The defining masterpiece of modern manga—the series that “God of Manga” Osamu Tezuka considered his life’s work—is finally available in English once again, in a beautiful, cloth-bound hardcover featuring fully restored art and new introductions by translator and author Fredrik L. Schodt (Manga! Manga!) and Hugo finalist Dr. Ada Palmer (Too Like the Lightning).
Vol. 1 includes the first two stories in publication order—”Dawn” and “Future”—presented in a large size with silkscreen-printed and gold foil–stamped covers and including color pages recovered from the original serialization and other material never before presented in any English edition: 670 pages of manga and bonus material.
From the premiere of Astro Boy on television in 1963 to the release of Buddha, Princess Knight, Dororo, Black Jack, and other English editions in the 21st century, Americans have become familiar with the vast breadth of Osamu Tezuka’s stunning career, over which he produced more than 150,000 pages of comics.
Yet the most conspicuous omission from Tezuka’s English catalog has long been the series he considered his magnum opus, one he worked on and reworked from the 1950s until his death in 1989: Phoenix. Known as Hi no tori (“firebird”) in Japanese, this meta-series—inspired by Tezuka’s omnivorous appetite for Asian folklore, American science fiction, Russian ballet and animation, and anything he he found fascinating—leaps through extremes of time and space, encompassing exciting action and experimental suspense, stark philosophy and intimate drama.
Tying it all together are the recurring “actors” of Tezuka’s “Star System”; themes of mortality, legacy, love, and ego; and the titular bird herself: at times a mythical being living in a volcano, at others a spiritual presence in deep space, always a mystery.
This new Kodansha edition features the acclaimed original translation, commissioned during Tezuka’s lifetime by his production company, from Dadakai—a collective consisting of Jared Cook, Shinji Sakamoto, and Frederik L. Schodt, the inaugural inductee of the American Manga Awards Hall of Fame. This translation was previously published by Viz Media from 2002–2008 but is long out of print, and Schodt and Cook themselves have returned to assist in updating it for this edition.
The art draws on a new restoration published in Japan in 2020, intended to replicate the visuals of Phoenix precisely as it would have appeared to Japanese readers experiencing it for the first time in COM, Tezuka’s seinen manga magazine, in the 1960s. This edition features recreations of two–, three–, and four-color art treatments that were forgotten for decades, with new lettering from master letterer and font designer Sara Linsley, wrapped in a cloth cover with screenprinted and foil-stamped trade dress.
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