Tezuka's splash pages

Out of all the comics we have read, Osama Tezuka's The mysterious underground men is my favorite. As an art history minor, I never thought myself to be particularly interested in Japanese artwork and for that reason, I did not expect to enjoy Tezuka's work as much as I did. Nevertheless, one of the most engaging components of Tezuka's work arose from his adept artistic content, which I found particularly effective in the comic-book setting. His use of splash pages, which oftentimes bled from one page to the next, was especially poignant and effective. After reading Tezuka's Afterword (1982), I found that these pages, most importantly, achieved the comic writer's intention to create "Philosophical depth at the level of content" (iv). For example, the splash page spread across pages 98 and 99, are organized (or unorganized) to elicit the chaos of a brawl; the audience interacts with the pages as we would interact with a brawl. In another example, the majority of the splash page spread across pages 138 and 139, consists of negative space; this manipulation of space contextualizes the story in a broader scope, thus emphasizing the vastness of the world and the smallness of humanity and its inventions. Many of Tezuka's other splash pages evoke similarly profound philosophical subjects, which allow Tezuka to challenge the traditional framework of children's comics.