• Starting overview of the series
• Volume 1: Dawn
• Volume 2: Future
• Volume 3: Yamato
• Volume 3: Space
• Volume 4: Karma
• Volume 5: Resurrection
• Volume 8: Robe of Feathers
• Volume 6: Nostalgia
• Volume 7 and 8: Civil War
• Volume 9: Life
• Volume 9: Strange Beings
• Volume 10 and 11: Sun

Also an older post on Volumes 7 and 8.

Tezuka, Osamu. Phoenix Vol. 11: Sun Part Two (1986-88). Viz, 2007. ISBN: 9781421509730.

See previous post on Phoenix Vol. 9: Strange Beings.

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.

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The story starts in the 7th century with the defeat of a combined force of Koreans and Japanese by the Chinese. A young Korean noble is mutilated by the Chinese. The skin on his face is removed and that of a wolf’s head is placed in its place. Tezuka evokes a sense of horror at the end of the left page, but his handling of the event at the top of right page does not quite live up to the horror. Tezuka tries to show too much while simultaneously holding back, and he doesn’t quite manage that tightrope. I want this page to be more traumatic than it is, but it almost falls into parody. That last black panel of the hatched over face is fairly effective and might be even more so without all those silly knife panels and if it weren’t so cramped in a horizontal panel.

Left to die, he somehow survives, now a human with the head of a wolf. He ends up in Japan with an old lady (she’s kind of a witch type), having rescued a Japanese general. The young man, called Kuni’ichi by the old lady, is given land, title, and name (Inugami) for rescuing the general. In his travels he also meets a clan of wolf spirits, who represent part of a traditional Japanese religion (perhaps Shinto related?). What ensues is a combination of political and religious struggle, as the emperor enforces Buddhism onto the land, and his brother struggles against him. This struggle is another repeated theme of Phoenix, the use of religion as a political tool, and the corruption of such with power.

In this case, Tezuka brings out a mythical angle to the story, putting Buddhist gods and traditional spirits into the story as characters. While previous stories have limited this element to the phoenix alone, now we see large Buddhist gods fighting against wolf spirits and bird spirits. It’s one of the many elements that point to Tezuka’s lack of interest in maintaining a narrative world consistency to this series. The fantastical/mythical/science fiction elements are added or removed as appropriate for each story. Even the phoenix itself is not always the same from one story to the next.

The past story line finds Inugami involved in the fight against both the emperor and the Buddhist gods. The emperor’s brother eventually becomes emperor and is inspired to worship the sun (he coins the term “Nippon”, the land of the rising sun). While the new emperor had fought against his brother’s enforcing of Buddhism on the land, it is hinted that the he will, in turn, force the sun religion on his subjects.

This pessimism in the face of political/religious revolutions is echoed in the future story line. The future is at first seen only as the brief dreams of Inugami when he lies unconscious/injured/sick at various times, but it takes on a greater importance as “Sun” continues with the future story line taking up more pages and becoming more clearly defined. In the future, a “light” religion, worshipping the phoenix, rules the land, while below ground live the “shadow people” who were exiled when the light religion took over. The details of all this are rather vague, but Tezuka serves up enough information to suit his purposes. Inugami’s counterpart, Suguru (who we learn is a reincarnated form of Inugami), is a spy for the shadow world, sent into their citadel to steal the object of their worship, the body of the phoenix.

Eventually the shadow people take over, lead by another Saruta (the guy with the big nose) who proclaims his plan to force his own religion, “eternalism,” on everyone. While the new emperor in the past only hints at this desire, the new ruler of the future explicitly states his plan, adding some weight to the implied sense that this will be the case for the past. Political power uses religion for its purposes, a theme Tezuka addresses numerous times over the course of this series, here explicitly shown as a circle much like the many reincarnations in the series.

In the phoenix’s major appearance in the series, she makes this theme clear to Inugami.

Besides the war, politics, and myth that fill “Sun,” Tezuka also offers a romance plot for both Inugami and Suguru. These romances, both doomed in their own times, become, at the end, a sentimental romance between reincarnated souls. Both Inugami/Suguru and their romantic partners are the same soul reincarnated over the course of centuries. In the end they go off together into some kind of afterlife. It’s an oddly happy ending for Phoenix.

One aspect of the future story that I am a bit baffled by is the women Suguru falls in life with, Yodomi. In the future story she is somehow immortal. In a rather horrific scene at the very end, the leaders of the light religion, not believing the rumors that Yodomi is really immortal, start shooting her, firing and firing, then using a flamethrower to burn her into ashes. Yet, still she lives. Unlike the scene above with Inugami, Tezuka really makes this scene a horrific visual event, though oddly he does not play up Yodomi’s suffering. She becomes a mere physical body, mutilated, yet without continuing to speak or express any real emotion.

What I don’t get, and what I never saw an explanation for is how she became immortal. She is dying, by Suguru’s hand (they start out as enemies), and he prays for her to be saved, and then… a miracle. It’s a strange and out of norm case of a completely unexplained miracle in the series. The phoenix does not appear in a vision or anything. The woman is just healed. As if, there is something outside all of what we have seen that has power over life and death. One is tempted to say it is love itself, given the ending. It’s overly sentimental for this series. The love that extends beyond death and even defeats death, whereas previous loves in the series were delimited by a single lifetime/cycle.

I have to say, that after all this I’m a little worn out on Phoenix. I was going to write a summary/overview post, but I think I will have to leave that for another time. By its very nature Phoenix is an inconsistent series, not only because of its loosely connected narratives but also because of the long time period over which Tezuka created it (over 20 years). Some parts of it are clearly better than others. For the curious, I’d have to recommend volume 4′s “Karma” as the best single volume to read. It’s a strong narrative that incorporates a number of the primary themes of the work into one story. In general, I think Tezuka is much more successful with the historical volumes than the future volumes.

In rereading Phoenix with an eye towards writing about it as a whole, I think I would have to read it more like a novel than as a series of stories. By this, I mean, taking it as a single work to trace the themes and variations that emerge of the course of the pages. More note taking would also be needed, though in a way this series of posts is more like a series of notes for some future article than individual completed works.

Two more pages to share as addendum:

This is just a wonderful, time-stopping page, as Inugami is defeated by a rival loyal to the emperor. The first panel, with its figures posed at the end of movement and the blood floating in the air, seems to freeze time (in this sense very reminiscent of a Lone Wolf and Cub image). This frozen time is further enhanced by the second panel, not, this time, because of the figure’s pose but because of the way the blood from his wound appears to be flowing up into the air, a split second moment before gravity takes over where Inugami, eyes focused in on his snout, realizes his defeat.

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Another one of Tezuka’s abstracted sequences which, in this case, brings to mind the work of Yuichi Yokohama, with its architectural elements and prominent sound effects.

So that brings the Phoenix series of posts to an end (for now at least). Viz did publish a volume 12 which features early Phoenix stories that preceded volume 1′s “Dawn.” I’ve twice failed to read the volume because I find the stories too insipid to bear. Not recommended.

See previous post on Phoenix Vol. 9: Life.

“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. In killing the nun, Sakon becomes trapped in the temple and its vicinity. She is forced to take on the nun’s duties of healing those that come to the temple for aid, these supplicants being not only people but “strange beings” of a mystical/mythological variety. I should note that we begin this story in media res with Sakon and her manservant arriving at the temple and killing nun. Only later do we realize Sakon is a woman and the back story on why she killed the nun.

Eventually the phoenix comes to Sakon, telling her that she is in some kind of time pocket where the same 30 years are relived endlessly. Because Sakon came to the temple and killed herself (of the future) she must relive those 30 years endlessly, each cycle concluding with her murder by her younger self. The phoenix tells her to save all the people that come for help and in doing so she might be cleansed of her sin and be released from her time prison.

Once again, the phoenix is the punisher, and a harsh one at that. Sakon only kills herself, yet must suffer endlessly for it (is this an anti-suicide tract?). I have to overlook the messiness the time paradox in the story: what is the original crime? How could she have killed herself originally if she wasn’t there to kill herself?

Anyway, Sakon does heal all manner of people, using a tail feather from the phoenix, as well as demons and other monstrous looking creatures that come for aid, but there is one scene where she apparently refuses to heal someone: a loud-mouthed samurai warrior who bears some resemblance to her father. Is it her father as a younger man or just a stand-in representing her father? Perhaps this one refused warrior is her sin, she is still trying to kill her father (indirectly, by refusing healing). This is the only case I see where Sakon is explicitly shown refusing to help someone. We even see scenes of her getting over her fear and disgust with the monsters to help them.

Despite this, the punishment of the phoenix still seems absurd for someone who only kills themselves and wants their father to die. So many other worse characters have passed through the series without facing such endless punishment. The endless time cycle of the punishment does act in concert with the cycle of reincarnation and the circular nature of the series as a whole, another form of endless death and rebirth.

Just another one of those abstract landscapes I love, a fire on the horizon.

This is half of a page showing a rare use of very small panels by Tezuka. It’s almost a consistent pattern of shrinking panels except for the one panel that is made to stand out in the center. This sequence is the end of a flashback, so the shrinking panels are the past fading back into the past before opening up again into the present.

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Tezuka’s less than subtle nightmare for Sakon. Despite its blatant imagery, it is effective and a bit creepy mostly for the way Sakon is faceless in the middle three panels. The bottom row of panels also rotate her head continuously to create a vertiginous effect that brings her back to waking (on the next page).

Next up: The last Phoenix story “Sun” which takes up volumes 10 and 11.

See previous post on Phoenix Vol. 7 and 8: Civil War.

Two short stories in volume 9, and once again, for reasons that are not clear, Viz has put the stories out of order. This volume places “Strange Beings” before “Life,” yet both in the order Tezuka made them and in the structure of the series, “Life,” a future story, should precede “Strange Beings,” a past story. I’ll keep with Tezuka’s ordering, so first up is “Life.”

Set in the mid-22nd century, “Life,” drawn in 1980, is oddly prescient about television. Here Tezuka posits televisions decline into a morass of reality-type game shows of ever more questionable content. Naturally, he takes it to an extreme point. The story’s protagonist, Mr. Aoi, is a slick television producer, living a decadent life. His program that features people hunting cloned animals is losing ratings, so he decides the next big thing should be hunting human clones. Human clones are illegal, but Aoi travels to the international cloning center in the Andes Mountains. Aoi meets a doctor there who is yet another man named Saruta, with a big bumpy nose. He wants a clone made of himself, one who is pre-cancerous bumpy nose, so the clone can go back to Japan and marry his girlfriend.

Saruta takes Aoi to the “bird woman” who holds the secret of cloning and lives with the Incas. She forces the two men to stay inside a large brick bowl for a day and night in the cold and heat. Saruta dies, but Aoi survives to learn the bird woman’s secret. She is a cloned descendent of the offspring of an Incan warrior and what we can only assume is the phoenix itself. This adds another strange facet to the phoenix, one which does not at all fit with the rest of what we’ve seen (how does it mate with humans?). I get the feeling Tezuka is not all that concerned with a consistent vision of the phoenix. He has his stories to tell, with their morals, and he’ll use whatever plot points he needs to get there.

Because of Aoi’s “impudence” in exposing the bird woman’s face (he pulls off her bird mask to reveal, gasp, a bird face), she clones him as punishment. This descendent of the phoenix is just as harsh with punishmenta as the other incarnations. He and all his clones become, not unexpectedly, the human clones that Aoi’s studio uses for their clone hunt show. They don’t know which one is the original Aoi, so they just use all of them. Why all the clones seem to have the same knowledge (and clothes) as the original is not addressed and an illogic we must overlook.

So Aoi becomes the hunted clone and in fleeing his hunters (they seem to do the hunts in an actual inhabited city!), he meets an obnoxious little girl name June with whom he escapes into the last unspoiled wilderness in Japan. Naturally, by being hunted he learns the error in his ways. The suffering put upon him, living in the wilderness with no luxuries, though is only part of his punishment. He lives in the wilderness for 15 years with June, who grows into a young women. Aoi begins to lust after her, despite her calling him “father” (Tezuka does seem to like injecting incestual affection into his works), and becomes jealous of certain of her activities, convinced she is seeing a man. In fact, she is seeing the bird woman who for reasons that aren’t clear travelled from the Andes to Japan to tell June that Aoi would be punished even past death (the clearest lesson in Phoenix is that punishment lasts past death, with poor Saruta being the exemplar of such). Bird woman offers to help June teach Aoi to get past his suffering. The bird woman imbues June with the “pure knowledge of what it means to be a true living being” (225). Your guess is as good as mine as what that is, because before June can do much of anything Aoi causes her to get shot by a mad farmer (she’s stealing yams and Aoi trails her and causes trouble). Aoi tries to lick her wounds like a dog (this is something that also comes up a lot in Tezuka’s work, as some kind of pure act of humility (perhaps there’s a Buddhist precedent)), but must give in to taking her back to civilization to a hospital.

Discovering his clones are still being murdered on television he visits his old station manager, learning that now the company is making its own clones in Japan, Aoi accompanies the manager to the factory, where he blows it up with a bomb he concealed on his person. He dies in the process. In an epilogue with June, we learn that the whole human clone industry in Japan has collapsed because of Aoi’s attempt at redemption.

Maybe I’m getting jaded with Phoenix, but “Life” seems to have an excessive number of plot holes and open threads. What was June supposed to teach Aoi? Is the lesson to not make clones of humans so as to hunt them on television? Why did the bird woman go to Japan anyway? Did Aoi redeem himself in the end? Tezuka doesn’t shy away from afterlife scenes in this series, yet, no word on Aoi. Why do they only make clones of one guy for 15 years? Surely, someone else would think of making different clones to give some variety to their show.

Even more importantly, what is Aoi’s real crime? When he is cloned by the bird woman, his sole noted crime is his “impudence” at exposing her identity (pulling off her mask when no one else is around to even see). The actually cloning of the humans only happens because the bird woman lets it happen (she does the cloning). So is Aoi’s crime just being a television producer asshole? Are the cloned animals the problem, because it’s made clear from the story, there’s a lot of cloning already going on besides he and his show. Or, at the heart of things, are we to see his punishment as rather absurd? Life sucks sometimes. People get diseases (or get cloned and hunted down on television), and there isn’t always a direct correlation. That’d be rather existentialist of Tezuka, wouldn’t it?

No images this time as nothing particularly caught my interest.

Next up: “Strange Beings.”

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. 6: Nostalgia.

Note: I wrote previous on this part of Phoenix back in 2006.

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 spends a lot of time with the stories of Benta and Obu, two young mountain peasants who are engaged to each other and both become involved with separate factions in the civil war. Both attain levels of responsibility above their class backgrounds (Benta becomes a samurai, Obu a noblewoman), moves that both emphasize and gloss over the vast issues of class in historical Japan (something seen a lot more clearly in manga series like Lone Wolf and Cub (which I’m also reading (but not blogging) my way through)). We see a lot of these two characters and are made to empathize with them, but, by the end of the story, when Tezuka brings out reincarnation and an animal parable, one is tempted to say two of the faction leaders, who until then seemed distant and secondary, are also protagonists.

In either case, this story shows the unreason of war and power struggles. I don’t think a single character who gets any attention in the story survives to the end. One by one, all the primary characters are killed off in different ways. Some of the major characters kill each other, some are killed unexpectedly by minor characters. War kills off everyone from peasant to the most powerful lord.

The ending only adds to this bleak message. Two of the dead leaders are seen in the afterlife. The phoenix appears to them, and tells them that they will be reborn in a time before their last lives, because “there is no time in the universe, at least not as humans know it.” (233) Once again this element of one of the stories echoes out to the series as a whole and its structure.

The two men are reborn as a monkey and a dog. The reader immediately realizes this past they have been reborn to has already been partially explained earlier in the story. Benta, the peasant, is at one point taken to an armless mystic who lives in the woods. He is Gao from “Karma” still living over 400 years later. He tells a story about a monkey who is defeated as leader of his tribe. Gao adopted the monkey, to help him heal, as well as a puppy. The dog and monkey become friends (cue Diseney-esque animals from Tezuka), and eventually, the monkey gets the dog to help him retake leadership of his tribe. They remained friends but a year later died at each other’s throats. The retelling of the story at the end of “Civil War” explains more of the circumstances with the monkey’s tribe and the dog’s pack fighting.

The story equates the warring human clans with the warring animals. Irrationality, lust for power, and a determination to help one’s own people to the detriment of others only causes death for all involved. Once again Tezuka shows leaders causing the death of a great many people, dragging peasants along with them.

The phoenix’s appearance at the end of the story is its primary actual appearance, but throughout the narrative characters are involved with a bird that is believed to be the phoenix (actually its a peacock). Much blood is shed over the attempt to get ahold of the pseudo-phoenix’s supposed immortality granting blood. In this case the various leaders vying for immortality express their reasons as being primarily about the survival of their clans/families. This is not unlike Romy in “Nostalgia” who is obsessed with the survival of her descendants.

One unusual (yet welcome) aspect of “Civil War” is the character of Obu, a rare strong and active woman. She perseveres through a number of experiences, in the process showing clear growth in her ability to assert herself, in particular, not just following along with whatever the men in her life tell her to do. She takes stands and acts on them. In great contrast, Benta remains through almost the whole book a dumb oaf who continues to follow orders despite his clear disgust with them. His complaining, yet unwillingness to act on his complaints, is a constant annoyance through the book and perhaps a lesson aimed at the reader.

In fact, the story as a whole seems to offer lessons for the reader about power hunger, blindly following leaders, war mongering, and class divisions. And it’s not much of a step to think of World War II and Tezuka’s experiences therein. Moreso than previous stories in the series, “Civil War” really makes war an all encompassing force that consumes everything beneath its weight.

Visually, Tezuka pulls out all the stops for this one: great layouts, site gags, detailed landscapes, etc.

At the end of the story, Tezuka uses his cute animal style. Note how the early panels use a consistent point of view/composition for the monkey. When he switches to the comedy, the monkey is quickly moving back and forth, back and forth, with the horizontal in the middle of the last row, nicely framed by the semi-mirrored compositions of its adjacent panels.

I love the transition in this page. One of the lords dies, and Obu breaks out in sobs (third panel). The next panel, a rather large one, shows what I assume is the lords house, devoid of any people, empty and silent.

Click for a larger view.

Another amazing landscape spread by Tezuka. As Gao dies (panel two) the image of the phoenix shoots across the sky above an interestingly shaped mountain horizon. The linework in the two skies is amazingly fine and contrasts so well with the huge black horizon. This spread always stops me in my (reading) tracks.

Next Up: Volume 9′s “Life”.

See previous post on Phoenix Vol. 8: Robe of Feathers.

“Nostalgia” originally appeared from 1976-1978, five years after the previous Phoenix story, “Robe of Feathers.” It is another futuristic story, which, according to that handy chart in the back of the books, takes place approximately in the 25th century. This is one of the only stories that does not give an explicit date at its beginning.

The story begins with George and Romy, a young couple, arriving at a planet called “Eden-17″ with their space realtor, a half-fox looking guy. They have bought the planet as a place to live after fleeing Earth. The planet’s name becomes a bit of irony as it turns out to be a dud, lacking water and traversed by storms. After only a day, George is killed (a water derrick falls on him and then he drowns), and Romy is left alone, pregnant, with a robot.

Then Tezuka heads into that place he goes occasionally where you begin to wonder how the hell he comes up with these ideas. Romy has her robot build her some kind of cryogenic sleep chamber. She goes to sleep, leaving the robot to care for her son because she wants to wake up when he is older have children with him so that humans will not die out on the planet. It’s completely nuts, but it points to the anthropocentric viewpoint that crops up in some of these stories. Humans must survive!

So Romy sleeps then wakes up and has children with her son (who Tezuka decides to name Cain), except they are all boys, so she has to go to sleep again. Then she wakes up again and has children with her own children/grandchildren (yes, the content warning in the front cover tells us there will be “incest”). But, again, only boys, Romy can’t get a break, yet for some reason she is very determined.

And this is where the phoenix intervenes. It decides to help the “poor, miserable people” on Eden-17. The phoenix gets an alien, a moopie (remember those shapeshifting aliens from way back in “Future”), to go to the planet and mate with one of Romy’s children/grandchildren. And thus a new race is born to populate the planet.

Before this happens the phoenix visits Romy in a dream as she sleeps. The conversation is weird. The phoenix asks Romy if she “likes” the planet and her response is “of course I do, this is where my husband George is buried.” That is an excellent reason to love an earthquake ridden desert planet. She adds, “This planet belongs to George and me and I can’t die until my descendants populate it.” (116) A fine capitalist reason. The logic of all this does not work for me, it seems all very self-centered and selfish on Romy’s part, yet the phoenix helps her. In this story, rather than a mythical beast, a cosmic force, or a divine arbiter, the phoenix is more like a sympathetic mythic deity who interferes in human concerns for no clear reason.

So the half-human/half-alien people populate the planet with Romy as their queen figurehead, until one day a young (and very annoying) kid name Kom has his (her?) day of “duty” to serve the queen. She tells him about Earth and how she wants to see it just one more time. And so begins the voyage back to Earth. Kom finds the cosmic rock spaceship that brought the first moopie to mate with the humans and somehow it flies off into space.

The space voyage sequence goes on about 100 pages as Romy and Kom make new acquaintances, visit some crazy planets, and finally get to Earth. Among the people they meet is Makimura the space pilot who I’m all but definite is the same character as seen in “Space” (I’m assuming this is before he became immortal). The planets they visit all look wonderful and benign and then end up being crazy and dangerous (electrified planets, planets with living rock and mud monsters, etc.).

When Romy finally gets to Earth, she discovers that all returning colonists are shot down if they try to get to the planet. She and her companions must make a deal with a shady merchant (who looks like a rat man, so you know he’s trouble). She is almost dead from one of the crazy electric planet, so the rat man uses some kind of technology to revive her. Of course, the side effect is rapid aging (a delightful opposite to all the immortality in this series), and in exchange Kom lets on where his mother the moopie lives (rat man wants moopie for something).

They sneak on to the planet, only to discover that it is a mess and the beautiful nature Romy remembers from her youth is mostly gone. Illegally on the planet she and Kom, in fleeing police, even end up swimming through sewage and getting attacked by future sewage rats. They are briefly aided by a robot (Chihiro model just like in “Resurrection”) and a weird biker and his girl named “Fox” and “Rattler Sally” (?!). Alas, Romy finally gets to see some nature just before she dies.

Tezuka has an environmental theme going through this story. Despite the ability to go to other worlds, Earth remains the home planet, the one that Romy (and evidently many other space colonists) has “nostalgia” for. While other planets may look as nice as Earth, they never are as hospitable to people (in fact all the ones we see are outright hostile). Tezuka reinforces the issue by having Romy live long enough to remember the natural environment from her youth and return to sewage and deserts and lakes that have been made into swimming pools. The struggle for the humans to survive on Eden-17 and their need to mate with aliens also hammers in the idea that humans and Earth are supposed to go together.

I am recounting a lot of plot here, but, what can I do? A lot goes on in this book. Even after Romy’s death, we see what happens to her ancestors on Eden-17. The rat man merchant shows up and because they are all so good and not interested in buying stuff, he puts some kind of drug in their water and in six months turns the whole civilization into crazy gambling, consumerist, gun wielding maniacs. So the phoenix decides to stop protecting them and a giant earthquake kills everyone.

Makimura arrives last at Eden-17 to bury Romy’s body (which he somehow took off Earth). He even has a monologue about The Little Prince (groan)… and then we get ghostly floating dialogue of Romy and her long dead husband George talking to each other. Shouldn’t they be… reincarnated into something else? Does reincarnation not work in space?

“Nostalgia” starts out weird and crazy and ends up weird and cartoonishly absurd (yes, I do feel guilty using “cartoonish” in such a negative context). Some of this Tezuka seemed to be making up as he went along, some of it is being forced a little too much into a message, and some of it is just plan ridiculous. And through all this, the issue of “how to live life” is not addressed beyond a base survival instinct. Even pleasure does not enter the equation, as Romy’s whole live is consumed by survival and sad nostalgia. If I were on a distant planet like that, I’d just let the humans die out, me included.

For Romy’s remembrances of her youth on Earth, Tezuka switches to a flatter, textured, abstracted style, that looks both dreamlike and storybook-like.

A lovely almost abstract landscape. Great use of texture, contrast, and space.

Next up: Volume 7 and 8′s “Civil War.”

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 which followed volume five’s “Resurrection” (1971) is “Robe of Feathers” (1971). Since this latter story is only 47 pages long, Viz ended up publishing it at the end of the second volume of the story “Civil War” (1980) which comprises volumes 7 and 8 of the Viz series. I decided to post in the original story order, so I’m going to discuss “Robe of Feathers” here and next time will discuss Volume 6: “Nostalgia”.

“Robe of Feathers” is the shortest story in the Phoenix series and also one of the most out of place. None of the characters, as far as I can tell, carry over from other stories or seem to exist as reincarnations of familiar figures. The phoenix itself appears only as a creature in a story told by one of the characters, and there is very little to be said on it’s thematic relation to the overarching concerns of the series.

This story is one of the past stories, dated in the master chart of the series as 937 AD. “Robe of Feathers” exists as a story within a framing device. The majority of the story exists within the frame of a play performed for an audience. The time period at which the play is being performed is unclear. At first I thought it was in 937, but I think I see men in sailor suits in the audience, so perhaps the play is being performed in a modern time, and it is the play itself which is set in 937.

The narrative frame provides the strict compositions of the panels. Other than the opening and closing two page spreads, the whole story is shown from a fixed viewpoint using a fixed setting. The opening spread shows a crowd in front of an outdoor theater building. A curtain closes off the stage. The closing spread is identical to the opening spread except for a single “gong” sound effect. In between the story uses a steady layout of four horizontal panels showing the events on the stage, which holds a single tree and the edge of a house.

The curtain opens on the stage at the beginning of the story. Tezuka uses black margins and gutters for all the pages except the opening and closing spreads. This black frame creates a sense of enclosure. The world outside the stage is blacked out, attention is focused.

The events of the story are performed by a few characters/actors moving onto and off of this stage. There are no close-ups or alternative points of view. The only thing that changes besides the characters is the use of lighting. Sometimes the stage goes black. At other times, the lights are dimmed and a spotlight focuses in on one of the characters.

The woman stands with her child. Lights dim, a spotlight is briefly focused, and then darkness envelops the stage. A few of these moments of darkness are used to indicate the passage of time.

The story/play itself tells of a young woman who arrives at a house on the shore. She leaves her “robe of feathers” hanging on a tree while she swims in the ocean, and the peasant who lives in the house takes her robe. He forces her to stay with him for three years at which time he says he’ll return the robe. Rather unbelievably, she not only agrees to this, but she has a child with him, too. When samurai come to draft the peasant into the army, the women gives them the robe (apparently she knows where it is) as a bribe.

As it turns out, she is from 1500 years in the future and was told that anything she leaves behind will change history. The peasant goes after the robe. Alone with her child, the woman describes the war torn future she came from and how a flaming bird granted her wish to escape by sending her into the past. The woman waits for the peasant and after some time assumes he has died, so she takes her baby and goes back to the future. (How exactly she does this in unexplained.) At the end, the peasant returns, dying, and buries her robe in the ground so no one will get it.

The peasant and the woman from the future both spend time lamenting the tough times they live in, the war, the poverty. Yet, it is hard to feel sympathetic to the peasant. He uses the tough times as an excuse to make the woman stay with him, calling her an angel. He wants to keep her around so he will be happy and work harder, with no regards for her feelings. In short, he’s basically a thief and a kidnapper. If his final death scene is an attempt at tragedy, I find it hard to feel. As inexplicable is why the woman doesn’t just take her robe and leave while he’s out working. Clearly she knows where it is, since she retrieves it when the soldiers come to draft the peasant.

I’m not sold on this story, and I find it of little relation to the rest of the series. It is slight and mostly interesting for its strictly fixed compositions. Every series has to have a low point, this is it for Phoenix.

Next up: Volume 6: “Nostalgia.”

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 themes of immortality and questioning what is “human.”

The story begins in 2482 with the death of Leon (a young man) as he falls from his flying car to the ground far beneath. He finds himself floating in the nothingness that is some part of the afterlife. But a bright light appears, he goes to it, and he is revived. Leon is brought back to life as a cyborg with an almost completely artificial brain. In what is the most interesting part of the book, Leon’s new brain does not function exactly right. He sees all living things as inorganic matter: large talking sandstone structures, spiky coral-like objects. Throughout the first fifty pages of the book, Tezuka only shows humans other than Leon from Leon’s perspective. He breaks this perspective briefly to show a scene outside of Leon’s knowledge (two other characters discussing Leon’s situation), but otherwise over the course of the book the humans from Leon’s perspective slowly become more recognizable and “normal” looking, from completely abstract to rocky looking (kind of Thing-like) to just being shaded gray. Tezuka admirably takes this interesting concept and carries it through the book, slowly showing Leon’s brain re-humanizing his surroundings.

While Leon sees people as objects, he sees one robot as a human, a young woman wearing a head covering with long “ears” (actually her antennae). Leon falls in love with this robot, and, somehow, it falls in love with him. Why Leon sees the robot this way is understandable, but why the robot seems to “feel” for him is never really addressed. They cling to each other’s companion and struggle with the robot being owned by a corporation that will not let Leon buy her away.

Leon quickly realizes his death was a murder, so an early part of the story has him investigating his own death. This leads him to the United States and the discovery of a forgotten part of his life just previous to his murder. He was yet another phoenix hunter, though Leon succeeded in killing the mythical bird. Before it rose from the ashes, he took some of its blood. Afraid to drink the blood, he buried it. Later, his family, unsure if he was immortal or not, kills him, then has him revived to get him to lead them to the hidden blood (another case of the horrible things people do in the search for easy immortality). He discovers all this back in the U.S., even finding the phoenix again. The phoenix warns him not to drink the blood, and convinces Leon that even if he kills himself, society would not let him die because of his unusual circumstance as the first person to be brought back from the dead cybernetically. He would just be brought back again, perhaps even more “wrong” than the last time.

The phoenix trying to convince Leon not to drink it’s blood is interesting in the light of the ways the phoenix has used its blood in previous stories. In “Future,” it has Masato drink the blood so he does become immortal and live through the destruction of the world. In “Yamato,” it gives Ozuna enough blood to keep the king’s sacrifices alive longer than normal. In “Space,” it tricks Makimura into tricking its blood, causing him to be forever punished growing old then young then old again. So why does it so explicitly warn Leon against drinking the blood? It seems to see the blood as a special gift or as divine punishment. I imagine one could reread this series focusing exclusively on the phoenix as character and divine entity.

(Back in the story) as Leon’s family arrives, following him to get the blood, Leon burns the phoenix blood. His family are in disbelief, they want the immortality, but Leon replies: “The only problem is… once you’ve attained immortality… What reason is there to live?” (170) He returns back to that ongoing question of the series: “What kind of life should I lead? How can I live this life to its fullest?” (173) Oddly, Leon does not address the answer. By the next scene he is begging the doctor that revived him to let him die or make him fully a robot. He doesn’t want to be part human/part machine. He runs away with his robot love, and Tezuka takes a detour through his encounters with a group of smugglers that ends with Leon and his robot love being merged into a single robot body (by a kind of crazy doctor figure).

This is a good time to point out that, the chapters in “Resurrection” are all dated with years and they are not completely linear. Like the Phoenix series itself, this part of it jumps around in time. Leon’s story in 2482-2484 is interspersed with chapters in 3030, 3009, 2917, and finally 3344. In these chapters we see the story of Robita, a model of robot (that looks a lot like the robot from Lost in Space). This robot, though out-of-date, is beloved by children and others for a certain human aspect lacking from other robots. We see a group of these Robita’s wrongly blamed for a boy’s death. When that group is sentenced to be destroyed, the model collectively commits suicide. The only one that remains is a single model living on the moon, who is unable to join his fellows. In a struggle to show its portion of humanity (and that it is more than just programming), the Robita causes its owner’s death.

Tezuka plays out these parallel stories of Leon and the Robita so that, at first the connections are not clear. The Robita plotline starts with the mass robot suicide and then fills in the background on the events that lead to it (showing us that mass suicide multiple times with new context for each repetition). As Leon’s story moves forward, the Robita story moves back, and the connection becomes clear that Leon and his robot love became the original Robita, later mass-produced. The Robita’s claims of some portion of humanity are true, and the mass suicide becomes the fulfillment of Leon’s wish to die, a move against immortality, and also a robotic sign of self-determination.

Yet, in the final scene, the last Robita, alone on the moon, has a visitor. A rocket lands carrying Professor Saruta, the same Professor Saruta from “Future,” and the reader realizes that this Robita is the same robot seen with Saruta in that previous story.

In the end, how does Leon lead his life to the fullest? I don’t think he does. He abandons his humanity, then as a robot, struggles to maintain it, still not completely human or machine. In “Future” man is dehumanized by the computers he lets control the great underground cities, but here in “Resurrection” even becoming a robot does not destroy Leon’s humanity, though this humanity, that of the Robita’s, takes its ultimate form in suicide and murder. Is this a sign that man cannot escape his worse nature? Yet the final Robita, left alone on the moon, meets Saruta and decides to stay with him. Saruta laughs to himself: “All the women of earth treat me like a monster… and now… out here… a robot falls in love with me.” (316) The very last speech in the story points back to man’s better nature, even when encased in a robotic body.

As often as Tezuka’s work can, on the surface, appear simplified, black and white, with caricatured villains, he never offers any easy answers to the questions that rise in his work. The complications of the stories only grow as one rereads, leaving me to write these inconclusive posts as I work my way through a third or fourth reading of most of these stories. Like this series itself, which remained unfinished at Tezuka’s death, any clear thematic readings remain inconclusive, especially in this story.

As I noted above, the first scene where Leon is revived from his death are the most interesting scenes in the book. Here’s the first two pages of Leon revived:

Click for larger.

At first he unable to see anything at all except lines, almost like the static of a television. Then he comes face-to-face with his distorted view of people (the doctor, his mother, and others). Tezuka shows us Leon and his surroundings as Leon perceives them, stressing the disorientation and sheer terror Leon feels. In an attempt to fix this perceptual problem (people as objects like sandstone, Leon even tells us they feel like stone), the doctor works on him again (effectively killing and reviving him a second time). Which leads us to the following page:

Here Tezuka stresses Leon’s vertigo at coming back to consciousness, showing a wonderful sequence of panels where Leon is flipped back and forth before he is faced with a second, even more distressing view of the people around him.

This page shows Leon’s robot love, as she appears to everyone but Leon, thinking about Leon while she should be working. One can almost see the robot as a high school girl sitting at her desk thinking about a new boyfriend. Leon’s head floats above the robot as she thinks of him. To stress the robotic brain, Tezuka is actually representing Leon through an dense overlapping of the letter “A.”

I love this! Though personally a binary (01110111011) might have been a little more logical.

Next up: A detour into Volume 8′s “Robe of Feathers”, which is the next story in the series, but so short that Viz placed it at the end of Volume 8.

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 number of the ongoing themes of the series such as suffering, the transmigration of souls, karma, and religion as politics. Plus, it’s got a number of bravura visual displays by Tezuka. The story follows two protagonists, Gao, a one-armed criminal who becomes a sculptor and spiritual figure, and Akanemaru, a famous sculptor. The two men’s paths cross numerous times over the course of a lifetime, bookended by each becoming the cause of the physical maiming of the other. Early on Gao, then an outcast and killer, slashes Akanemaru’s arm, permanently damaging the hand he used for carving. Near the end, Akanemaru exposes Gao’s early crime to a wealthy patron and has Gao’s other arm cut off. In between the men go on differing journeys.

Akanemaru’s journey starts with his injury by Gao. In a nearby monastery he meditates and slowly comes back to sculpting despite his injury. He notes how conceited and overconfident he was and claims to have changed. For a time, he does. He creates sculpture for its beauty, for its own sake, devoting all his effort to it. Soon, though, a powerful lord forces him on a mission to sculpt the phoenix. Akanemaru is given three years to do it or else he will be killed, thus begins his travels to find visual evidence of the phoenix. As his three years ends, still having found no evidence of the phoenix, he carves a beautiful representation of the goddess of mercy using a woman companion as his model. This point in his story seems to be the apex of Akanemaru’s story, this work of extraordinary beauty which he creates for its own sake. The choice of the goddess of mercy is ironic given his later lack of mercy for Gao at their final encounter, an indication of his downward trajectory.

Dragged back to court Akanemaru is saved by another powerful man, who gives him access to a tapestry of the phoenix. The sculptor has a vision before the image, one of the most interesting scenes in the book. The phoenix reveals to Akanemaru the transmigration of souls through the sculptor’s own future (this is not indicated at the time, but by the end of the volume we understand this scene as his future lives). First a tiny sea creature, then a turtle, and then a small bird who finally meets the phoenix. Tezuka’s representations in this sequence are stylistically variable. The pages with the turtle are drawn with a certain realism, the turtle looks like a real turtle and has neither word nor thought balloons, while the bird pages show the bird as a Disney-esque little creature who speaks aloud. Tezuka never shies away from mixing styles to fit his needs, a trait both unusual and admirable in a comics artist. When representing statues, including the Buddha statue, or even discussing the religion, he uses a densely hatched style, which stands out greatly from the rest of the book’s images.

After his vision, Akanemaru can create his phoenix sculpture which leads him to be the head of a project to create a giant Buddha statue. Tezuka shows the sculptor’s attitude changing as he becomes more embroiled in the politics of the statue. His concern becomes, like many previous characters in the series, with his own immortality, taking the form of his memory living on through the statue (much like the king in “Yamato”). As drought hits the land and people are starving Akanemaru, unconcerned, continues his political sculpture, the Buddha, an emblem of the government’s use of religion as a controlling device. Akanemaru returns to his conceit and overconfidence. Finally, in a challenge to build gargoyles for the Buddha statue’s temple against Gao, now also a famous sculptor, he, realizing he is losing the competition, exposes Gao and his crimes. He is even the one who suggests the removal of Gao’s remaining arm. Akenamaru turns away from mercy, from art for its beauty, and he is punished for this (I assume this is why he is punished). He dies in a fire, and the phoenix tells him that he will never be reborn as a human again.

Gao’s journey takes a different trajectory. We see his early deformity–the result of his father slipping on rocks and dropping him just after his birth–and how he is made an outcast by his village. He turns into a killer, a bandit, unrepentant, blaming society. A woman becomes his catalyst for transition. He kidnaps her early on and forces her to live with him for a long time, before, tricked by his bandit companions, kills her. Over the course of this time, his nose slowly grows and becomes deformed and bumpy, placing him in line, once again, with the big-nosed Saruta’s of previous stories.

Captured as a killer, he is rescued and forced into servitude to a traveling monk. His spiritual transformation begins. The monk teaches him about the transmigration of souls. Gao blames society for how he turned out, but the monk blames karma: “You bear no responsibility for what you’ve become. The cycle of transmigration of souls is to blame.” (79) He further explains: “You may have been human once too perhaps millions of years ago… or in the distant future. The fact that you had to kill people and that you suffer with that hideous nose may be retribution for actions in your former life.” (86) This idea of “karmic retribution” points to the previous story “Space”, where Saruta was punished by the phoenix at the end, “Your face shall become ugly… and it shall remain so from generation to generation.” (320) With the cycle of rebirth and the circle of narratives in Phoenix, we can read Gao’s suffering as part of the karmic retribution for Saruta’s actions. This reading is further bolstered by a later vision of Gao’s where the phoenix shows him some of his future selves, including one who seems to be the Saruta of “Future”.

This concept does seem to negate the idea of personal responsibility. What is Gao’s responsibility if he is a killer because of a previous life’s actions? That’s a philosophical or theological discussion that I am not prepared to address. Perhaps this issue is one of the main themes in the series, not just how to live or make use of one’s life (see “Future” and “Yamato”), but the interplay of choice/fate and personal responsibility/karma.

The monk also directly addresses one of the other ongoing themes of Phoenix, the political use of religion. The importation of Buddhism into Japan was, as I understand it, largely a political act. Buddhism was used to help cement the control of the rulers. We see this in this story, and as directly noted by the monk: “Buddhism is only a vehicle for the authorities to deceive the people. And make them obedient and willing to pay heavy taxes.” (117). Aspects of this theme are seen in the political machinations behind the great Buddha statue that Akanemaru works on and will also be seen in future stories such as “Sun.”

After hearing the monk’s statements about this, Gao flees to a nearby village, where the people live in fear of evil spirits. In anger and desperation he carves a sculpture as a totem for them. He uses his anger and suffering to make art that is beneficent to the people. The monk tries to convince him that this is his role in life, as a sculptor.

Gao continues to endure much suffering during his life. He puts that suffering into his art, creating fearsome sculptured figures even while locked away in a dungeon. Eventually he comes to the point of the contest against Akanemaru. He has a vision. The phoenix shows him the suffering of his descendants. He ends up, as mentioned, getting his other arm chopped off and is let go. Gao becomes a kind of wandering mystic. He sits atop of hill and cries at the beauty of the world and the life that fills it, despite all the suffering. He decides to live as long as he can and to help other lives.

In the above, I neglected to fully explain the woman that becomes Gao’s companion. After killing her, Gao discovers that she was somehow a reincarnation (or something) of a ladybug he saved earlier in the book when he was being chased down as a killer. This is not clearly explained, since if it was a real reincarnation she would have no memory of her former life. I guess she is more a spirit. Anyway, this page takes place after he has killed her. Her body disappears in the snow, and he finds only a ladybug. Not only is this an interesting page layout, with the panels shrinking down the page as they focus in on the ladybug, but that out-of-panel, isolated image of Gao as he screams out her name is just crazy. The psychedelic, paisley pattern that fills in his silhouette is a shocking change and looks like he was covered in paint and is melting away.

Click for larger

This two page spread stopped me when I was first reading the book. Tezuka puts a lot of movement into these panels, though not of the character action type. The first page starts with the house, and then Akanemaru appears at the bottom. He moves up the page as the panels continue. Notice all the diagonals that also move up and across the page. Panel five finds us reading the word balloon that comes from the body and then moving down the page along with Akanemaru’s head (he imagines his own execution). This movement handily leads us to Akanemaru on the next page, now at the bottom of the page again. We follow back up the panel to the monk in the distance, then down the next panel as the monk approaches. Back up and down again for the last two panels to follow the characters and the words (as well as the dark shadows that point from the figures in the penultimate panel to the figure in the last panel). This up and down movement is punctuated by the “Bong” of a bell, a bell tolling for Akanemaru, perhaps in the “for whom the bell tolls” manner. The up and down movement of the panels echoes the oscillation of a bells sound, soft to loud to soft. Also notice the way the first and last panels are quite similar in composition.

This is just an example of the lush backgrounds Tezuka frequently uses as full page images. The dense, patterned, and realistic background is in contrast with the bare, abstracted rendering of Akanemaru as he travels. This is much like the examples McCloud uses in Understanding Comics of “masking.”

An example of Tezuka’s humor and cartoon sensibility. This looks right out of an old Warner Brothers cartoon or the like. I know I’ve seen a similar animates sequence before, where a giant snowball falls to the earth and, wham, the earth is covered with snow.

Next up: Volume 5 “Resurrection.”

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, other than the fact, that, yes, much of this story takes place in space. We are now in 2577 A.D. (Tezuka is careful to note the year at the beginning of most of these stories.) In the depths of space five astronauts are on their way to Earth in a trip that takes them many years. They sleep in special cryogenic chambers, taking turns navigating the ship. I’ll say for the record, right here, that the logic of most of the technology and the way these characters are aging makes no sense to me. I’ll chalk it up to this being a story where that’s just not important.

One of the astronauts, Makimura, seems to die while navigating, causing an accident and forcing everyone to abandon ship. Floating through space in tiny individual escape capsules, the group can talk to each other and discuss the idea that perhaps their comrade was murdered. They also discover that Makimura’s capsule is following them, though who is in it, they cannot tell. After many months of travel (another example of what must be a horrible event getting glossed over by Tezuka, not at all dissimilar to the living burial in “Yamato”) two astronauts, Nana and Saruta, as well as the Makimura capsule end up on a strange planet. Throughout this section and while on the planet, we learn, through various embedded narrators, the story of Makimura and how he become immortal, but uniquely forced to grow old then young then old again in an endless cycle.

The previous stories (and most, if not all, of the others) have external narrators. Narrative text from a character outside the story is used to fill in information like historical information. Generally we would associate that with the voice of the author. “Space” is actually narrated by Saruta — another, third, character with that name and a big nose. At one point during “Dawn”, Saruta is bitten by many bees and his large nose becomes all bumpy and ugly. By the end of this story, the Saruta of “Space” also becomes afflicted with a large, bumpy nose (did Tezuka hate big noses that much?). Why Tezuka chose to use the internal first person narration I am not sure. Saruta does not provide any emotional register nor does he provide information that could not be given through the external narration. It might be more successful if Tezuka placed Saruta as an embedded narrator where we see him telling the story to someone.

Makimura’s story, and the parsing out of that story, is the primary focus of “Space.” His story is, early on, obscured by a red herring mystery of his “murder” by one of the other astronauts. This allows Tezuka to fill in background information on the astronauts, primarily to tell us how the female astronaut Nana really loved Makimura from the beginning. Tezuka makes use of a number of narrative levels in this story. That is: narrators telling us a story within which another character narrates a story. At one point we have Saruto telling the story of himself, being told a story by the phoenix who tells him a story about Makimura, in which Makimura tells a story to his alien wife. You could make diagrams, but I’ll restrain myself.

In the end, Makimura was tricked into drinking the phoenix’s blood, causing immortality but in the way mentioned above where he is constantly growing older then younger. The phoenix seems to be the one enacting this on him as a punishment for killing a large number of aliens (including his alien wife). The planet to which the surviving astronauts have been led (by the phoenix it seems) is some kind of prison planet. This story finds the phoenix acting less as guide or guardian but as punisher, as the vengeful god. Makimura becomes an immortal prisoner on a harsh planet, a kind of hell, which seems much more Christian then Buddhist (though again, I am no expert). Seeing the phoenix as a punishing, disciplinary entity is a change from the previous incarnations, though it is fitting that, once again, it’s all about time and cycles of time. Makimura’s life becomes it’s own endless circle. Like the bid for immortality in other stories, this puts Makimura outside the natural cycle of death and rebirth.

Time, in general, is much less linear in “Space” than in the other stories, acting in a way like a detective story, where the first level of narration acts as vehicle to create a reconstruction of events previous to the beginning of the story.

I should also mention that this is the first time the phoenix is seen in space, far away from Earth, pointing to the cosmic nature of its existence, as discussed in “Future.”

The character of Nana, a female astronaut, does point to some of the issues with women one can find in Tezuka’s work. She is totally defined by her mostly unexplained love for Makimura. In the end, she sacrifices her life to care for him. The self-sacrificing woman is also found in “Future” where the alien, Tamami, sacrifices herself in an attempt to help the world. Kajika in “Yamato” is also sacrificed, though not by choice. All are also primarily accessories to the male protagonists. Nana seems the worst of the lot, though. She has no character at all, and serves as a vehicle for the men to fight over: of the three male astronauts besides Makimura, two profess love for her and become violent when rejected. This subject deserves more attention as my reading continues.

One thing that is really impressive with this story is the way Tezuka uses page layouts. He has a number of virtuoso sequences from which I would like to offer some examples.

Tezuka cleverly lays out this page so that the space of the page and the location of the panels is analogous to the space of the space ship. He starts with the four astronauts in separate panels, then slowly brings them together into the single panel of the last row. On the left we see the captain climbing down a ladder as he moves down the page. Similarly, on the right we see the other astronaut running down a passage as he moves down the page. Also note that he connects all the panels together, creating a single multi-part panel that encloses the whole page and could be read in a variety of nontraditional paths. This closed-in space works to evoke the closed-in and finite space of the ship.

Ten pages later we find a similar yet different layout. The astronauts are now in their individual escape pods. They are cut off from each other in space, though still able to speak through radio. In this scene (which goes on for some time) each astronaut is given his own row on the page. Each panel in that row is connected to the next, yet the rows themselves are completely separate, the gutter has even been increased to further separate them. Because of this separation the reader is forced to read top to bottom, left to right. Tezuka teaches us to do that with this first page of the sequence. The captain gets each member to sound off, getting us to read from his row with the name call-outs down to the individuals’ responding. As the members of the group become separated (two of them at least) the rows are dropped off.

Click for larger view.

A few pages later, the characters are talking and thinking about the missing Makimura. Tezuka shifts the layouts once again, this time using a connected series of visual thought balloons. The different characters’ thoughts are traced across the page (the sequence starts on the previous page). The bottom line shows Nana’s thoughts, and the top one starts with the captain’s and twists around into the middle, which is a little more confusing. We get a few of the characters mixing together in the middle. It’s taken me a while to realize that the middle is Saruta’s thoughts, since it’s his head we see in the center (just to the right of the book’s gutter). Nana’s line of thought goes off the page; it continues onto the next page. This sequence is one of the ways Tezuka alters the structure of a page and panels to mark off narration outside the main timeline.

This portion of a page shows another way Tezuka demarcates levels of narration. These borderless, amorphous panels represent narration by Nana to one of her astronaut colleagues. The return to more regular rectangular panels then indicates the return to the present and primary level of narration.

Just another example of Tezuka shifting his style a bit to emphasize action.

Next: Volume 4 “Karma.”