The Astro Boy Essays

A book about Tezuka organised around Astro Boy: the character's creation, his development across decades, the 1963 television series, the merchandising, the American adaptation, and the robot's afterlife in Japanese culture.

Schodt knew Tezuka personally and interpreted for him, and the book combines scholarship with first-hand recollection.

One character, used as the route into the career of the person who invented modern manga.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Schodt worked as Tezuka's English interpreter on several trips, and the passages describing him at work — his schedule, his temper, his competitiveness — are the book's most distinctive content.

Almost nothing comparable exists in English, and the portrait is affectionate without being uncritical. Schodt also travelled with him internationally, and the account of Tezuka working through jet lag and unfamiliar countries is among the book's funniest material.

The book is frank about his difficulty with younger rivals, his inability to delegate, and the professional insecurity that persisted despite his standing.

The gekiga generation's challenge to him in the 1960s is covered in particular detail, and Schodt does not pretend Tezuka responded to it gracefully.

Astro Boy's status — a machine with a child's face, built to replace a dead son, denied full legal personhood — is analysed as a sustained argument rather than as an adventure premise.

Schodt connects it to Japanese attitudes toward robotics and to the industry's later enthusiasm for humanoid machines.

A substantial thread concerns why robots are received differently in Japan than in the West, taking in Shinto animism, post-war industrial policy and the absence of a Frankenstein tradition.

The argument is handled carefully and Schodt is sceptical of the simpler versions of it that circulate widely.

The account of the television adaptation covers the production constraints, the low sale price, and the merchandising arrangements that followed, which Steinberg later analysed at length.

Schodt's version is shorter and is based partly on conversations with people involved, which gives it a different kind of authority.

The adaptation for American television, with changed names, altered episodes and removed content, is documented in detail.

The material is a useful case study in how Japanese animation was initially handled abroad, and several of the alterations are genuinely extraordinary. Names were anglicised, episodes dealing with racial themes were dropped entirely, and the broadcaster commissioned additional material to fill the resulting gaps.

The book takes seriously his pacifism, his ambivalence about technology and his preoccupation with discrimination, and connects them to his wartime experience in Osaka.

Schodt argues these were consistent commitments rather than themes he happened to return to. He witnessed the Osaka air raids as a teenager and has described the experience directly, and Schodt treats it as the origin of nearly everything that followed.

It is organised as linked essays rather than as a continuous narrative, which means some material recurs and the chronology is not strict.

The looseness suits the mixture of scholarship and memoir, and individual chapters can be read independently. Readers looking for a straightforward account of Tezuka's life will find it distributed across the chapters rather than presented in sequence, which takes some adjustment.

The book includes a substantial amount of visual material, including photographs and reproduced pages, and the design is careful.

The images are genuinely necessary rather than decorative, particularly in the sections about character design and the American alterations. Several of the photographs are Schodt's own, taken during the trips he describes, and they give the book a documentary quality the text alone would lack.

It is the best English-language book on Tezuka and among the most useful on the early industry, and it won an Eisner award.

Readers wanting a full biography will find it partial by design, since the Astro Boy frame excludes a great deal of his output.

Readers who have read some Tezuka and want to understand the person and the period, and readers interested in how Japanese animation first reached American audiences.

It requires no scholarly background and reads quickly, and its first-hand material makes it valuable even for readers who know the history from elsewhere.