Maria (Star)

Maria is one of Tezuka’s important archetypal females, alongside Melmo, Mitchy, Sapphire, and Zephyrus, among others. She is the forward woman who is comfortable with love and with sexual desire, as shown in her debut role in the series Yakeppachi’s Maria, published in 1970. In this series, she has no actual body of her own and possesses a beautiful female doll to befriend a young man named Yakeno Yahachi, nicknamed “Yakeppachi.” This series, and this role, are particularly important to the political development of Tezuka’s manga, and of the growing manga industry in Japan at the time. In both Japan and the United States, taboos and restrictions were starting to appear in the publication of comics and manga. In reaction to this, many cartoonists in both countries began to produce work of extreme violence and erotica, solely for the sake of defiance. In Yakeppachi’s Maria Tezuka successfully attempts to show his audiences, and his publishers, how those taboos can be broken without producing work which could be in some way “harmful” to readers, as he believed some other cartoonists were doing. He uses the character of Maria and her interactions with others in the series to criticize the medium and its industry across the world.
Maria’s other important appearance was in Alabaster, another somewhat shocking Tezuka series, where she played Ami, the girl who has been rendered invisible by her grandfather’s scientific experimentation on her pregnant mother; in this series, she works alongside Alabaster himself, partly through his manipulations of her. She also has an appearance in Black Jack.