Win a copy of MW for Tezuka Month!

To begin the first of three — yes, three — contests for Tezuka Month here at Ani-Gamers, we will be giving away two new paperback copies of one of the darkest manga series ever to come out of the mind of Osamu Tezuka: MW. The story follows the exploits of the bisexual criminal mastermind Michio Yuki and his lover, Catholic priest Father Gurai. Both men were survivors of a poisonous gas leak, and the effects of the poison have warped Yuki's mind, turning him into a twisted monster. The series, created in the late 1970s, represents the darkest time for Tezuka, both in his personal and professional life.

For more information on MW, read our very own Mitchell Dyer's review of the mind-blowing one-volume story. But how do you get your hands on a copy from us? Well, we're starting this first contest off with something pretty simple. In the comments below, let us know what your favorite Tezuka manga is, and WHY (that part is important). If you haven't read any Tezuka manga, let us know which one you're most looking forward to checking out and why.

At midnight EST next Sunday (March 14), we will randomly select two winners, and they will receive brand-new paperback copies of MW, courtesy of the fine folks at Vertical, Inc. Have fun, and don't hesitate to discuss your choices with each other in the comments!

Check out more articles about Osamu Tezuka in our March 2010 Tezuka Theme Month!

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Weekly Astro Boy Magazine app now available to new lands

Starting today, anyone who owns an iPhone or iPod Touch (or even, presumably, an iPad, in the future) and lives in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand or other listed countries can download the stonking good App “Weekly Astro Boy Magazine”. They join Japanese, Canadian and American fans who have been able to get the app since its original launch in 2009.

While this would be great news at any other time of year, this is especially timely given the ongoing Ani-Gamers Tezuka Month celebrations, and that fact that I personally have been awaiting the release of this App with baited breath since its initial announcement.

The app works by first asking you to download a small reader application — costing $1 or the local equivalent — and then each week additional “issues” are published which the user can purchase, each for an additional $1. The individual issues contain a mixture of chapters from various Tezuka works including the titular Astro Boy, Black Jack, Dororo, and Phoenix. The translations are the same as those used in the domestically published works due to the program makers agreements with Tezuka Productions and publishers — for example the Dark Horse translation is used for the Astro Boy chapters.

A free version, containing the first issue of the magazine, is available for you to download and try with no obligation. In addition, you are under no obligation at any point to purchase new issues so you don't have to worry about the app siphoning money out of you.

A nice bonus is that all the previously released chapters are available for download in English in the new territories right now — I will freely admit abusing the wi-fi at my work office downloading additional issues of the magazine this afternoon.

From a brief play with the application this afternoon I am very happy with the viewing software — the user interface is well built for viewing the manga pages, if perhaps a little awkward when you want to change the issue you wish to read and I have a bad habit of exiting the reader application entirely when trying to do this. In addition there is no real way to know which chapters you are receiving each week short of subscribing to the Application's twitter feed (included at the foot of this post) The official website only lists the titles present in a volume, not the chapter names or any additional details. I would be interested to see how it performs on a iPad once they are released, due to the larger viewing area.

A special bonus for me is that the first Astro Boy Story serialised in the magazine is “The Greatest Robot on Earth”, the origin for the Naoki Urasawa adaption "Pluto" and a story I have wanted to read for a long time but never had the opportunity.

I heartily recommend that you give the App a try should you have an iPhone or iPod touch — it does have a free version after all.

[via astroboymagazine.com, AstroBoyMag official Twitter]

Check out more articles about Osamu Tezuka in our March 2010 Tezuka Theme Month!

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FMA: The Brotherhood Diaries – Episode 46

Ani-Gamers staff writer Ink contributes a weekly column in which he examines the differences between the original Fullmetal Alchemist and its re-telling, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. To read previous entries, click here.

Watch Episode 46 – Looming Shadows

One of the most brilliant things this series is doing, no matter how disheartening, is the physical separation being kept between Ed and Al. And the second scene, where Ed and company accidentally meet up with Winry and her escort, makes a wonderful show-don’t-tell move. Upon finding out that Al is near, Ed immediately jumps from his chair and starts toward the door. Of course viewers know where he’s going, but then Ed stops. There’s much implication in this. Ed knows his and Al’s paths, which are destined to intersect (if only in purpose), must remain separate for the time being due to circumstances beyond his control, and Ed recognizes that rash action cannot be made for selfish contentment (i.e. reuniting with Al) in order to attain the goal directly before them: stopping the homunculi.

This is in contrast to FMA1, which never let the brothers develop on their own. And while that made the bond enviable and the devotion heartwarming, the fact that the bothers were (almost) never apart meant they never had a chance to become their own characters or grow in relation to each other. More or less, FMA1’s Elric brothers were one and the same with a smattering of internal conflicts between their collective conscious. Moreover, FMA2 has shown a degree of growing independence that fosters a trust betwixt the two brothers that FMA1 never required. Here in FMA2, Ed and Al are conspirators, plotters — chess players who can only see their own pieces while trying to play the same game against a nigh-omnipotent opponent — furthering the strategic nature of this series.

The ways in which FMA2 continue to use Greed are also impressive. Aside from aspects already mentioned in previous Diaries, these last two episodes of FMA2 have shed light on why Greed was such a threat to the other homunculi and sealed away: selfishness. He wants it all and all to himself. Each mean he employs is one aimed at fulfilling his own desires, regardless of what anyone else wants — a blatant anarchistic threat to any organized plot. But as this episode has Greed spell out to Ed, greed can be utilized for good and evil alike. As easy as switching a lower-case g to a capital G, this can be taken as metaphor for how the series is justifying Greed’s alliance with Ed. This is in line with FMA2’s strategy-based build but also parallels FMA1 Lust’s selfish interest in helping the boys.

And last but not least, if we are to believe Bradley was actually killed by a little explosion and subsequent fall into a river, then FMA2 polishes him off via a team effort pulled off by ancillary characters instead of mano-a-mano a la FMA1’s Mustang vs. Pride. More importantly, FMA2’s route bolsters the human vs. homunculus theme as opposed to FMA1’s alchemist vs. homunculus. This may seem trite, but if we’re looking into the sociopolitical aspect of the inference, then what FMA2 does is stress the power of the ordinary people have over fantastic forces (government), while FMA1 used fantasy to counter fantasy. I think this is the essence of what makes the blood race when watching FMA2. Aside from its well-developed action scenes, the amount of adversity faced by the ordinary characters lets un-fantastic viewers see a bit of themselves as major factors in the revolution.

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Review scores change: no more stars

It's finally happened. For a long while, I have considered abolishing star ratings from our review system here at Ani-Gamers, but I was never sure of how I would want reviews to be set up without stars. Would we have any final, conclusive "rating" or other comparative measure between reviews? Well, the decision has been made.

Beginning with this week's reviews of Phoenix and The Art of Osamu Tezuka, Ani-Gamers will no longer feature star ratings in ANY of its reviews (for anime, manga, games or anything else). Instead of numbers, we will now include a final comment [in brackets] after each review, expressing the reviewer's overall opinion. These comments will be one of five terms: "Highly Recommended," "Recommended, "Passable," "Bad," or "Terrible." My hope is that this will allow reviewers to siphon more attention toward their actual review content (not the score) while simultaneously providing readers a standardized measure by which to consider their next anime, manga, or game purchase.

As with any change that directly affects our readers, I invite anyone with comments, questions, or suggestions regarding reviews to please make your voice heard through the comments thread on this post, our contact form, or e-mail.

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Review: The Art of Osamu Tezuka – God of Manga

Medium: Coffee Table Book
Author: Helen McCarthy (foreword by Katsuhiro Otomo)
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts (NA/UK)
Release Date: Oct. 1, 2009 (NA/UK)

The inside cover of The Art of Osamu Tezuka depicts the schematics of famous manga character Astro Boy, with notes pointing out each of the functions of his robotic body. It is fitting, then, that the following 260 pages of Helen McCarthy's new coffee table-style book represent a "schematic" of the life of Osamu Tezuka, easily the most influential artist in anime and manga history.

"Osamu Tezuka is not the founder of Japanese animation," reminds Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira, Domu) in the book's foreword, but he most certainly was the single greatest influence on its evolution. The manga artist-turned animator created countless unforgettable characters (including the titular characters of Astro Boy and Black Jack) and revolutionized the post-war animation industry. Thus, for fans looking to the past for evidence of where anime evolved from, all roads lead to Tezuka. The Art of Osamu Tezuka is at once a celebration and an analysis of this star-studded career, debunking myths about the artist's influence while emphasizing the all-important changes that he did make to Japan's anime and manga culture.

The first chapter depicts Tezuka's young life before his debut as a major comic artist, beginning (delightfully) with a photograph of the boy at only one year old. This unique window into Tezuka's early life shows fascinating insight into later works in his career, though McCarthy's assumptions regarding childhood influences on his art are certainly debatable. Most interesting of all, though, are the doodles from Tezuka's elementary school days, which include some characters (like Hyōtan-tsugi) who appear frequently in his adult works.

Chapter two features an encyclopedia of Tezuka's "Star System" — his unique way of grouping his characters into an "acting troupe," with different players playing different roles in different stories. While this list naturally includes big stars like Astro Boy and Rock Holmes, it also includes a lot of lesser-known characters such as Geta (Ayako, Rainbow Parakeet) and Notaarin (Metropolis).

Later chapters each focus on a decade of Tezuka's life, beginning with his debut of Ma-chan's Diary in 1946 and ending in the late 1980s with the artist's death. Throughout, McCarthy provides descriptions of what was going on during each decade of Tezuka's life, detailing — through full-page photos and brief sections of text — his struggles and triumphs in both his professional and personal life. Then the chapter moves to a title-by-title analysis of the major works of that decade. Some are notably left out (including many Vertical releases such as Apollo's Song and Ode to Kirihito), but the analyses, often brief, provide valuable insight for anyone looking to plumb the depths of the Tezuka catalog. Still, McCarthy chooses to spoil the endings of some series, which may disappoint some Tezuka fans hoping to track down these anime and manga themselves.

McCarthy has a reputation as an "anime academic," but her writing in The Art of Osamu Tezuka is far from the indecipherable treatises of most academic papers. Instead, it frequently flows with the enjoyable style of a journalism piece, despite quite a few paragraphs that seem to be nothing but a series of simple sentences starting with the same word. (To be honest, this is probably just my editor's mind making me so nit-picky.)

Included in the back of the book is a subtitled documentary entitled Osamu Tezuka: The Secret of Creation. The slightly odd 45-minute video, produced by Japanese television network NHK, follows a TV crew as they document the day-by-day schedule of the manga master, complete with charming moments of humanity that we rarely see through all of the discussion of the man's artistic achievements. The video (even though it was produced independently of the book) has an incredibly authentic atmosphere that serves as a fantastic capstone to McCarthy's humanization of Tezuka throughout her book.

It might miss a few steps here and there, but overall The Art of Osamu Tezuka is an absolute joy for Tezuka fans old and new. At once an encyclopedia of Tezuka's work and a narrative journey through his incredible life, McCarthy's guide is an inspiring examination of the artist's impact on anime and manga. With its wealth of fascinating information and the added value of The Secret of Creation, this is a book that belongs on any Tezuka fan's bookshelf — or coffee table for that matter.

[Highly Recommended]

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This review is based on a hardcover retail copy purchased by the reviewer.

Check out more articles about Osamu Tezuka in our March 2010 Tezuka Theme Month!

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