context: comics > Osamu Tezuka

Work rate

Tezuka's productivity was legendary. Like almost all Japanese comic artists, he had a staff of assistants, but the story is that he wrote everything, laid it all out, pencilled most of it and inked at least the main figures - assistants did spot blacks, shading, and filling in details of cars, clothes and the like from files of reference pictures. He produced over 300 pages a month - to give some context, few US comic artists today hit a tenth that rate, and even Jack Kirby in his prime was only managing perhaps a third of that. He produced over 150,000 pages in his career, a stupendous amount surely unrivalled by anyone. Frederik Schodt mentions, several years before Tezuka's death, a publisher putting together a prestigious complete-works series of books running to over 300 volumes.

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