Lost Osamu Tezuka Manga Layouts Discovered and Set for Book
A wonderful find for manga history: the publisher Rittorsha announced a new book, Tezuka Osamu Missing Pieces, collecting previously unreleased layouts and drafts from the legendary Osamu Tezuka. It is due out on November 14.
The materials only came to light this past summer. While organizing documents at its art storage facility in Saitama Prefecture, Tezuka Productions discovered two cardboard boxes of pencil layouts in June, with panels, characters, and dialogue all sketched out. The company believes they date to around 1973, a difficult period when Tezuka was dealing with the bankruptcy of his anime studio.
Tezuka created the layouts to pitch story ideas to editors, and two of the three were never published. One imagines a powerful computer reborn as a feral, wildcat like boy, while another follows a young man unraveling the mystery of his brother’s death on a Swiss mountain.
The third is an early prototype for his 1975 short story The Lowly Angel, about a man who takes care of a young girl.
Beyond these, the book gathers drafts and sketches from other Tezuka works, including the short manga Mansion OBA and materials that had only previously surfaced in scattered bonus publications.
My take: Discoveries like this are pure treasure for fans, offering a rare glimpse into how the God of Manga worked out his ideas. I would love to see those abandoned pitches, since even Tezuka’s unfinished concepts tend to be fascinating.
