Will the Dark Horse Astro Boy look just like the original Japanese version from the 1950s?
It’s a little bit different. One of the things about Tezuka is that he often went back and revised things if he didn’t like them — so he cleaned up some of the images. One of the really nice things about the Shonen Sunday editions is that Tezuka prefaced many of the stories with himself as an interlocutor, so he introduces the story from the standpoint of nearly 30 years after they were created, and he often describes why he drew it in a certain way or what the context was in which it was created. It’s really quite charming. I know that Tezuka loved Disney cartoons and saw Bambi more than 80 times, but the visual style of Astro Boy reminds me more of the cartoons from the Fleischer Studio. Yes, I think that you can say that artistically in many ways in terms of character design, Fleischer was more of an influence on Tezuka than Disney. He was a huge fan of Disney, but in terms of his character designs you can see that many of the minor characters are like ‘homages’ to the Fleischer ch
