Osamu Tezuka has often been called the Walt Disney of Japan, but he was far more than that. Tezuka was Disney, Stan Lee, Alan Moore, Tim Burton and Carl Sagan, all rolled into one incredibly prolific package – and he changed the face of Japanese culture forever. This lavishly packaged book reveals what made a shy doctor one of the key figures of 20th Century pop culture. Packed with stunning, never-before-seen images, it tells the story of Tezuka’s amazingly prolific life, and connects it to his manga and anime work. Tezuka created hundreds of characters, many known worldwide, drew over 150,000 pages of art and scripted dozens of movies; he created graphic biographies of Jesus, and the Buddha – yet a huge amount remains untranslated into English. The book is accompanied by a DVD with a fly-on-the-wall documentary, The Secrets of Creation, made in 1986 and never before translated or shown in the West.


Helen McCarthy has established herself as one of the Western world’s pre-eminent experts on modern Japanese culture. With eight books about anime and manga to her name, she also curated the first Osamu Tezuka Film Festival at London’s Barbican Centre and is currently developing a documentary film about his life and work. She lives in London. Katsuhiro Otomo, who contributes a foreword, is the creator of Akira, the first hit manga in the English speaking world. Widely seen as one of the most important manga creators after Tezuka, his work has sold millions of copies worldwide.