Apollo's Song

I picked this one up by chance and I finished it in a single one hour setting thoroughly impressed with the depth, talent, and vision of Tezuka's story and illustrations. Apollo's Song, humorous but also visceral throughout, per Tezuka's style, is not only an epic morality tale on the meaning of love, an ancient Greek tragedy, a modern psychological tale, but it's also a manifesto on the inescapable essentialness of human nature. That is, humans are biological organisms that are created and/or formed through love and regardless of how and why some individuals reject love the necessity of love, e.g. maternal or romantic, remains constant and essential for life.

On the issue of the Moomin, I can confirm it's existence in Chapter 2, "No Man's Land."

A really eye-opening piece of work about the idea that love transcends time and place. Beautiful art, and equally quite wonderful story. There's even a moomin in there! ( )

a minor masterpiece, this one. a long discursion on the subject of love: where it comes from, what it's made of, what it leads to. the characters change utterly across time, yet at every point we can understand them. the Greek myth of Apollo and Daphne figures into one segment of the story, while another sequence centers around an alien race in the far future, but all the segments are tightly woven into the larger story. the treatment of voice is also remarkable: its romantic tendencies nicely tempered with a salty streak of raw realism. a beautiful edition from Vertical, too. ( )

"the god of Manga." Dr. Osamu Tezuka writes a great story of love that is obtained and lost. What a great story and while I was reading it toward the end it reminded of the great Philip K. Dick and his writing's. After finishing it, much to my surprise on the inside cover it mentioned the similarity to Philip K. Dick. ( )