When a horrific airplane crash occurs, all the passengers are doomed to die. However, the plane just happens to have comes crashing down onto the mysterious “Mountain of Life” - home to a hidden reserve of the energy that serves as the basis of all living creatures. As such, in the aftermath of the crash, small stones and dust infused with this energy rain down on eight of the crash victims and allow them to miraculously survive.
When Yakeno Yahachi, better known to his friends as “Yakeppachi” (i.e. “desperate”), has ectoplasm seep out of his nose, he does what any normal teenage boy would do - he puts it in a life-like doll suit, names her Maria, and has her attend high school alongside him.
When a low class samurai named Ichirui Hanri agrees to sell his soul to Sudama, a beautiful demoness, for three wishes, she whisks him out of the castle in style.
Escaping from a gang of criminals, two young orphans, Minoru and Marimo stumble into the laboratory of a scientist who has created a transporter machine that can take the pair anywhere they wish. With that, the pair are literally “broadcast” into one adventure after another - including a world inhabited by humanoid ants, a world filled with invisible men bent on world domination, and the American “Old West”.
When three aliens, disguised as escaped human convicts, descend upon unsuspecting manga artist, Osamu Tezuka, and devour his brain, they expect to acquire all his thoughts and knowledge. Instead, all they get is a sudden, unrelenting feeling of the pressure of a impending deadline hanging over their heads… which only gets worse when the editors of his many manga publications start calling.
This peek behind the scenes of Tezuka’s life comes courtesy the chapter “The Three Invaders” (1969) of his sci-fi series exploring the human mind, The Crater (1969-70).
Young Okuchin, a good-for-nothing student with no prospects for the future, is visited by a strange young man who tells him he’s a thief that steals the futures of others. The stranger gives Okuchin a set of special glasses that lets him see one of the great secrets of mankind - that we all carry our futures in a sack of flesh coming out of our rear ends. While the size of the sack denotes the amount of future each one has left, no one knows what the future holds… unless you cut open the sack and find out.
