Manga is not an isolated phenomenon. Authors like Tezuka, Tatsumi and Taniguchi – all of which are amongst my favourites – were influenced by authors from far overseas. In Tezuka’s case, artists from the United States had a tremendous influence on his stylistic idiom. Taniguchi on the other hand, was influenced more by the Franco-Belgian school of comic strips, or bande dessinée.
One of the greatest artists in Europe’s bande dessinée is Jean Giraud, better known as Moebius. You can watch a nice documentary about his work on Google video. Moebius’ art is as original as it is stunningly beautiful. He is a master of form and composition, and his drawings can breathe movement like no other. He is as much a author of sequential art is he is an artist that is at home in galleries and museums.
One of his works that is relatively little known (but closest to my heart) is the text-free tale ‘40 days dans le désert B‘, here offered as 40 days in the desert B. This short piece features all that is dear to me in Moebius: incredible line-art, fantastic imagery, dream-like and poetic scenes and the ever-present themes of rebirth and transformation. I don’t begin to think that I understand what this little gem is all about, and I fear that nothing short of trepanning and unhealthy amounts of fasting would bring me any closer. But I don’t mind. I revel in the sheer madness of it all; the stilled movement of otherworldly vistas. Part dream, part hallucinogenic mind-fuck; part art book, part comic strip: this is one little gem that I am glad not to have missed out of. I hope that some of you would at the very least take a look at it, and maybe check out some more of Moebius’ work, if you didn’t know him already. And if you did, I hope you’ve discovered something new.
For this release, I tried to clean and improve some scans that I found floating around (by I don’t know who) and scanned the cover anew. I’ve got a shitty scanner, so don’t hold that against me. I hope at least some of you like this. Let me know if you did.
Download: Mediafire | FileFactory | MegaUpload
You can find more great works by Moebius in this MediaFire folder.
With the second and final volume of Nextworld, not only this story comes to a close, but we see the completion of Tezuka’s “science fiction trilogy”, comprising Lost World, Metropolis and Nexworld. These stories, that saw publication between 1948 and 1951, are iconic for the young Tezuka.
Published in 1951, and last in Tezuka’s “science fiction trilogy”, Nextworld is already leaps and bounds beyond Lost World in quality and maturity. All right, this still can’t hold a candle to many of his later works, but Nextworld is very interesting still, serving as a cautionary tale of using science for the wrong reasons and what unchecked warring could do to the human race. It was later adapted into the anime movie Fumoon.
The first of Osamu Tezuka’s "science fiction trilogy"was Lost World. It was followed in 1949 by the legendary Metropolis. Published only a single year after its predecessor, the progress Tezuka made as an artist is very noticeable. Metropolis was a huge hit in Japan, and inspired many young artists to explore the career of a mangaka.
Lost World is interesting for a number of reasons. First off, it enables us to appreciate the development of the skills of Tezuka. Drawn when he was nineteen, the quality of the art is expectedly inferior to his later works. But already one can appreciate some of the sensitivities for which he would later become famous. Try not to be put off by the childish nature of the story and art; it gets better in the end.
Yeah, I know page numbers are all that, but do we really need them if I name the pages after the corresponding page numbers? Why am I even asking this? Because editing scans would be a whole lot quicker if I didn’t have to work my way around those dangling numbers.
Here I offer you the first of 23 volumes in a series of Tezuka Osamu goodness. The one that brought him fame in Japan and eventually the wide world over: Tetsuwan Atomu, or “Mighty Atom”, better (although erroneously) known as Astro Boy. I’ll endeavour to bring you the remainder of this impressive series over the coming months.
