could slot in.

Even though they look the same, they could be different characters in different manga series.

But, uh, I think that's why Miyamoto and possibly other people at Nintendo did not want to just pin plumber on him, because he was supposed to be versatile.

But they originally were intended to be walking shiitake mushrooms.

But I guess, uh, whoever was drawing these, perhaps it was Miyamoto, perhaps it was Koji Kondo.

Who knows who it was? Not Koji Kondo, but Tezuka.

Maybe, uh, they drew it, and somebody said, "Well, that's, that's a chestnut," and that's what stuck.

Then in August, specifically August 8th, 2026, we got The Ribbon Hero.

This is Yuki Igarashi's feature-length reworking of Osamu Tezuka's classic Princess Knight.

And right around the corner this month, September 2026, we have Lego One Piece, a two-part animated special from Atomic Cartoons covering the East Blue and the Grand Line, narrated by the character Yusof.

And October is packed.

You can find us on pretty much every social platform.

And yes, we definitely have a lot of great books coming out over the fall, including a very fun 80s Bansho delinquent slash slice of life comedy manga called Vegetable Sandwich, a throwback to classic sci-fi manga in the vein of Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix and similar works with The Pipe Machine.

a classic adventure manga inspired by the Arabian Nights in Sinbad, and a modern-day Yuri reimagining the Shinsengumi as high school girls in the modern day with Bakumatsu High School Girls.

So a lot of great titles coming out from us this fall, and you can find all of that stuff, all of those great books, on our online store, store.bakumatsu.com. We also have a Patreon and a sub stack where you can support us for our editorial content and get updates on stuff going on with the store and MongoRx books.

First up, we have a bit of news.

Scholastic is teaming up with Tezuka Productions.

So apparently they teamed up a couple years ago doing this thing called Unico Awakening, which I believe we talked about this on the podcast when it happened in 2024.

There was a pretty successful Kickstarter about this, maybe because we just talked about Unico I think a year or two before that.

So them doing Unico – or actually maybe earlier, I can't remember – Also means that they are going to try doing a couple of other Tezuka titles, including Three-Eyed One, Princess Knight, Trident of the Sea, Zero Men, and then Atom Cat slash Astro Cat.

Not Astro Boy.

Astro Cat? Astro Cat.

He's Trey's, Kushnada, and Gundam Wing, as well as Jinnai Katsuko and El Hazard.

And then the other thing too with that is it, it's kind of, uh, thinking in that logic is also the assumption that production committees has always been the way that it's been done and is the best way to do it, right? And that's also not the truth 'cause they, there weren't always production committees.

Initially it was sponsorship models, and this was what, uh, uh, Tezuku, Tezuka did with his initial business model where essentially he would find people to sponsor his products, right? So he would get like animation studio, a TV station, a merchandising company, an advertising agency, and they would sponsor the work.

So they would, it would be more of that collaborative, "Okay, we pay and invest some money, but you're still keeping some of your rights 'cause we're, we're sponsoring you.

We're not buying the rights and then, then going out and contracting you." And there were problems with this.