“Manga is virtual. Manga is sentiment. Manga is resistance. Manga is bizarre. Manga is pathos. Manga is destruction. Manga is arrogance. Manga is love. Manga is kitsch. Manga is sense of wonder. Manga is…There is no conclusion yet.” — Tezuka Osamu, 1969

David Pescovitz notes in Boing Boing that San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum has a huge retrospective on Tezuka Osamu, the pioneering master of manga who created Astro Boy and so, so much more.

The exhibition features 200 works, including original art, covers, posters, anime, adult manga, and film screenings. A lot more information about Tezuka and the exhibition is available on an impressive dedicated website.

Artist, writer, and entrepreneur Tezuka Osamu (1928-1989) is regarded in Japan as the “god of comics,” and revered worldwide as an artistic master. He was the driving force behind the international phenomenon of manga-Japanese comics-and their offspring anime, Japanese animation. Creating over 700 manga titles-and drawing more than 150,000 pages-during his lifetime, Tezuka is best known in the West for Tetsuwan Atom (Mighty Atom or Astro Boy) and Jungeru Taitei (Jungle Emperor or Kimba the White Lion), both of which originated from his manga, and were serialized internationally for television in the 1960s. Today, Tezuka’s work is acclaimed for its complexity, originality,
and a powerful dynamism.

Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga, which took nine years of complicated negotiations to organize, is the first major exhibition of Tezuka’s art outside of Japan.

The exhibition was organized by Australia’s National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in association with Tezuka Productions. Curator Philip Brophy said:

Tezuka is venerated as a driving force of the manga and anime industries in Japan. This exhibition will reveal the striking originality of his manga; its technical inventiveness, extraordinary dynamic range, and its close relationship to his anime. From the people who remember Astro Boy on TV when they were kids to the late teens of today-who are in tune with Japanese pop culture-this exhibition will appeal to a wide audience to whom the bold and sharp sensibilities of the comic form are exciting and relevant.

San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum is a public institution whose mission is to lead a diverse global audience in discovering the unique material, aesthetic, and intellectual achievements of Asian art and culture.

Holding nearly 16,000 Asian art treasures spanning 6,000 years of history, the museum is one of the largest museums in the Western world devoted exclusively to Asian art.