Tezuka In English Discussion Forums

I figure it must have been about 25 years ago. Japanese publisher, Kodansha, slamed together English versions of about 10 different popular comics with the intention to send out to foreign publishers to encourage
some daring company to give them a try.

One of them titled The Third Eye by Tezuka - only about 40 pages.

So as to not let someones good intentions come to nothing, a generation
later, what publishers might seriously give it a look if I sent it out to them?
It is an ultra rare find and I wouldn't want to have it set around
in some office dead end file for another 25 years.

David
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Vertical and Drawn and Quarterly both come to mind. What is the Third Eye like...might it go nice with something else? how is the translation?

It starts with a little text introduction of the series - then an outline and profile of characters. Then comic story itself is great - cool and creepy. a brief origin story and then an episode.
The printing format is more like American monthly comics, with paper covers.

The translation is fine - but I think it was rushed out... more of a teaser
for someone to look at and want to do more of.

Incidentally, in the same group of printings they did 2 Black Jack stories.
Neither were included in the Viz books.

As for Drawn and Quarterly, which I love btw, is there some reason
to think they would want to take on a Tezuka series?

Vertical sounds like a good idea. Does someone have a name of someone
at Vertical that would be the correct person to get this too - plus an address?

David

A couple of comments...

I've got a copy of the Third-Eye One promo piece that David's talking about. My opinion is that 15-20 years ago that might've been an option, but I doubt that something like this would catch any publisher's attention now. It looks rather dated. Also, Third-Eye has been . So there's better editions easily available to them.

I can appreciate David's feelings on this, it's a treasured item of historical and collector appeal, but I doubt it has much "promo" value left.

As for getting it published... well that's another problem entirely. Third-Eyed One is one of Tezuka's longer (8 volumes in the Asuka edition) series. It's much like Astro Boy or Black Jack in that the stories are episodic in nature. Some longer, some shorter, but more or less stand-alone adventure stories. I strongly doubt that Vertical will be interested given that they've stated (mainly to cmoon if memory serves) that they're only interested in doing "Adult" Tezuka material (of which, luckily, there's enough to keep going for a while). I think other publishers (like Dark Horse or Viz) would be more worried about the length of the series.

As for Drawn & Quarterly... there's no real hint that they'd be interested in publishing any Tezuka material. They've just been the topic of some "out of forum" discussion about the value of approaching Tezuka's work as graphic storytelling instead of Manga (given the current definition of the word).

*nods*

Vertical clearly love Tezuka, but I think they are working very hard to try to change perceptions of him, so they were not (or least did not seem) interested in publishing the works for younger readers.

I also have that Three-Eyed One series (and please, let's be consistent and call it "The Three-Eyed One" not any other variant translation - that's the one used most regularly in English).

I agree that Three-eyed one is not likely to get picked up any time soon, since what's being most successful now are Tezuka's shorter mature stories. It's something to think about for a few years down the road, but not now. And, as Greg said, it's easier for publishers to look at the French Asuka/Akita editions than an old promo one (whenever I talk to executives about licensing this or that Tezuka series they always ask me to point them to the French edition first) so I think that single issue of Three-eyed one is more useful as a collector's item than a promotional one at this point.

Having read five volumes of it now, by the way, Three-Eyed One is not actually episodic. It consists of long-ish story sections which are somewhat independent but so far every single one of them has referred back to events from earlier ones, so reading it out of order like Black Jack or Astro Boy would be really confusing. I actually expected it to be more episodic like Tezuka's early stuff but I've been very surprised by its complexity and the very serious character development of Sharaku, who is certainly one of Tezuka's most tragic characters. It's skyrocketed to being one of my favorite of his works, despite various weaknesses, and I think that, of his kids/adventure works, it's actually most likely to succeed in a US publication, but not yet. A few more Vertical releases first, then Black Jack, then we'll be ready to push Three-Eyed One on people.

yep... that looks like it. You know, there's just something about seeing type-face fonts used in word balloons that strikes me as unnatural.

Thanks to Ada for clearing up what I was trying to say in regards to the episodic nature. I knew that there was an underlying plot to the series, but I guess I wasn't clear that I meant there are story arcs of varying length.

I've got the first four French volumes, but I haven't really read them yet.

Oh how great. I hope I can get this translation for my library one day. It looks like a wonderful story collection.