鉄腕アトム (Astro Boy)

Fujiko Fujio were Tezuka's students in the most literal sense. Hiroshi Fujimoto and Motoo Abiko moved to Tokyo and into Tokiwa-so, the apartment block Tezuka had lived in, because he was the reason they wanted to draw manga at all; they sent him fan letters as schoolboys and he answered. Doraemon is Astro Boy's premise softened into domestic comedy: a robot built in the future, sent to live with a child, treated by everyone around him as a member of the family rather than as a machine. Tezuka's central question, whether a manufactured being is a person, is simply assumed by Doraemon, which is what a generation of influence looks like.

Tezuka adapted his own manga, and the 1963 series is the one that set the working method for Japanese television animation. To make a weekly half hour on the budget available, Tezuka's studio used held cels, repeated stock cuts of recurring actions, and three frames per exposure instead of one. That economy is the root of the limited-animation grammar the industry used for decades, so the adaptation matters twice: as a version of the manga, and as the production model everything after it inherited.

Tezuka asked the question Japanese science-fiction manga has been answering ever since: is a manufactured mind a person? Astro Boy is a robot built to replace a dead child, and the stories are mostly about the legal and social consequences of that rather than about fights. Shirow inherits the question and moves it: the Major is a human brain in a manufactured body, so the boundary Tezuka drew between made and born has stopped being locatable. The ghost, in Shirow's usage, is precisely the thing Astro Boy's opponents keep insisting he cannot have. Filed MEDIUM. It is the debt of a whole tradition to the person who founded it, and the map already records the same source reaching Akira.

Tezuka built the industry Otomo works in, and the inheritance is formal before it is anything else: the cinematic page, with panels used as shots, long wordless sequences and motion carried across a spread. Before Tezuka that was not how comics in Japan were drawn. The subject descends too. Astro Boy is a manufactured child with power beyond its keepers, built by a scientist who wanted his dead son back, and the stories are about what the state does with him. Tetsuo is that premise with the sentiment removed. Filed MEDIUM: foundational rather than specific, and Otomo is on record reacting against the roundness of the Tezuka style as much as inheriting from it.

Tezuka set the terms every later shonen artist worked in, and Toriyama has named him as the figure he grew up reading, alongside Disney. What is inherited here is form rather than plot: weekly serialisation with a cliffhanger an episode, cinematic panelling with speed lines and impact frames, big round eyes and simplified faces on bodies drawn with real anatomy underneath, and a boy hero whose strength is the engine of the story. Filed MEDIUM rather than HIGH because it is a whole-tradition debt rather than a specific borrowing: the map already records Tezuka's direct line to Akira.