Osamu Tezuka was a Japanese manga artist, cartoonist, animator, and film producer. He was born in Osaka Prefecture on November 3, 1928 and died on February 9, 1989. Tezuka earned many titles such as “the father of manga”, “the godfather of manga” and “the god of manga”. 

 

Tezuka sold his first comic strip, a four-panel serial called Diary of Ma-chan to an Osaka children's newspaper. Though it appeared in limited circulation, the strip proved popular enough to generate publisher interest in the artist. In short order, he sold the manga The New Treasure Island, the first in a long line of his adaptations from Western literature. Treasure Island made Tezuka nationally famous and proved to be the tipping point in his career. Even while completing medical school, he published manga at a furious clip, graduating to larger newspapers and reader numbers.

 

From 1950 until his death, Tezuka worked non-stop. It seemed natural to him to transition his manga characters into the animation he so loved, and thus a genre was born. Even he could not have foreseen that his Astro Boy would take anime global and offer Tezuka international fame. Ever the workaholic, he produced nearly 500 anime episodes -- and this while continuing to conceive, write and draw volumes of some 700 different manga titles.

 

He is popularly considered the Japanese equivalent to Walt Disney, who Tezuka is greatly inspired by. Some of his most famous children mangas include; Astro Boy, Princess Knight and Kimba the White Lion. Also, he made adult series such as; Black Jack, Phoenix and Buddha. These all won several awards. Sadly, he died of stomach cancer in 1989 which impacted the Japanese public and other cartoonists. A museum was created in his memory called Takarazuka, it dedicated to his memory and life works.