Astro Boy - URAN!

Tezuka Productions: Astro Boy and Friends - Uran - Heathside Trading 2022

In the past 10 years or so I've become a big fan of Osamu Tezuka. He is known by many nicknames, but I was always fond of "The Godfather of Manga." At over 150,000 pages and 700 volumes of manga in his brief 60 years, he earns that title easily. Interestingly, I think what finally turned me from a casual appreciative fan into a mega-fan was the launching of KickStarter and the almost immediate campaigns to translate various works of his into English. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I picked up the very first KickStarter-funded manga of his at my local comic shop and was instantly smitten. But way before I began obsessing over his manga, I was a big of the 1963 black & white Astro Boy anime (an adaptation of Tezuka's Mighty Atom manga from 1952). I had an  VHS with a handful of episodes and I was blown away by the quality. It's was lightyears ahead of American animation. I even played the exact same tape on a loop in my college years for background ambiance at parties, and it always got attention.