Phoenix (manga)

AUTHOR: Tezuka, Osamu

ARTIST: Osamu Tezuka (illustrator); Izumi Evers (cover artist); Courtney Utt (cover artist)

PUBLISHER: Kodansha (Japanese), VIZ Media (English)

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION:Hi no tori, 1954-1988 (English translation, 2002-2008)

Publication History

As a longtime fan of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet L’Oiseau de feu (1910; The Firebird), Japan’s “God of Manga” Osamu Tezuka aspired to draw a tale about the legendary Phoenix from an early stage of his career. His first attempt appeared in the boys’ comics magazine Manga Shonen, but he did not manage to complete the story. Another attempt followed in 1956 in the girls’ comics magazine Shojo Club. At the time, Tezuka had a passion for Hollywood-style romantic period epics; set in ancient times in Egypt, Greece, and Rome, the story reflected this sensibility.

A decade later, when Tezuka turned to producing long-form, adult-oriented stories, he rewrote and redrew “Dawn,” the story that originally appeared in Manga Shonen as a tragic tale about the life-and-death cycle, which became a recurring theme in the following stories of the series. “Dawn” was published in COM magazine, founded by Tezuka as a platform for experimental works. Subsequent chapters were serialized in Manga Shonen (following the bankruptcy of Tezuka’s production company, Mushi); The Wild Age Comic magazine later collected different editions.

Tezuka kept drawing stories in the series until his death in 1989, but the comic remains unfinished, as he had plans for further stories beyond those that had been published. In 2002, the second chapter in the series, “Future,” was published in North America as a large-size, stand-alone volume. Later that year, “Dawn” was published in a small-sized volume to clearly identify it as the first in a series; subsequent editions of “Future” were published in the new format. By 2008, all the volumes in the series were translated and published in North America.

Plot

In the year 240 c.e. Nagi, a boy from a small village, watches as his people are slaughtered by the unstoppable army of Himiko, the legendary queen of Japan. He then becomes entangled in the dying queen’s plot to capture the Phoenix, the bird of fire whose blood can grant eternal life. Saruta, an officer in the queen’s army, gets attached to the boy and suffers a grim fate.

Over three millennia later, on a postapocalyptic Earth, the forbidden love between the human Masato and the alien Tamami forces both to flee the giant underground metropolis of Yamato to the uninhabitable surface, where they are offered refuge by Saruta—a genius scientist with questionable ethics who bears a suspicious resemblance to the soldier from Queen Himiko’s army, thousands of years ago. Saruta’s plan to restore Earth involves the mythological firebird.

Thus start the two major plotlines of Phoenix, one moving forward from the dawn of time, the other backward from the distant future. The stories are interconnected, though each can be read individually. Along the way, the protagonists in each story cross paths with the Firebird, which symbolizes their (often forbidden) ambitions, dreams, and desires. Peasants and kings, workers and tycoons, in the bloody battlefields of the past and the enormous cities of the future, clash in this great tale of the human race.

Volumes

• Phoenix: Dawn (2003). Queen Himiko sends her armies to capture the Phoenix, and one of her spies triggers a series of tragic events.

• Phoenix: A Tale of the Future (2002). Saruta, a genius scientist, plans on reviving the dying Earth with the unwilling help of two desperate lovers.

• Phoenix: Yamato/Space (2003). This volume collects two stories: The first is set in the fifth century, relaying the king of Yamato’s plans for his subjects to accompany him on his death; the second story takes place in 2577, following a group of astronauts who find themselves on a mysterious planet where the firebird resides.

• Phoenix: Karma (2004). A gifted sculptor and an armless bandit clash over the construction of a giant Buddha statue in eighth century Japan.

• Phoenix: Resurrection (2005). Leona, a young man who was resurrected after dying in a car accident in the year 2483, falls in love with an industrial robot called Chihiro, who then begins to develop feelings of her own.

• Phoenix: Nostalgia (2006). A woman named Romi who finds herself abandoned on a remote planet is revealed to have played a major part in the future-history of the human race.

• Phoenix: Civil War, Part One (2006). Benta, a hunter from a small village, searches for his beloved Obuu and finds himself in the middle of the murderous struggle between the Taira and Genji clans in twelfth century Japan.

• Phoenix: Civil War, Part Two/Robe of Feathers (2006). This volume features the conclusion of the Civil War chapter and the short story “Robe of Feathers,” about Zuku, a hunter who finds a mysterious robe that changes his life.

• Phoenix: Strange Beings/Life (2006). This volume collects two stories. The first, “Strange Beings,” is about Sakon-Nosuke, a seventh century noblewoman who wishes to get even with her father for raising her as a man. The second, “Life,” follows the unfortunate victims of the twenty-second century cloning and entertainment industry.

• Phoenix: Sun, Part One (2007) and Phoenix: Sun, Part Two (2007). Two volumes that feature the last chapter of Phoenix that Tezuka completed before his death. They tell the parallel stories of Suguru, a twenty-first century mercenary, and Harima, a Korean soldier who is forced to live in a wolf’s skin and struggle against the mass conversion of Japan to Buddhism during the seventh century.

• Phoenix: Early Works (2008). This volume collects the first stories Tezuka attempted to draw in the series during the 1950’s. They follow a crown prince and Daia, a slave girl, and the role they played throughout the history of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome.

Characters

• The Phoenix is the mythical firebird whose blood can grant eternal life to anyone who drinks it. The Phoenix is presented as a huge peacock-like creature, and the hunt for it and its blood is the driving force behind many of the stories in the series.

• Saruta plays many different roles in different incarnations throughout the series. He is portrayed as a hero and a villain, a savior and a destroyer, and both selfless and selfish. He appears as a short man with a grotesquely large head and a big, scarred nose. His character often crosses paths with many of the Firebird’s aspiring hunters in the past and the future.

• Queen Himiko, featured in Phoenix: Dawn, is queen of Japan in 240 c.e. She tries to capture the Phoenix for her own gain.

• Leona is resurrected from the dead after a car accident and later falls for Chihiro, a robot.

• Romi, featured in Phoenix: Nostalgia, learns she has played an important role in the future of humanity.

• Benta, a hunter, becomes entangled in the rivalry between the Taira and Genji clans in twelfth century Japan.

• Harima is a Korean soldier during the seventh century, when Japan converted to Buddhism.

• Daia is a slave whose story is told against the backdrop of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome.

Artistic Style

Phoenix serves as one of the best examples of Tezuka’s enormously large pool of styles and influences. It features human and animal characters of the cartoony, cute design inspired by the animated films of Walt Disney and the Fleischer brothers alongside realistically designed characters that bring to mind protagonists from American comic books.

Another important influence on the series is The Little Humpbacked Horse (1947), the first Soviet feature-length animated film, which inspired the firebird’s design. The series’ detailed historical backgrounds were initially inspired by Hollywood epics but later drew their influence from authentic Japanese landscapes when the location of the series’ historical chapters became exclusively Japanese.

The backgrounds for the futuristic chapters also show a wide variety of influences, from the dystopian vision of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to cover illustration from the golden age of American science-fiction magazines. Tezuka also experimented with different styles of page layout and panel design to portray characters drifting between different stages of consciousness (as in “Space”) and to represent the passage of time (as in “Robe of Feathers”).

The narrative and textual structure of the series is likewise varied; it is not uncommon to find a verbal or physical gag in the midst of a serious and even tragic plot. Tezuka has also filled the series with deliberate anachronisms, and often he breaks in the fourth wall, enhancing the feeling that his characters are merely actors, playing their role in the great theater show of human history.

Themes

Above all else, Phoenix appears to be about the karma of humanity—the endless, tragic cycle in which the human race repeats the mistakes that bring suffering upon itself. The immortality that many characters pursue throughout the series is a metaphor for the human need to cheat death evident throughout history, and to maintain a presence in the world through cruel actions and through monuments often built at the cost of human lives.

In the passage back and forth between the past and the future, an unflattering picture of the human race is presented: Times change, as do technologies and societies, but humans will always retain their greedy, selfish, warlike nature. The partly satirical tone of the dystopian futuristic characters has a universal feeling to it, but the historical chapters are surprisingly critical of Japan, Tezuka’s homeland, and its growth throughout the ages. Japan is presented as a having a history of constant violence, tyrannical regimes, and religious fundamentalism. Even Buddhist faith in Japan (Tezuka himself was a Buddhist) is portrayed at times in an unflattering manner. Indeed, before dying, Tezuka left behind a draft for a new story in the series that was to take place in China during the late 1930’s, dealing with the behavior of the Japanese army in Asia (a theme he also touched on in another masterpiece, Adolf, 1983-1985). The history of Japan—a country that achieved great accomplishments at the cost of great cruelty—might have been seen by Tezuka as the perfect example of the karma of humanity he wanted to depict in Phoenix.

Impact

Phoenix is a transitional work for Tezuka, and it marks his move from his early period of adventure stories and romantic epics to adult works that explore serious themes and often experiment with new styles. The gekiga (“dramatic pictures”) genre of stories, which deals with crime, sex, and politics, was gaining popularity throughout the 1960’s. The maturing of comic readers and the rise of rebellious student movements in the same decade eventually led the artists of such works to find their place within the mainstream manga industry. However, Phoenix went a step beyond other artists, not only in introducing Tezuka’s old-school Artistic and storytelling techniques to a mature audience but also in attempting to transcend storytelling itself and reach for the abstract concepts that existed beyond narrative through experimentation with a variety of new techniques; ostensibly, Tezuka attempted to turn comics into a higher form of art. Phoenix encouraged other Japanese artists to explore the more experimental possibilities of art and narrative in comics. Tezuka himself drew other stories that aimed for a deeper exploration of human nature, but Phoenix remains the forerunner among his works, his unfinished magnum opus.

During the 1970’s, a group of American students made first attempts to translate the series into English, and a member of that group, Frederik L. Schodt, went on to become one of the most prominent scholars and translators of Japanese comics in the English-speaking world. A segment of the translated Karma volume appeared in Schodt’s seminal 1983 book Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics, and the attempts at translation during the late 1970’s served as a basis for the English editions of the twentieth century.

Films

The Phoenix. Directed by Kon Ichikawa. Hi no Tori Productions, 1979. The first theatrical adaptation of Phoenix was a live-action retelling of the “Dawn” chapter, featuring the firebird as an animated character. The film was directed by Ichikawa, one of the pioneering film directors to emerge in post-World War II Japan. By the time the film was made and released, Ichikawa was well past his prime, and The Phoenix, as it was known in its English release, was considered to be little more than a curious footnote in his career.

Space Firebird 2772. Directed by Taku Sugiyama. Tezuka Production Company, 1980. An animated adaptation, Space Firebird 2772 fared much better than The Phoenix. Produced by Tezuka’s own company, this animated feature borrows elements from different chapters in the series to tell a new story about a hunt for the firebird through space. The film’s opening ten minutes are nothing short of an animated masterpiece, delivering its protagonist’s coming-of-age story through images and music alone and no dialogue, in a manner doubtlessly inspired by Disney’s Fantasia (1940). The rest of the film, though, is a disappointingly conventional chase story, in which the firebird’s mean attitude feels very out of place for readers familiar with the original series. However, the film remains an imaginative and entertaining take on Tezuka’s original source material, with a worthy guest appearance by Black Jack, the brilliant unlicensed doctor and star of the Tezuka manga Black Jack (1973-1983). An English-dubbed, heavily edited North American release was issued on VHS, and an uncut English-subtitled DVD release is available in Australia.

Television Series

The Phoenix. Anime Works, 2007. A thirteen-episode animated adaptation, this was originally produced and broadcasted in Japan in 2004. The series features impressive designs that honor Tezuka’s original work, with the addition of a rich and delicate color palate, beautiful animation, and an epic musical score. The first episodes are a faithful adaptation of the “Dawn” chapter, though the following adaptations of the “Resurrection” and “Sun” chapters feel a bit condensed. Overall, it is a respectful adaptation that will satisfy fans of the original series, though its insistence on focusing on the serious elements of the comic while ignoring its many lighter moments gives it a somewhat stiff feeling.

Further Reading

Tezuka, Osamu. Apollo’s Song (2007).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Astro Boy (1952-1968).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Buddha (2006-2007).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Ode to Kirihito (2006).

Urasawa, Naoki, and Takashi Nagasaki. Pluto: Urasawa ´ Tezuka (2003-2009).

Bibliography

McCarthy, Helen. The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2009.

Schodt, Frederik L. Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga. Berkeley, Calif.: Stone Bridge Press, 1996.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics. New York: Kodansha International, 1988.

Tezuka, Osamu. Phoenix Volume 2: A Tale of the Future. San-Francisco: VIZ Media LLC, 2002.