Kasei Hakase
Doctor Märs

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This is one of the earlier manga by Tezuka, written before The New Treasure Island, I think. And it kind of shows.

The story is very thin and jumps here and there thorough the entire hundred-page run. The chapters are brief, with each of them introducing and dropping new things all the time, without any consideration for what's happened in the previous chapter, and at times, even the previous page.

This makes for a very dynamic and eventful, but uneven and unexciting, read, which starts off as a Titanic-cum-abduction sci-fi mystery and grows to involve robots, secret organizations (like those in The Lost World), and towards the ... end - Martians trying to invade Japan. It's all very tropey and inconsequential to the plot mostly because of the frenetic pace and the fact that everything gets resolved almost the moment it is introduces.

This habit of overcramming the stories with as much things as possible isn't something that Tezuka has ever grown out of, I think. It's not among my favorite qualities of his manga, because it feels like he's treating the readers as children (to be fair, the readers of most of his stuff were children). I'm not sure if it's condescending or just the result of a frenetic mind, though. Maybe in the case of this manga is the latter.

The style is the typical Tezuka Disney-esque one. We get the same soft, wobbly lines and forms here as in his more mature works, just in a much cruder form. The characters are a bit less appealing, a bit more difficult to read at a first glance. Their designs are also less perfect, though we can see glimpses of his later style in them. The same can be said about the backgrounds, whenever they are drawn, that is. There are many panels with nothing in the back.

Tezuka has always been a very interesting author for me. One that is both incredibly child-like in his humor and mature in some of his themes. Reading his early work, a part of which is this manga, points me to an oeuvre of incremental development towards perfecting a specific form of expression, never of extreme reinvention or swerving from the path he's been building since his childhood manga. (At least, that's based on the work I've read so far, and that's not even half of his massive output.) Some might not like this method, but as I grow and read more, I find myself and more and more drawn to this single-minded, almost crafstman-like, dedication.