Having hunted down as many of Dark Horse’s 23 Astro Boy volumes as I’ve been able to find over the past two years, I almost feel guilty that I haven’t come across a proper book of analysis and examination of the property until now, and I’m not sure that any of the sort existed before Schodt and Stonebridge put this to publication last year.  As the only real English authority on Astro Boy, it’s pretty good – but not good enough.

It’s hard to go wrong with Schodt at the helm.  He was, after all, Osamu Tezuka’s Best White Friend, the first American to approach Tezuka about translating his works into English, as well as Tezuka’s personal guide and translator on his trips to the United States.  Credentials aside, Schodt’s just not a very compelling and articulate writer.  His sentences are bland, partly due to the textbook nature of his essays and partly due to his own limitations in vocabulary.  Now, given that I’ve read and loved the hell out of the works of Tezuka he’s translated, I safely conclude that the guy is a superb translator who fully grasps the changes that need to be made to smoothly bring a foreign masterpiece to English.  However, given the interesting nature of Tezuka’s history and the machinations behind the scenes of Astro Boy, Schodt doesn’t makes this ripe material a bit of a slog.

He certainly doesn’t win points by prefacing the book with a defense of its brevity: because chronicling the life of Tezuka and the breadth of work he created would take too long and be too much effort, he chose instead to focus solely on the Astro Boy property in its various forms, only clocking in at 174 pages without indexes.  While this choice gives the essays a clear focus to center exclusively on the Astro Boy phenomenon and its global effect on animation and comics, it foregoes the bigger picture.  Many references are made to Tezuka’s other material, but only briefly.  We’re told that Kimba the White Lion was almost as major a landmark in animation as was Astro Boy, and that Black Jack was almost as equally beloved a manga, but no explanation is given as to why or in what way.  Painfully few mentions are made of the works of Tezuka that have yet to be translated into English.  Schodt is English readers’ gateway into the star system of Tezuka, and yet he offers up so little.

Thankfully, that which he offers up is particularly revealing.  Schodt cites many instances in which Tezuka criticizes his own work, or the shortcomings in which he felt he was unable to convey his intended messages in his Astro Boy stories.  Public reaction both at the time of release and through later analysis is contrasted with Tezuka’s own statements of intention, showcasing the unique disparity between the artist and his audience.  Schodt also tries to compare the many incarnations of Astro Boy – from his initial creation to his delayed origin story, to each subsequent reworking of his origin and how it changed over time.  Many of his analyses are in reference to Japanese books that have already dissected the Astro Boy phenomenon in enormous detail, but again, Schodt’s the only real English authority around.

Unfortunately, a lot of space is wasted in summarizing and relating stories and characters that appear in the Astro Boy comics, to which I’d think readers of this essay collection should already be somewhat familiar.  Only a Tezuka enthusiast would be interested in this book, and such an enthusiast is likely already familiar with the Astro Boy series of comics.  Moreover, Dark Horse’s Astro Boy volumes often contain preambles to the stories they collect, revealing an interesting background tidbit concerning their creation, and Schodt often regurgitates these anecdotes in his essays.  It’s all a little redundant for the Astro Boy fan.

If one thing can be said about The Astro Boy Essays, it’s that you can judge the book by its cover.  The weak and uninspired cover design speaks volumes about the potential this book could have had to explore its source material in greater depth and with greater zeal, and yet instead comes off as an aging translator’s reluctance to revisit the material he had labored on for too many years.  Couldn’t Schodt have at least abided Tezuka’s (and his family’s) wish that if his work was going to be revisited, that it be done in a compelling and inspired manner?

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