Our Classic Manga Wish List

It might not feel like it, but right now we're living in a golden age! A golden age of English releases of classic Japanese manga, that is. The pile of localized old-school manga seems to get taller every day, with venerable titles like Hisashi Eguchi's Stop! Hibari-Kun, Tetsuya Chiba's Tomorrow's Joe, and Tsukasa Hojo's Cat's Eye and Cityhunter getting new releases and straining bookshelves already filled with earlier releases. Back in 2019 Seven Seas published Space Battleship Yamato after Devilman and Captain Harlock in 2018. Kodansha's Queen Emeraldas release was reviewed right here. Viz Communications' Golgo 13 and Dr. Slump were almost twenty years ago, and Tokyopop's edition of Shotaro Ishinomori's 1960s Cyborg 009 manga dates from 2005. Dark Horse's first flipped release of Tezuka's Mighty Atom/Astro Boy was back in 2002. Vertical's lovely set of Keiko Takamiya's To Terra (aka Towards The Terra) saw print here in '07, when sales figures for that title echoed the then-prevailing wisdom that "old manga simply won't sell" in our market. This doesn't seem to be the case any more. For instance, the 2022 Seven Seas release of Ishinomori's Kamen Rider manga already commands collector's prices.

Udon's handsome Rose Of Versailles release was a long time coming, but worth the wait. Viz recently saw the light and re-released Rumiko Takahashi classics Maison Ikkoku and Urusei Yatsura in new editions with new translations. Montreal's Drawn & Quarterly has made a cottage industry out of Shigeru Mizuki's Kitaro, while DMP released significant works by Osamu Tezuka including Princess Knight, Wonder 3, and Tezuka's version of Crime And Punishment. Even DC Comics got into the vintage manga act with their release of Jiro Kutawa's bold take on Batman, while Fantagraphics seems to have cornered the market on big hardcover releases of Moto Hagio's shojo masterpieces like The Poe Clan and Heart Of Thomas. Spanish publisher Fanfare/Ponent Mon is putting Hideo Azuma's essential Disappearance Diary back into English language print. Meanwhile, Ryan Holmberg, PhD, is the go-to guy bringing experimental, avant-garde, buried-trash-treasure Japanese comics to North American audiences, localizing Yoshiharu Tsuge, early Tezuka, Suehiro Maruo, and Sanpei Shirato's Legend Of Kamui! And only recently Kodansha announced they were putting Tezuka's Phoenix back in print, while Manga Mavericks will be releasing Yumiko "Candy Candy" Igarashi's The Sword Of Paros, the first Igarashi manga to make it over here in English. 

Like we said, if you want to wallow in old Japanese comics in English, your time is now. But if we know anything about Japanese comics, we know that beyond this mountain, there's always another mountain, always more titles waiting for release or re-release. To further immanentize this particular eschaton, we reached out to the smartest, handsomest, and hippest people we know - the readers of Let's Anime - and we asked them to name some of the vintage Japanese manga they'd love to see released in our language. The enthusiastic responses range from the obvious to the obscure, from the family-friendly to the absolutely not for children, from trash to treasure; in short, the wonderful world of Japanese comics. So let’s take a look at what they recommend!

Honey Honey

Let’s just get this one out of the way first since everyone knows it’s coming. It's way past time Hideko Mizuno's The Wonderful Adventure of Honey Honey manga was published in English. Mizuno brought girls' manga away from classroom romances and into fantasy, myth, adventure, and youth culture, and we'll be seeing her set that world on and in Fire soon, but what we here at Let's Anime really want to see is Honey Honey, the rollicking around-the-world chase about a girl, a cat, a gemstone, and the balance of power in Europe prior to World War One. Honey Honey was serialized in Ribon in 1966-67 and released in two volumes by Asahi Sonorama's Sun Comics, and later in the 00's by Futabasha. On this side of the Pacific all we got was a CBN broadcast of the 1981 MIC anime show, but someday Honey will return to our shores.

Prefectural Earth Defense Force

Koichiro Yasunaga’s zany pop culture high school SF comedy-action-comedy Prefectural Earth Defense Force had a two-year run in mid 1980s Shonen Sunday, detailing the adventures of a gang of low-rent hero teens versus an inept crew of wanna-be world conquerors. You might know the 1986 OVA, but the manga deserves some English language love!

Blazing Transfer Student

Another Shonen Sunday title, Honō no Tenkōsei (炎の転校生) or Blazing Transfer Student was our first look at the work of Kazuhiko Shimamoto, when we got to see the 1992 Gainax OVA, an out of print classic about a new student at a school where disputes are settled by ridiculous logic-trainwreck arguments or in the boxing ring. Shimamoto's gutsy, loopy manga style betrays his love of Shotaro Ishinomori cinematics and Go Nagai impact, a melodramatic look brought to life in the live action version of his semi-autobiographical manga Blue Blazes. In fact, why isn't Blue Blazes in English already? The manga began in 2007 and is still going today! We'll have to be satisfied with Shimamoto's salaryman superhero manga Hero Company coming soon from Manga Mavericks!

Battlefield

Leiji Matsumoto's Battlefield series began in Big Comic in the mid 1970s and continued on and off for the next thirty years in Weekly Shonen Sunday, COM, Play Comic and Big Comic Original, under titles like "Battlefield, "The Cockpit," "Heavy Ballistics," and "Hard Metal." Leiji's love for WWII weapons and equipment is on full display as legions of hapless grunts on every side of the conflict find themselves knee-deep in the bloody, muddy confusion of war, where sometimes the difference between life and death could be chance, fate, or preventative maintenance. Battlefield's only English language appearance is a short story in the back of Fredrik Schodt's Manga Manga, and that was more than forty years ago!

Locke The Superman

I managed to wring an entire Let's Anime column asking why Yuki Hijiri's long-running Locke The Superman manga, featured in a range of stories across a range of publications, has yet to appear in English print. And I'm still asking why, because his stylish SF ESPer action blurs the line between Star Wars, the X-Men, and shojo manga, inspiring a high-tech outer space aesthetic that still informs manga today. Of course Hijiri had an immense manga career beyond Locke, adapting anime properties like Space Battleship Yamato and Fighting General Daimos while rendering rock legends Rod Stewart, Billy Joel and the Go-Gos into manga form. ALL of this should be in English.

Gekiga Roadshow features by Gosaku Ota

Speaking of manga that demands an English translation, Dynamic Pro manga-ka Gosaku Ota churned out a surprising variety of strips for the magazine Gekiga Roadshow based on popular American films. I'm talking about Bad News Bears manga, Wilderness Family manga, and Blazing Saddles manga. Every 70s kid needs this whether they know it or not. What's Ota been up to lately? Well, he spent time illustrating junk science comics about how white sugar rots the brain, and sadly passed away from COVID-related illness in 2022.

Cobra: The Psychogun

Buichi Terasawa's far-future adventures of the man with the psycho-gun, Cobra, began in Shonen Jump in 1982, thrilling readers with Terasawa's vision of a Heavy Metal inspired universe filled with bodacious space babes and nasty space criminals, all after Cobra's hide. After switching publishers from Shueisha to Kadokawa the series was retitled Cobra The Space Pirate, but continued intermittently in Comic Flapper until Terasawa's death in 2023. Terasawa was always pushing the creative envelope with his art and 1995's Cobra: The Psychogun was completely rendered using digital tools for its appearance in Super Jump.

Golgo 13

Manga legend Takao Saito came out of the gekiga movement and built an empire out of quiet, dangerous men, sudden acts of intense manga violence, and using the heat from his cigarettes to dry the white-out on his manga pages. The final product of this hard boiled approach is Golgo 13, the most feared assassin in the world. Since Golgo's debut in a fateful 1968 issue of Big Comic, 220 volumes of Golgo 13 have appeared, roughly sixty thousand pages, only a small percentage of which have been published in English. Saito's own Lead Publishing entered the market in the late 1980s with now-rare volumes with titles like Ice Lake Hit and Into The Wolves Lair, along with some 32 page newsstand type comics to capitalize on Golgo 13's NES game. Viz picked up the license and in the 00s released a 13 volume "Best Of" featuring Golgo's greatest hits (pun intended) and supplementary editorial material by manga professional Carl G. Horn. Since then Golgo 13’s English-language whereabouts are unknown. Perhaps he likes it that way, but we do not.

Dirty Pair

Adapted from episodes of the Sunrise TV anime, Monthly Shonen's Dirty Pair manga by Kazunari Ikeda appeared from June until November 1985. We've seen Dirty Pair drawn by Yasuhiko Yasuhiro, we've seen Adam Warren's Dirty Pair, we've seen the Tsukasa Dokite version on TV, we've had Dirty Pairs thrown at us in all configurations, but it looks to me like Ikeda perfectly nailed that mid 80s aesthetic. These comics haven't even been collected in Japan, apparently Ikeda dropped out of sight soon afterwards, let's make something happen here, WWWA!

Area 88

Phantom Burai

Several respondents mentioned Kaoru Shintani titles. Back in the 1980s, his tragic jet fighter saga Area 88 was one of the first manga to get localized and distributed in America by a major American comic book publisher; trust me, this was a big deal at the time. Shogakukan and Eclipse soon parted ways and Area 88 was published by Shogakukan's Viz Media directly for the last six issues, sporting photo covers of military aircraft instead of Shintani artwork. Viz cancelled the title at 42 and the series hasn't appeared in English since, leaving the series unfinished here. Come on Viz, bring Shin Kazama home. An assistant to Leiji Matsumoto, Shintani's artwork is filled with the clean-line beauty shots of military and SF hardware he was doing for Matsumoto, and that's evident in all Shintani's work. His first hit was Phantom Burai, running in Weekly Shonen Sunday from 1978-84. The adventures of F-4 Phantom pilots flying for the JSDF out of Misawa, Burai was scripted by former JSDF pilot Sho Fumimura. Another Shintani reader suggestion is Queen 1313, pronounced "double thirteen", which appeared in My Anime from 1981-85 and is the tale of the free-trader starship QUEEN1313 as they trade through outer space. Other Shintani suggestions include the rollicking corporate teenager story Cleopatra DC and Desert Rose, starring the dedicated commando Marie and her worldwide anti-terror campaigns. Shintani has enjoyed tremendous Japanese success but most of his work remains unseen here, and we hereby petition the powers that be to change this state of affairs.

Firefighter! Daigo Of Fire Company M

Daigo's a hot-headed 18 year old who thinks he knows everything there is to know about firefighting. Like most 18 year olds with this attitude, he's wrong, and he finds out through 20 volumes of Firefighter! Daigo of Fire Company M by Masahito Soda, which put out fires in Shonen Sunday from 1995 until 1999 and sparked subsequent short anime films, TV dramas, and a recent manga sequel. Viz released the original Daigo manga in English in 2002, and we think the time is hot for a reprint!

 

Shota's Sushi

Can a mom and pop sushi joint in Hokkaido compete against the big chains - even after illness and injury strike the family? It's time for teen itamae Shota to step up and save the family business! Daisuke Terasawa's Shota no Sushi had a five year run in mid 90s Weekly Shonen and as yet has never been served to sushi-starved English language customers!

Kyomu Senki

Unfolding on Earth and in far-off galaxies! In the past, the future, and across dimensions! The final battle between light and darkness begins, has begun, will begin shortly in Ken Ishikawa's Kyomu Senki, or "Records Of Nothingness", a sprawling re-imagining of Ishikawa's earlier works into one cosmos-spanning saga, incorporating works like Tiger of 5000 Light Years, Skull Killer Jacki-Oh, Evil Demon King Explosion, Honnoji Temple Ninja Techniques - Kashin Koji's Sorcery, Shinrashomon, Dogra Chronicles, and Kyomu Senshi Miroku. Kyomu Senki appeared in Futabasha's Action Comics from 1999 to 2000. Apart from Ishikawa's Getter Robo Go manga, published in America by Viz as "Venger Robo," work by this titan of SF-mecha action manga has been thin on the ground here.

Cooking Papa

Kazumi Araiwa is an outstanding cook, but he doesn't want his job to know this big, imposing, rough looking guy knows his way around a kitchen. He manages to keep his secret and keep his family well fed in the manga Cooking Papa by Tochi Ueyama, which began in Kodansha's Morning in 1985 and... let me see here... the manga is still running! The Eiken anime series, in contrast, had a mere 151 episodes. This manga's motto is "Cooking Is Fun!" We here at Let's Anime agree, and we say it's way past Cooking Papa time here.

Georgie!

Georgie! Mann Izawa and Yumiko Igarashi's Georgie! is the story of Georgie! She's an orphan raised in Australia who travels to England to find her true family, accompanied by her adoptive brothers, who both may harbor more than brotherly feelings for Georgie! The manga appeared from 1982 to 1984 in Shogakukan's Shōjo Comic. Discotek released the TMS anime series from 1983 here in the West on Blu-Ray,  and the show is also available on some streaming platforms, but so far the English language manga world has not been blessed with Georgie!

Natsuko's Sake

Natsuko Saeki quits her Tokyo ad agency job, returns to her family business, and takes on the challenge of making the best sake in Japan! Natsuko's Sake tackled the problems of women moving into traditionally male occupations, as well as the underlying structural and agricultural issues facing the sake industry. This 12 volume manga series by Akira "First Love Scandal" Oze ran in Kodansha's Weekly Morning from 1988-91 and has been called the "masterpiece of sake manga," inspiring a Fuji-TV drama series, the production of which started years in advance because they actually planted the rice they were going to harvest for the sake in the show. Now that's dedication. Twelve volumes of Natsuko's Sake are out there, and none of them are in English.

Ai to Makoto

Can love blossom between the high-class daughter of a respected family and a scarred delinquent from a broken home, both tangled in struggles between youth gangs, political rivals, and right-wing machinations? That's the story of Ai and Makoto in Ai to Makoto, the Ikki "Tomorrow's Joe" Kajiwara scripted manga drawn by Takumi Nagayasu that ran for 16 volumes worth of tragic melodrama in mid 1970s Weekly Shonen. Plenty of live-action adaptations and a reputation as a "masterpiece of the Showa era" prove this story appeals to wider audiences, why not let English-language readers enjoy this?

various Goblin Moriguchi works

Former Toshio Maeda assistant Goblin Moriguchi's work can charitably be described as "insane metal murder manga," cheerfully transgressive works of lurid, shrieking gore single-handedly dragging manga back down into the gutter. I dare any American publisher to put this work into print. I DOUBLE dare them.

Mad Bull 34

In 1985 Weekly Young Jump exploded as "Sleepy" John Estes and his new NYPD partner Daizaburo "Eddie" Ban began their two-man assault on crime. Carbines, shotguns, axe handles, pistols, bayonets, knives, brass knuckles, and a submachine gun, along with rocket launchers, explosives, and the pile-driver fists of Estes himself, made the 34th precinct a war zone, and among the criminal community Estes' nickname became "Mad Bull." Written by Lone Wolf & Cub legend Kazuo Koike and delineated by the luridly detailed penwork of Noriyoshi Inoue, Mad Bull 34 smashed its way through seven volumes of late 80s manga adventures in the war zone of what NYC was like in the popular imagination of the time. Why not let NYC enjoy this manga for itself?

Sasori aka Scorpion

In 1970 Toru Shinohara began a manga serial in Shogakukan's Big Comic about an unjustly imprisoned woman who embarks on a bloody trail of revenge against all who have wronged her. Sasori, or "Scorpion," would go on to inspire a series of live action films starring Meiko Kaji as Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion, popular here with film buffs and exploitation hounds, all of whom would love to buy these comics, hint hint.

 

Godzilla manga through the ages

Speaking of movie stars, they don’t come any bigger than Godzilla. When we think of Godzilla comics, we think, of course, of the Marvel Godzilla comic book from the 1970s, a Herb Trimpe-penned romp that put Godzilla into the Marvel Universe and brought a level of smashy fun to a line that was already creaking under the weight of its own continuity. But in Japan Godzilla has been a manga star since the 1950s, with the big G starring in dozens and dozens of manga adaptations across a wide variety of publications, adventures, and art styles for decades. It's high time our scaly hero's Showa-era manga adventures were brought to English audiences!

Chie The Brat, aka Downtown Story

Jarinko Chie, or Chie The Brat, or Downtown Story as Futabasha and TMS would like us to call it, is Etsumi Haruki's manga about cranky Chie Takemoto, growing up in a rough part of Osaka constantly having to solve the problems caused by her chronically under-employed dad who spends half his money on gambling and alcohol. The other half? He just squanders meaninglessly. Haruki's Chie manga started in Action in 1978 and ran for nineteen solid years, selling thirty million copies of collected volumes, and never once making it into English. Isao Takahata's anime, on the other hand, is available here from Discotek.

 

Wild 7

Kilroy Was Here by Styx and Mikiya Mochizuki

Mikiya Mochizuki, sometimes working under the pseudonym "M. Stryker," produced a mountain of manga during his career, drawing war manga, cop manga, auto racing manga, soccer manga, and manga based on the Styx album "Kilroy Was Here" and its hit single "Mr. Roboto" for Shogakukan's magazine "FM Recopal," because of course. His most popular series was Wild 7, the hard as nails story of some hard as nails reformed-convict biker cops using their motorcycles and a wide variety of powerful firearms to wage a war on crime. Wild 7 ran for ten years in Shonen King and inspired a live action TV series that was cancelled because it was too violent for Japanese TV, let that one sink in for a minute. Wild 7 got an English language release from Bay Area publisher Comics One, but when they vanished without a trace in 2005, the adventures of our dirty seven were interrupted. Someone grab this license, get the motor running, and head out on the Wild 7 highway!

 

 

Ambassador Magma

Part of Osamu Tezuka's mid-60s manga masterpiece speedrun, Ambassador Magma's robot rocket family and their battle against the emperor of the universe first appeared in Shonen Monthly in 1965, with a live-action P-Productions teleseries following the next year. Legendary in the US as "Space Giants," the spectre of litigation has tied up the show here for decades. An overworked Tezuka had staff ghostwrite the back half of the manga series, which leans less "monster" and more "weird alien" and "existential crisis" than the TV show. Apart from an 80s OVA series starring a dog that barks "blarg," we've been deprived of this electronic space family for decades, and it's way past Magma manga time.

Violence Jack

Go Nagai's Cutey Honey and Devilman have made the jump into English, but Nagai's Violence Jack, the story of a destroyed Japan descending into darkness and savagery where only the giant jack-knife of Violence Jack can mete out justice to the lawless, has yet to appear in English language comics. 38 volumes of Violence Jack have appeared since his 1973 introduction in Weekly Shonen, Monthly Shonen, and Weekly Goraku, spawning OVAs, novels, and sequel manga including 2021's Violence Jack 20XX.

Mazinger Z

Koji can swim in the sky, he can fly beneath the sea, in his robot man Mazinger Z. Now why can't we get Go Nagai's Mazinger Z manga in English? Everyone involved is leaving money on the table here, because this would sell like crazy. Is it because Shueisha first published Mazinger Z in Shonen Jump, and then Kodansha later published Mazinger Z in TV Magazine? They've both published Mazinger Z collections, somebody get cracking and get this out in English already, we're dyin' here.

 

Mitsuteru Yokoyama's Giant Robo, Tetsujin 28-go, and Babel 2

Speaking of giant robots and manga, Mitsuteru Yokoyama's Tetsujin 28-go is a foundational figure in the wild world of mechanical monster heroes, and not only are we the poorer for lacking this work in English, we are absolutely crippled by a lack of any English language version of any of Yokoyama's immense body of manga whatsoever. Yokoyama gave us magic ninjas, psychic teens, super robots, and magical girls, and single-handedly made historical manga a top selling category. Put Giant Robo in English, publish Babel II in English, give us Witch Sally in English, get Mars and Romance Of The 3 Kingdoms and Ninja Akakage in English already. It is way past Yokoyama O'Clock.

Prince Planet aka Planet Boy Papi

The manga/anime field was growing in 1964 and Mitsuteru Yokoyama figured he could put together a crew to help market their work across the wide world of merchandising and licensing. That's when Yokoyama and four other artists started Hikari Productions. Hideoki Inoue was one of that Hikari crew and Planet Boy Papi, or Yusei Shonen Papi, or Prince Planet, was Inoue's most popular series, based on an original concept by "Shoichiro Yoshikura," a pseudonym for five authors. Papi was a multi-media franchise with a TCJ anime series and a Glico candy contract and toys, records, merchandising, all driven by Inoue's Papi manga serialized in Kobunsha's Shonen in 1965 and '66. That Papi manga would look great in English, and we here at Let's Anime have already taken the first steps in making this happen. Now it's up to the Glico Candy Company, or some other corporate entity, to take over and give North America the Prince Planet comics they desperately need.

This has merely been a sample of the unreleased Japanese comics that wait patiently for North American releases. You probably have a few favorites waiting in limbo yourself that we overlooked. Well, it’s our intention to let this Let’s Anime be a call to arms, a stirring battle cry for everyone with the ear of Japanese publishers, a line of credit at a reputable printing company, some translators on speed dial, and a few good distribution deals to keep the classic manga localization train fully loaded with more classic manga. I want to holler a big THANK YOU to everyone who chimed in at our Facebook group with suggestions! Your recommendations led me on a deep research dive into manga I’d barely heard of, or never knew existed in the first place – and that, my friends, is where the magic happens. Thank you again, and I'll see you in the funny classic manga pages!


-Dave Merrill

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across the leijiverse

Leiji Matsumoto: Essays On The Manga And Anime Legend
McFarland & Co.
Editors Helen McCarthy and Darren-Jon Ashmore

Leiji Matsumoto isn't as well known in the English speaking anime-fan world as, say, Osamu Tezuka or Hayao Miyazaki. Tezuka’s manga career impacted every facet of the Japanese industry, and his animation aired across America for decades, while Miyazaki’s Academy Award-winning films have become their own aesthetic, a byword for the global reach of Japanese animation as serious cinema. Both are names any lazy entertainment media editor will drop into a headline for maximum clickbait value.

But Leiji? In America his most successful work was the syndicated TV cartoon Star Blazers, the localized Space Battleship Yamato. This series had the bad luck to hit an audience distracted by toy-commercial cartoons starring transforming robots. And yet, Leiji Matsumoto had undeniable impact here in North America. The film based on his Galaxy Express 999 manga was the first non-kiddie anime movie to get a national theatrical rollout. His artistic vision inspired American comics based on animated series that never aired in the States. His predilection for willowy, mysterious blondes ran rampant across syndicated cartoon television, the children's section of your local video rental, and the TVs of your local anime clubs - only Russ Meyer has had a larger impact on the visual portrayal of specific body types of women in the media. But while Tezuka and Miyazaki both have bookshelves worth of English-language texts exploring their lives and careers, Matsumoto has... zero.

However! This Leiji-shaped pothole in our anime knowledge has finally been measured, marked, filled, and steamrolled smooth, no longer impeding our progress. Leiji Matsumoto: Essays On The Manga And Anime Legend, recently published by McFarland & Co., is the long-awaited hard-copy exploration of his six-plus decades of artistic labor. Editors Helen McCarthy and Darren-Jon Ashmore have assembled a dream team of theorists and craftsmen that explore Leiji Matsumoto's popular works like Space Pirate Captain Harlock, Galaxy Express 999, Space Battleship Yamato, and The Cockpit, with every chapter featuring a different researcher exploring a new facet of Leiji Matsumoto's creativity, skill, and ethos.

With pieces from ten different contributors, the essays are naturally going to differ in tone and focus, language ranging from casual to academic and referencing everything from low-rent comic book publishers to highbrow philosophy. As an academic work Leiji Matsumoto: Essays On The Manga And Anime Legend isn’t the dashed-off pop culture typical of media fad publishing – this is a serious book that demands and rewards the reader’s extra attention.

Helen McCarthy takes us to then-Akira Matsumoto's youth in Fukuoka Prefecture, Kyushu, raised by parents that instilled diligent self-determination without neglecting culture, art, and film. I knew his father had flown fighter planes in the Pacific during WWII. What I didn't know, and what I learned from this book, is what Dad Matsumoto did AFTER the war, and how his moral code directly affected his family's fortunes and became an example for young Akira. His family survived postwar tragedy and hardship and while the younger brother eventually became an engineer and professor, Akira took the midnight train to Tokyo to find his fortune in the burgeoning manga industry, joining Tezuka, Ishinomori and others brute-forcing an entire medium into existence.

Licca-chan meets Captain Harlock

Matsumoto's early shoujo manga work, in part produced with his wife, fellow manga artist and Licca-chan fashion doll creator Miyako Maki, gave Matsumoto the track record and experience needed for his move out of the girls' school. With a pen name change to Leiji Matsumoto, he moved into worlds of science fiction, adventure, melodrama, and licensed Toshiba mascot characters, doing work for Tezuka's COM and adapting Night On The Galactic Railroad for "Friend of Hope" magazine. As a result, Leiji Matsumoto was perfectly placed to become the visual manager for Yoshinobu Nishizaki's Space Battleship Yamato project. Matsumoto remodeled the series, foregrounding the WWII In Space aesthetic and helping to spur not only a "Yamato Boom" but his own manga stardom, making his style inescapable for the rest of the decade.

Darren-Jon Ashmore explores the infinite canvas of Matsumoto's space opera, contrasting the transformative journey of characters like Captain Harlock, Tochiro Oyama, and Tetsuro Hoshino with Matsumoto's own regional express-train "bildungsroman," traveling as he did from Kyushu to Tokyo to become a man amidst a recovering Japan. Goethe and Wagner both reveal their inspirations for Matsumoto's worldview and Ashmore details the history of space opera with "Doc" Smith's Skylark and Lensman novels, their roots in western pulp fiction, and how Matsumoto combined several genres to push boundaries in late-50s shoujo epics like Marie Of The Silver Valley. Captain Harlock's origins as "Captain Kingston", derived from Sabatini's Captain Blood, reveal where young Matsumoto's dreams were moving; out, away from mundane troubles, to boundless oceans, towards the endless "wheel of time" we all cycle through.

Tim Eldred brings the eye of a professional animator and comic artist to a process-oriented chapter that examines how Matsumoto's work was modified for mass production both here and in Japan. We learn how Matsumoto's ethereal brush line was changed for animation, and Eldred delivers a fascinating look into a forgotten corner of American comic publishing, when comics based on Japanese anime properties could sell in the tens of thousands. His eyewitness look at what it took to publish Eternity's Captain Harlock comics is a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes. The problems of quickly rendering fleets of space battleships and of compressing the more relaxed narrative pace of a Leiji Matsumoto space opera into the rigid 24 pages of American periodicals are all detailed. Also reported firsthand: his own evening visiting Leiji Matsumoto at home, finding out what Matsumoto feels is Matsumoto's most representative work and whether Yamato influenced Star Wars or Star Wars influenced Yamato or both (it's both).

Jonathan Tarbox dives into Matsumoto's war stories, little seen in the West but perhaps the best example of comics exploring the human tragedy of warfare since Harvey Kurtzman was editing EC’s Frontline Combat. The Japanese ideals of purity and sacrifice in pursuit of a doomed goal are highlighted against Western concepts of heroism, as Joseph Campbell's mythic thousand-faced hero stacks up against the "noble failed hero" described by Yukio Mishima translator Ivan Morris. We're shown how notions of the ephemeral beauty of human achievement in our fallen world permeate Matsumoto's work, particularly in the three-part OVA series The Cockpit, where three different WWII stories show three different characters wrestling with sacrifice and duty.

1980s American VHS releases of Matsumoto anime films

Stefanie Thomas gets to tackle perhaps the most tangled knot in Matsumoto's intertwining space operas, the world of women and gender roles. What can we learn from Harlock’s female characters - the traditional, mothering Miimay, the boundary challenging Kei Yuki, and the cranky kitchen matron Masu versus the Mazone, who appear to be beautiful, seductive women, but who we're told are asexual plant creatures bent on dominating and/or destroying men? How does Maetel navigate both the 999's galactic railroad and her own character's journey from "mother figure" to "object of sexual desire" and back again? On what page does she name-drop Corn Pone Flicks (126)? Thomas examines the evolution and interplay of these characters against decades of women's rights campaigns in Japan and Matsumoto's own ideas and ideals of womanhood, informed by the women around him during his Kyushu childhood and the femininity presented to him in popular culture.

Captain Harlock TV and Galaxy Express 999 film laserdiscs

Edmund Hoff’s chapter looks at the origins of cosplay culture in 1980s Japan. First-hand reports of the controversies surrounding costuming at fan events like Comiket, the origins of the word "cosplay" itself, and how Matsumoto’s characters fueled the scene all enter into the investigation. Meanwhile, here in the present, award-winning costumers Ondine and Matthew Montoya deliver a detailed how-to guide all about building your own Captain Harlock and Captain Bainas (from 2012's Ozma, based on Matsumoto's 1961 manga) outfits from the ground up, including plans for a Mr. Bird puppet and how to get the proper facial scars without actually, you know, scarring your face.

Translator Zack Davisson speaks to his struggles at translating Matsumoto's poetic idiom into English, finding the rhythm and tone of opera serving as context for rendering the inner monologues and dramatic declarative statements of characters like Emeraldas and Captain Harlock. In live "translation battles" his approach is tested against that of Harvard professor Jay Rubin, and seeing the contrast between their takes on the material is an enlightening look at a process many anime and manga fans might take for granted.

Leiji Matsumoto in Kenya

In the final chapter Ashmore interviews Matsumoto for a wide-ranging conversation that bounces from his love of classical music, the origins of his iconic female characters, the impact of films like Shochiku’s 1943 The Spider And The Tulip, Fleischer’s 1941 Mr. Bug Goes To Town, and Scarlett O’Hara’s determination to never be hungry again. Matsumoto speaks to his early years in the newspaper and print industry, the coldness inherent in digitally-produced animation, and holds forth on the theories of race memory and time dilation that have come to the foreground in his work; the cyclical nature of universal time seeing iconic characters appear and re-appear in new yet familiar guises. Also discussed: how he and Ishinomori were accused of running an illegal underground cinema.

The usual adjective for books like this is “essential,” and usually that’s just overblown hype. In this case, Leiji Matsumoto: Essays On The Manga And Anime Legend is the real deal, honestly a one of a kind must-have. Informative, unique essays, revealing interviews, and an exhaustive appendix of Matsumoto’s manga and anime career guarantee you’ll be returning to this again and again. English-language work on manga-ka is rare enough, and to finally have the career and philosophy of one of the prime movers of the worldwide success of Japanese animation laid out for us is a pleasure long overdue.

Diecast Arcadia toy (author's collection)

Without Leiji Matsumoto, the infrastructure and industry that’s grown up around Japanese animation in North America would be very different. Certainly without his work I wouldn’t be here writing these words. If you’re interested in Japan or Japanese comics or animation, let alone Space Battleship Yamato or Galaxy Express 999 or Captain Harlock or Queen Millennia or anything else from his lifetime of creativity, Leiji Matsumoto: Essays On The Manga And Anime Legend needs to be on your bookshelf for every single revolution of that wheel of time.

-Dave Merrill

with special thanks to Stephanie Nichols and McFarland

collect 'em all!

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spacemen with a mission

By all logic, this should not work. A juvenile delinquent with a secret agent big brother who moonlights as a manga artist? A secret world war over a planet-destroying Anti-Proton Bomb? A detour into small-town school board politicking? A time-travel twist ending? And as the main characters, three space aliens turned into what appear to be inflatable pool toy animals? These ingredients don’t seem to add up to anything but obscurity. Yet Wonder 3 became one of Osamu Tezuka’s many popular manga serials and an early success for his Mushi Production animation studio. In a mid ‘60s field crowded with amazing robots, jet boys, and Planet Princes, Wonder 3 carved out its own transformative space, inspiring decades of fans. And now more than fifty years later, English readers finally get to enjoy the original Wonder 3 manga that inspired the Amazing 3 television series.

Taking a page from the 1951 20th Century Fox film The Day The Earth Stood Still, the theme of a union of advanced alien races observing & judging our terrible Earthling behavior isn't new, even for Japanese pop culture - Shintoho’s 1957-58 "Super Giant" films used similar story beats. Tezuka himself would utilize the plot point in manga like Next World and Zero Men, but Wonder 3 may perhaps be peak Tezuka; a wild mix of action, SF, human interest, Big Philosophical Issues, and the polymorphously perverse ability of every character to transmogrify almost at will that runs through his entire amorphous body of work. Serialized in Shonen Sunday from May 1965 until May 1966, the Wonder 3 manga was being produced concurrently with several other Tezuka works, because let’s face it, the guy was a workaholic. Wonder 3 shared manga rack space with the similarly transformation-themed Ambassador Magma (itself to become a 1966 live-action P Production teleseries), the transforming cyborg Big X (which would become TMS’s first anime series), and the folktale-inspired Dove! Fly Up To Heaven, which would finish its run in Tezuka’s magazine COM. Tezuka’s manga factory was running at top speed as does Wonder 3, zooming from outer space to Kanto region farmland to secret Pacific military bases to the center of the Earth and back again, never stopping to catch its breath.

                                               

Wonder 3 begins as the Milky Way League appoints three agents to observe the Earth. Enter our titular W3, Bokko, Nokko and Pukko, who arrive on Earth in their transforming flying saucer-robot, right in the middle of a brutal throwdown between ace Phoenix Agency counterspy Koichi Hoshi and various nefarious secret agents. Using their ultra-science, the three aliens obey the command of the theme song lyrics and change into animal forms, in order to better observe the humans. The warm-hearted Commander Bokko becomes a rabbit, engineering specialist Corporal Nokko becomes a horse, and cranky Lieutenant Pukko becomes a duck with what appears to be a Beatle haircut. Hey, it was 1965. 

 

The animal disguises are great for Galactic Patrol espionage purposes, but this leaves our heroes vulnerable to typical Earthling animal mistreatment. Rescued by Koichi’s brother, local juvenile hot-head Shinichi Hoshi, the three reveal their true mission and he becomes their willing, if at times reluctant, assistant. In the course of a few days Shinichi learns his three new animal friends are actually space aliens sent to destroy the Earth, and his brother is actually a secret agent for Phoenix; each a mind-blowing revelation that would ruin any kid’s life. But Shinichi is tough, and when he’s not getting into fistfights with the locals he and the rest of the cast are off on world-spanning adventures.

The story has barely begun before Pukko gets pissed off and tries to fast-track that whole Earth demolition thing ahead of schedule. That bullet dodged, he tags along with Koichi on a Phoenix mission to destroy Nation A’s Skeleton Satellite while Shinichi begins to learn impulse control through judo. Koichi is framed as an international gangster and assassinated on live TV - or is he? A typhoon exposes the hidden antiproton bomb, which has an amazing journey all its own before becoming a literal international hot potato that’s also a literal ticking time bomb. 

Shinichi and hundreds of local kids survive fires, floods, and the evil landlord’s plan to demolish the school. Nokko’s high-speed engineering skill comes in handy as he builds everything from remote spaceship controls to fleets of pickup trucks to advanced medical equipment to the W3’s iconic “Big Wheel” vehicle, all expressed in lots of speed lines, clouds of dust, and a galloping cartoon horse. Pukko grinds his teeth at the stupid minds of Earthlings while Bokko is forced to confront her troubling feelings of interspecies attraction. 

The 1960s espionage mixes freely with YA and SF, the result being a furious, panicky climax as Shinichi races to rescue the Wonder 3 and Earth itself from the runaway antiproton bomb. And after all that, those jerks on the Galactic Council vote against Earth! Spoiler, the Wonder 3 disobey their orders to destroy our planet, even though this means memory erase, exile, and transformation into a lower life form. What will they choose? Where will they go? Read the comic and find out!

The W3 manga is pulpy fun that jams high-concept ideas next to kid-gang adventures and trademark Tezuka comedy bits, filled with great characters and big set-piece action that never forgets the emotional beats. The comic has lots of memorable characters. Shinichi’s mom is a powerful Ma Hunkel-esque force of nature, Tezuka’s Lamp appears as an evil spymaster with his own code of ethics, and the Wonder 3 themselves are complex, motivated individuals who carve out their own destiny against everything the Earth or the Galactic Patrol can muster, leading to a time-travel paradox conclusion that bears a certain resemblance to Tezuka’s earlier Captain Ken.

The ink was barely dry on Wonder 3 before Tezuka began to move away from science fiction with his next works, the political/monster thriller Vampire and the historical revenge fantasy Dororo. But while W3 was still in Shonen Sunday, across the aisle Tezuka’s animation studio Mushi Production was hard at work on the Wonder 3 TV anime series. Sponsored by candy manufacturer Lotte, Wonder 3 aired on Fuji TV from June 1965 until June the next year, Sundays at 7pm until episode 35, when it switched to Mondays at 7:30. Wonder 3 did well in the ratings until Tsubaraya’s Ultra Q premiered in January of ‘66, which pulled viewers, including Tezuka’s own kids, away from W3. 

Big Wheel Keep On Rollin'

Opening with the W3’s arrival on Earth, the antiproton bomb threat is set aside for most of the show, allowing Shinichi and the W3 to adventure around the world in the Big Wheel while Koichi engages in the kind of spy adventures that were ubiquitous in film and TV of the era. Occasionally scripts will drop in an episode with environmental themes, and there are a few mentions of the “new airport” ruining farmland and uprooting locals, referencing the mid-1960s battle between landowners and the construction of Narita Airport, which was making headlines at the time.

Though Mushi was then producing animation for big-deal American distributors like NBC Films, Wonder 3’s American license was picked up by an obscure outfit doing business as Erika Film Productions. Erika doesn’t seem to have produced anything before or since. Their version, retitled The Amazing 3, was dubbed by the same Copri International crew that localized Prince Planet, with biker film idol Bobbie Byers voicing Bokko, now “Bonnie”. The show is deeply weird in a way that only translated children's cartoons were allowed to be at the time; the big messages of conflict, hatred, and greed merging with Tezuka’s penchant for comedic non sequiturs, punctuated by the angry ranting of Beatle-wigged cartoon duck Zero, a rabbit clearly thirsty for 12 year old Kenny, and a horse now named Ronnie that builds everything out of literal garbage. 

there's so much wrong with this

Copri’s dubbing is like radio drama, overacted and overly descriptive, yet at the same time content to leave big chunks of the show completely silent. The dub occasionally delivers bursts of unintentional comedy (“Democracy is stupid!”), and the American show begins and ends with a theme song that sounds like the college glee club is humoring some drunken alumnus who brought his accordion to the homecoming cookout. Mushi’s animation on W3 is fine; not as cinematic as what they were doing on the contemporaneous Jungle Emperor, but certainly not as clunky as some of the stuff TCJ was cranking out across town. There’s an interesting UPA-ish thick-line character design seen in the show that gives W3 its own style.

Viewed today, the fuzzy black and white images and hissy, warbly soundtrack give the show a real late-night cult-movie feel. The Amazing 3 aired on UHF television across America, until the mid 1970s turned black and white TV into a quaint novelty. As far as we can tell, the show last aired in the United States in 1976 on KCOP channel 13 in Los Angeles, right before Peter Potamus. Then the series vanished forever. Somebody on eBay was selling 16mm prints of the whole series for $24,000 back in 2008; if you picked them up, drop me a line!

HOW MUCH?

That last KCOP rerun was the last America would see of Bonnie, Ronnie, Zero, and their friend Kenny Carter. Sure, fuzzy 13th generation VHS copies were kicking around at the swap meets and on the mailing lists of cartoon nerds, but unlike contemporaries Kimba The White Lion, Marine Boy, and Gigantor, the Amazing Three failed to grab that valuable late-boomer cartoon mindshare.

Until now, that is. Digital Manga's Wonder 3 is an absolute chonky brick; three solid pounds of W3 manga in English for the first time ever, with a solid translation, sharp production values, and an afterword by Tezuka himself. It’s a must-have for fans of Tezuka’s work or manga in general, and anyone interested in midcentury pop SF adventure will get a solid kick out of W3. However, as with some of their other properties, Digital Manga can’t seem to get out of its own way, making publishing decisions that here seem almost counterintuitive. Wonder 3’s advertising and promotion were, apart from Kickstarter updates, almost nonexistent. The jacket design for the book itself is obtuse and confusing; it’s unclear on the shelf or in the hand what exactly this thing is. The manga’s back cover copy and DMP’s marketing for Wonder 3, instead of mentioning that Wonder 3 is the manga version of a TV show readers might have seen as a child, bizarrely insists upon explaining what “sentai” is, Millions of Americans watched The Amazing 3; wedging a Power Rangers mention into this series’ description makes zero sense. Potential American readers are pointedly ignored, if not deliberately avoided, and it’s a shame because this wonderfully entertaining block o’ comics deserves a wide readership.

Wonder 3 toy bus image from World Mook Figure King no. 11

Wonder 3 never achieved the kind of iconic cultural status reached by other Tezuka creations like Astro Boy or Black Jack. Among the parade of Tezuka reboots, remasters, sequels, and adaptations, W3 is noticeably absent. Sure, the characters make appearances every once in a while, like in the 1980 Astro Boy series, but with a few exceptions they’ve vanished. One of these exceptions was the fascinating July 2017 stage performance "Amazing Performance W3 (Wonder Three)," a silent theatrical piece that involved modern dance, pantomime, acrobatics, and images projected onto the stage. 

I don’t think the world of Japanese animation will ever entirely forget Wonder 3, with that Big Wheel zooming across oceans, the space rabbit with the hypno dynamism, and that cranky duck voting to blow up the Earth. The series might be the peak of Tezuka’s science fiction mythos; from here on out his works would focus more on adventures of the past and issues of the present. Absent our outer space saviors, mankind will have to find salvation on its own. Anybody got $24,000?

-Dave Merrill

Thanks for reading Let's Anime! If you enjoyed it and want to show your appreciation for what we do here as part of the Mister Kitty Dot Net world, please consider joining our Patreon