Flipped!: David Welsh On Osamu Tezuka's Swallowing The Earth



By David P. Welsh

I'm of the opinion that there should be a constant influx of translated comics by Osamu Tezuka. He's so essential to the history and evolution of manga, redefining storytelling techniques and expanding subject matter and audience in the process. It's hard to find a contemporary manga-ka who doesn't acknowledge him as an inspiration or cite his work as a professional influence or personal favorite.

He was prolific, too, so it seems reasonable to expect at least one "new" work by Tezuka each year. There are dozens of series waiting to be published in English, from classics for children like Princess Knight to works for a mature audience like Gringo. Of course, one of the side effects of Tezuka's daunting output is that all works will not necessarily be created equal. They won't all be great and some might not even be all that good.

That his works range along the quality spectrum doesn't bother me, and it doesn't strike me as a particularly compelling reason not to publish a work by one of the medium's undisputed masters. I know that's not a commercially sensible frame of mind, but it's how I feel. Every creator in every medium has works that suffer in comparison to their best output, and Tezuka's historical significance allows more leeway than most. I believe there's a compelling interest in seeing as much of his work as possible, even if it's... well... bad.



By way of example, I offer this year's "new" Tezuka, Swallowing the Earth, published by Digital Manga. It was one of Tezuka's first forays into the gekiga category, "dramatic pictures" conceived for adult audiences. Artists like Yoshihiro Tatsumi and his cohorts had broken ground in this category, and Tezuka, eager to see comics that appealed to every age and sensibility, joined the fray. Swallowing the Earth was one of the first titles to be serialized in Shogakukan's Big Comic, one of the earliest manga magazines targeted at adult men.

As prominent manga scholar Frederik L. Schodt argues in his foreword, Swallowing the Earth is an undeniably important milestone in Tezuka's output, representing an early step in Tezuka's transition from a creator of work for children to an artist who could frankly address adult concerns. Those concerns -- the price of war, greed, discrimination, and so on -- aren't absent from Tezuka's works for kids, but gekiga represented an opportunity to present those issues without any filter, incorporating sex and politics into his narratives. Tezuka would go on to produce enduring classics in the category of comics for adults, including Ode to Kirohito and MW, both published by Vertical.

But is anyone outside the narrow population of prodigies great at something the first time they try it? Tezuka wasn't, and Swallowing the Earth proves it.

It's about a global conspiracy to destroy civilization to avenge the wrongs done by men to a woman named Zephyrus. This conspiracy involves seduction, economic manipulation, and treachery of every stripe. Synthetic skin is developed and marketed to undermine law enforcement. Gold is dropped from the sky to destabilize global markets. And only a drunken moron is immune to the attentions of Zephyrus's alluring minions.



The drunk is Gohonmatsu Seki. He's drawn into Zephyrus's orbit when a mogul hires him to investigate the mysterious woman. Dim, booze-obsessed and entirely lacking in ambition, Seki seems like the last person you'd ask to engage in subterfuge. In fairness, he's also the last person you'd suspect of practicing it, but this does not enhance his effectiveness. His limited attention span for anything not contained in a bottle leads him to abandon his mission, but his sizeable endowment leaves the seductive Zephyrus bewitched. Seki can't escape involvement in Zephyrus's schemes, but the schemers find themselves at risk due to this unexpected chink in their man-hating armor.

You can hang a lot of different kinds of stories on the misadventures of a well-hung drunk, but I don't believe that a geopolitical thriller is one of them. Life just happens to Seki. His beliefs and sympathies are childlike, and they're automatically secondary, possibly even tertiary, to his thirst for alcohol. He's imperiled but not conflicted; if civilization collapsed, would he even notice?

As Schodt also notes, Seki disappears for long stretches, "and the story veers off in unexpected tangents, nearly running aground in the process." I'm going to have to respectfully disagree that the book suffers in the absence of its protagonist. He's a dimwitted encumbrance, and I found Tezuka's digressions much smarter and more mature. The tangential interludes where Tezuka illustrates the impact of Zephyrus's schemes are the most effective parts of the book.

The synthetic skin is initially embraced for purposes of vanity, but it evolves into a criminal tool. This development is best illustrated in a tangential story about greed and revenge rather than in the moments when Tezuka addresses that outcome directly. That kind of direct address actually results in one of the most cringe-worthy passages of the story, when American blacks flock to purchase the skin to pass for white, triggering violent riots in the process.



While Tezuka's intentions are undeniably good -- he's speaking out for equality and justice for the disadvantaged -- his execution can be lethally misguided and awkward. His rendering of blacks is undeniably if unintentionally racist to the point of grotesque. He meant no harm, and there's a cartoon apology for his ignorance in an early volume of Dark Horse's release of Astro Boy, but any other intention behind pages featuring these grotesque parodies is doomed to failure.

And while he clearly believes that women are mistreated singly and as a group, there's little in the way of event or character that empowers or redeems them. In Swallowing the Earth, women are ciphers, victims, vengeful automatons, or some combination of the three. It's frankly incomprehensible that so many of them would become smitten by Seki, which is yet another of his failings as a functional protagonist.



But even with those rather drastic failings, Swallowing the Earth is of value for the fulcrum point it occupies in Tezuka's career. It wanders and flails, but you can see the seeds of Tezuka's later, better work. It's fascinating to watch him fiddle with techniques he used to entertain kids and try and reposition them to serve an entertainment for adults even if that fiddling has decidedly mixed results. And whatever the failures of Swallowing the Earth as a story or moral argument, it still offers the opportunity to experience the work of one of the greatest creators of comics who ever lived. I believe that's always a worthwhile outcome.

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* Swallowing The Earth, written and illustrated by Osamu Tezuka, translated by Kumar Sivasubramanian, adapted and edited by Daryl Kuxhouse, foreword by Frederik L. Schodt, Digital Manga, 520 pages, June 24, 2009, ISBN: 9781569700563, $24.95.

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* all images from Swallowing The Earth

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David P. Welsh has loved comics since his parents first used Archie and Casper to sedate him during long trips in the family station wagon.

He's worked as a reporter and editor for daily and weekly newspapers, and later sold out for the glamorous world of public relations. Prior to relocating to The Comics Reporter, he wrote his Flipped column for Comic World News for just over three years. He's written articles on comics for print outlets and a variety of other web sites.

He lives in West Virginia, which he says has gotten a lot easier since the Starbucks and Barnes & Noble opened up.

You may e-mail David with questions or commentary You can write to this site about David's columns

Please bookmark his site, Precocious Curmudgeon.

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