The importance of Osamu Tezuka in the manga story is enormous. He defined the aesthetic of this type of comic and expanded its popularity in Japan. Recognized with the title of ‘manga god’, Tezuka is the author of a vast body of work that is the result of almost 50 years of career (more than 150,000 pages, according to experts) and also very varied, since it touches on very diverse genres.
Author of works as well known as Astroboy, Adolf or Buddha, Tezuka’s work is enormously popular in our country. However, this small album, which does not reach 200 pages, was still unpublished. Until today. Comic Planet finally publishes La fortaleza de papel, with a translation by specialist Marc Bernabé. Its publication is great news not only for manga fans but for any reader with an interest in comics or who wants to know a story that, despite being presented in a light and even comical way at many times, contains a crude portrait of how a young Japanese like Tezuka lived through the American bombing of the country’s main cities at the end of World War II.
La fortaleza de papel compiles seven semi-autobiographical stories published between 1970 and 1977. The first of them, Diary of a jerk, humorously portrays Tezuka’s first professional attempts in the world of comics first and then animated cinema. The author presents himself as a candid, clumsy and extremely shy guy, whose only goal is to find a magazine to publish his pages. This is a comic story, narrated with a dynamism typical of animated films –the influence of Walt Disney is noticeable–, and yet it hides an acid look at the world of comics that is not banal at all.
The second story is the one that gives the collection its title and is surely the most brilliant of all. Paper Fortress was originally published in September 1974 to commemorate Osamu Tezuka’s 30th anniversary as a cartoonist, or if you prefer, as a mangaka. The protagonist of this story is Tetsuro Osamu, a reflection of the author himself, who in 1944, in the middle of the war, is mobilized at only 16 years old but he is more concerned with drawing manga than with the conflict that is ravaging his country. He is portrayed without any leniency: he is cowardly, always hungry and incapable of following military discipline.
But the greatness of this little story is that after its first and fun layer, Tezuka slides a humanist message and a forceful criticism of the war. Amid humor, Tezuka peppers his story with nightmarish images to describe the horrors of war and his misunderstanding for getting there.
Always oscillating between the tragic and the comic, in the stories that Tezuka compiled The Paper Fortress captures the destruction of the city of Osaka, the hunger of the war and the harsh post-war period that followed. He also recounts his evolution as a cartoonist and his unwavering decision to dedicate himself body and soul to this profession, drawing, literally under the bombs.
The difficulty of eating is the focus of the third story, The Hunger Blues, while The Story of Tokiw-Sô describes Tezuka’s life in a Tokyo apartment block where he lived and worked, houses that later served as residence for other manga authors.
The compilation ends with a few pages of an unfinished work, Dotsuitare (Finish Him) where Tezuka is proud to publish his first long story in book form, The New Treasure Island (1947). The book was a success and marked the beginning of Tezuka’s career as well as the birth of popular enthusiasm for the manga. One of the qualities of the book was the great dynamism that Tezuka managed to print to the scenes, relying on cinematographic codes. In 1984, the author completely redrew the work and that version is the one included in the Anthology published by Planeta Cómic.
In this last story, he is seen giving this album to Fukujirô Yokoi, an author who was one of his great influences, and he reproaches him for not doing another type of work, more ambitious, with satirical elements. The truth is that Tezuka will embrace a more adult work from the second half of the 1960s and that from the Vampires series, for example, he will integrate the influence of the so-called gekiga, a more adult type of manga.
