Comics / Comics News

The Art of Osamu Tezuka Book Wins Harvey Award

By The Editor
August 30, 2010 - 03:56

English-speaking professionals in the comic industry have selected Helen McCarthy's book The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga as the recipient  of this year's Harvey Award in the Best American Edition of Foreign Material category. The book, created with the full cooperation of Tezuka Productions, is the first-ever full overview of Tezuka's life and work to be published in English. It combines numerous reproductions and translations of Tezuka's comics, including many that have never before been seen in English, with extensive discussion of his childhood, early work, and influence.

The other nominees in the category included two actual manga titles (Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki's Pluto: Urasawa X Tezuka and Ursawa's 20th Century Boys); the graphic novel The Photographer by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier LeFevre, and Frederic Lemercier; and another nonfiction volume, Manga Kamishibai. In Manga Kamishibai, Eric Nash studies Japanese paper theater, a form of art and performance that has been called a "missing link" in the development of manga.

Japanese comics such as Yoshihiro Tatsumi's Abandon the Old in Tokyo, Tezuka's Buddha, and Kazuko Koike's Lone Wolf and Cub have been named winners in the category in previous years. Last year, however, with Solanin, Red Colored Elegy, and two issues of Witchblade: Takeru all in the running, the award went to Gus and His Gang, French comics creator Christophe Blain's take on the Wild West.

The Art of Osamu Tezuka marks the first instance that a work that is primarily commentary, rather than actual comics, has received the honor. Nominations for the Harveys are solicited from qualifying comics industry professionals, who are asked to nominate persons and titles in more than 20 different categories. The top five vote-getters in each category become the official nominees, and the winners are picked by another vote.

McCarthy has been writing about anime and manga since the early 1990s. Her 1993 Anime: A Beginner's Guide to Japanese Animation was one of the first English-language books on the subject, while the study of Hayao Miyazaki's work that she authored in 1999 is considered the definitive work on the Oscar-winning director. Earlier this year, The Art of Osamu Tezuka also received an Eisner Award nomination for Best Comics-Related Book, but that award went to The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics.

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12