I feel as though I am condemned to write nothing but lamentations
for Osamu Tezuka whenever I read a new translation of one of his manga.
It’s heartbreaking to know that the man responsible for so many
brilliant productions has been dead almost twenty years now. Worse, in
lieu of seeing anything “new” by him, those of us in the
English-speaking world have to settle for catching up with his life’s
work as it’s gradually licensed and released here.
But is that really so bad? And with both Vertical, Inc. and
Viz bringing us good-to-excellent reissues of Tezuka’s work, there
really isn’t cause for despair—now a whole generation of manga readers
who weren’t even born when Tezuka was alive can experience his work.
Even better, they can now experience the whole of Tezuka’s most
ambitious manga project,
Phoenix, in a twelve-volume
trade-paperback-sized edition courtesy of Viz. I’ve been following the
series for some time since it first kicked off in English, but this is
the first time I’ve had the privilege of writing about it for AMN, and
it makes me feel obliged to cover the whole series from back to front.
[Review written for AMN. Click here to read full text.]
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