New Treasure Island Manga
(No Western editions.)
New Treasure Island (1946) was Tezuka’s first published manga. It was not a retelling of the original Treausre Island, as his later New Treasure Island TV special was, but a story loosely inspired by it, with the adventures of a young boy and a pirate searching for treasure together. Early in Tezuka’s career, his works suffered a great deal of editorial interference, frequently being cut to half or a third of their original length, with changes made both with and without his knowledge (Nextworld suffered similarly). The original drawings for New Treasure Island do not survive, and there are several print versions, none of which reflect the original very closely, though the later ones are closer.
Note that this New Treasure Island manga is not the basis of Tezuka's later New Treasure Island TV Special.
The main character of New Treasure Island "Pete" is the first manifestation of the boy hero character Kenichi (pictured below) who would remain one of Tezuka's staple heros throughout his career. For more informatino, see the Tezuka World Kenichi Profile or our Kenichi Profile. The series also featured Butamo Makeru and Buku Bukk.
Here follows a discussion story synopsis, excerpted from the catalogue of the 1990 museum exhibition of Tezuka’s works (unfortunately the catalogue has no ISBN number or publisher). It focuses on the circumstances of the original drafting of the work, and its original publication and later publication formats, which varied greatly due to editorial interference. This synopsis reveals the entire basic story, but no details apart from discussion of the multiple different endings of the different versions. The English translation of the summary provided in the book is not always of good quality, but it is comprehensible, and still the best English language source on the subject.
This is the work with which Tezuka debuted as a professional manga writer. The original draw¬ings do not remain, so we had to choose the pages to be reproduced from the Collected Works pub¬lished by Kodansha. But the version included in the Collected Works, as Tezuka himself admits, is a redo with extensive revisions. He made these revisions because the original version was a pro¬ject of his senior friend Shichima Sakai and Tezuka, to his remorse, could not write as he liked. In fact, the Ikueisha edition states that the original story is by Shichima Sakai and the drawings are by Osamu Tezuka.
The largest difference between the two versions lies in the cell division: The Ikueisha version has three cells per page, the Kodansha version, four cells per page. As the result, the story develops at a faster tempo in the latter. For instance, the scene in which the boy Pete speeds in a car, put on the brakes, and picks up a puppy gives the impression that we are looking at a movie. But in the original version, the tension is far slacker, and the puppy does not appear at all.. As can be seen from this example, the 250 pages of draft on straw paper Tezuka had done was cut down to 60 pages, with various revisions made "without consultation," and the resulting work was something that Tezuka could not call his own. The book says that the drawings are by Tezuka, but he was not given free rein even with the drawings. As the result, this work, despite its legendary fame, was not re¬printed for a long time. When it was included in the collected edition published by Kodansha, the artist tried to restore the original version based on his memory. (Why and how he did this is ex¬plained in detail in the postscript in the Collected Works, "The Circumstances of Publishing the Revised Version of New Treasure Island".)
The story itself is a simple adventure. With the map left by his father as his clue, Pete embarks on a search for treasures with a captain of a ship. They are assaulted by the pirate named Boire, who has only one arm and one leg, but assisted by a white man named Baron, who resembles Tarzan, they successfully get hold of the treasure. In the original plan of Tezuka, this story was to end with Pete find¬ing out that everything was a dream, but following Sakai's opinion, the old version ended with Pete and the captain leaving the island. (In the Col¬lected Works, the dream ending is used, but its seems not to reflect the original plans exactly.)
With the facts as they are. the Ikueisha edition of New Treasure Island is not very inooYaDve when actually read. As Morl Masaki says, this work follows "the expressive style of the classic manga at its most orthodox.” And “it is far more important to acknowledge that Tezuka’s manga observed the conventional style at first than to emphasize its newness in technique” (Mori Masaki, 1990, pp. 78-79).
Whatever is the case, New Treasure Island was the first 'scinematic' story manga to be published in book form from the start after the war, and it ushered in the first manga boom in postwar japan. And in view of this fact, we cannot discuss Tezuka’s work without mentioning this book. (K.M./K.K.)
