MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

After a little delay I’ve reached the last Phoenix story: “Sun”. This story was published between 1986 and 1988 with Tezuka dying early in 1989. It was one of his last works, and the last completed in this series. That is not to say this is the ending of the series. It is said Tezuka planned to continue these stories so that the past and future time lines converged at some point in the present. In this regard, “Sun” is an aptly fitting place for the series to stop, as the story incorporates both a past and a future timeline into the same story.

I finished up my reading of Lone Wolf and Cub. I’m not going to post about the whole series, it’s just too much to deal with right now. Suffice to say, I really enjoyed the series, and do recommend it highly. It is both narratively and visually engaging with strong historical and thematic material too. [...]

“Strange Beings” is another short Phoenix story that takes place in the past (1468 AD). This one features a young woman, Sakon No Suke, who has been raised as a man by her warrior father. When her father gets a cancerous growth on his nose (like the oft-appearing Saruta), a female monk from a nearby temple is called for and claims that she will heal the man. Sakon goes with her manservant to the temple to kill the nun before she can go back and heal her father because Sakon wants her father to die so she can live as a woman.

Besides my ongoing reading/blogging on Tezuka’s Phoenix, I’ve also been making my way through two other “classic” manga series: Koike and Kojima’s Lone Wolf and Cub and Otomo’s Akira. These three works are very different creatures on many levels, but primarily for me in my changing and opposite reactions to re/reading them.

The story “Civil War” takes up most of two volumes in the Phoenix series. Again, the story goes back in time to the end of the 12th century, following a number of characters during a tumultuous time of civil war in Japan. From some recent reading, I know Tezuka used historical events as a backdrop for his stories, so I’m assuming a lot of the major events and leaders in this book have some historical basis. At times the various clans and factions and places do get hard to keep track of, some seem to appear out of nowhere with little context. I’m not sure chaos doesn’t help the story by making the civil war a little more hard to grasp.

Tezuka, Osamu. Phoenix Vol. 8: Civil War (Part Two) and Robe of Feathers (1980, 1971). Viz, 2006. ISBN: 9781421505183. See previous post on Phoenix Vol. 5: Resurrection. It may seem I’m posting out of order, skipping from Volume 5 to Volume 8, but this disorder is created by Viz, not me. The story in Phoenix [...]

Tezuka, Osamu. Phoenix Vol. 5: Resurrection (1971). Viz, 2004. ISBN: 1591165938. See previous post on Phoenix Vol. 4: Karma. And back into a science fiction future, with robots! This isn’t one of my favorite stories in the series, though it has its moments. The narrative rambles a few times. “Resurrection” does offer another variation on [...]

Tezuka, Osamu. Phoenix Vol. 4: Karma (1970). Viz, 2004. ISBN: 1591163005. See previous post on the first half Phoenix Vol. 3: Space. If I were to recommend a single volume of Phoenix to a new reader, it would have to be Volume 4: Karma. This story can work well as a stand-alone and showcases a [...]

Tezuka, Osamu. Phoenix Vol. 3: Yamato/Space (1969). Viz, 2003. ISBN: 1591161002. See previous post on the first half Phoenix Vol. 3: Yamato. Viz’s Volume 3 continues with “Space,” which oddly enough is called “Universe” in the chart of stories at the back of each volume. Translation issues? Neither are evocative nor apt for the story, [...]

Tezuka, Osamu. Phoenix Vol. 3: Yamato/Space (1969). Viz, 2003. ISBN: 1591161002. See previous post on Phoenix Vol. 2: Future. Viz’s Phoenix Volume 3 includes two stories, the third and fourth in the series. This is where the volume numbers and the story numbers will stop matching. Later there will be stories that take two volumes [...]

Tezuka, Osamu. Phoenix Vol. 2: Future (1968). Viz, 2004. ISBN: 159116608X. See previous post on Phoenix Vol. 1: Dawn. Yes, I spoil the larger plot points. Isn’t it the journey that matters, anyway? I already wrote briefly about Phoenix Vol. 2 in my post on the structure of the series. It’s odd writing about this [...]

Tezuka, Osamu. Phoenix Vol. 1: Dawn (1967). Viz, 2003. ISBN: 1569318689. Warning: I’m sure there are spoilers. Also, I added a bit to one paragraph in my previous post on Pheonix about characters who appear in multiple volumes. This was to correct something I said that I realized was wrong. I’m planning on writing about [...]

Tezuka, Osamu. Phoenix (12 volumes). Viz, 2003-2008. I’ve read a lot of Osamu Tezuka’s work over the years, from early Viz issues of Black Jack through to most of the releases from Vertical (Buddha, Dororo, MW, Kirohito) and even a French translation of one of his shorter series (Ayako). I’d rank many of them very [...]

Mike Wenthe has been blogging about a volume of Lone Wolf and Cub everyday in February (there are 28 volumes of the series) over at the Satisfactory Comics blog. It’s well worth spending some time reading and then following for the rest of the month.

My review of Yuki Urushibara’s Mushishi (Del Rey) last week was primarily a broader discussion of the series. I didn’t get into any particular images or pages. I did have two pages marked that I wanted to return to, because they offer some examples that I thought were worth sharing.

Urushibara, Yuki. Mushishi. 10 volumes in Japanese. 6 volumes in English to date. Del Rey, 2007-. I looked around for reviews of this manga series. Six volumes have come out from Del Rey, yet I can only find reviews of the first (with some minor exceptions where the reviewer just summarizes plot). People seem to [...]

Looking back at this post about a thought balloon with two vertical rows of ellipses in a manga. I found this quote: Some English-style punctuation, such as exclamation points and question marks, are fairly common but none matches the frequency of the ubiquitous ellipses marks (typically rendered as a vertical row of dots), which further [...]

Something I’ve noted before and was reminded of as I read Inio Asano’s Solanin (Viz, 2008) this week. A lot of manga seems to use a certain layout of panels as seen in this randomly selected spread (142-143). The panels in the lower right and upper left are laid out using a similar structure. In [...]