Tezuka In English Discussion Forums

Hey there I'm Mike. I'm 26 and I live in Montreal, Canada. I discovered this excellent and very active site through the Tezuka wikipedia entry. I've been a fan of Tezuka's work for some time now and I've always found it frustrating how little of it has been made availabe in North America.

I read in English and French, so I do have access to the larger selection of Tezuka material being published in France, but the books tend to be significantly more expensive than their english-language counterparts, due in part to the exchange and also because there isn't the same kind of discount available as from American publishers.

I hope this site will encourage Tezuka Productions to take a more proactive approach to licensing their backcatalogue for North American readers, rather than the current scattershot, mutiple-publishers situation. The kind of work that Drawn & Quarterly and Fantagraphics are doing republishing classic works (like Peanuts, Moomin, Gasoline Alley, Popeye, Dennis The Menace, etc) and even Dark Horse with Little Lulu shows that the audience is there, and Tezuka's work certainly deserves better treatment (although Buddha and Ode To Kirihito are really excellent).

Nice to meet you, Mike. Thanks for letting us know how you found the site, that's a big help.

The saga of why it's dificult to license Tezuka manga for US release is a long and involved one, as I have discovered from discussing it with many US manga publishers and representatives from Teuka productions. Some day I hope to get around to writing up a little essay on the subject and posting it, but short version is that Tezuka's art-style is very unpopular in the US, as is true of all older manga art, so his stuff sells terribly compared to newer titles. While many executives of US manga companies, especially Dark Horse and Mediablasters, love Tezuka's work, they honestly can't afford to publish it since it is a big money-looser. VERTICAL Inc. has had more success marketing to a literary audience rather than an anime/manga fan audience, but until something changes American attitudes toward manga art, Tezuka manga will never sell well here the way it does in France. That is, of course, to say nothing of the infinite copyright confusion on the Japanese end which makes licensing Tezuka manga harder than normal manga, or the backwards thinking of many Tezuka Productions executives who don't pay much attention to international marketing...

I got the moomin book today. Incredibly nice. Amazing binding, extra large, well more than I expected to get for the price. Of course, it is only 100 pages long, but this is collector quality stuff, not the crap treatment most comics get. It would be nice to see this company doing other things I was interested in (or finding a few more lost treasures like those moomin comics...)