Shakespeare Manga Theater by Osamu Tezuka

Osamu Tezuka was a busy, popular, energetic creator for a long time - credited with over 700 books, plus animation projects and other things - and even the most expansive translation projects have only brought disconnected chunks of that oeuvre into English. I think I have a decent idea of the Tezuka work I've liked best, and has seemed strongest to me: his adult-aimed gekiga works, mostly from the early 1970s. Although, with several hundred other things I've never had a chance to read, that's a very tentative opinion.

But I keep reinforcing it when I find works from the mainstream of Tezuka's work - like Princess Knight a decade ago, or One Hundred Tales last year. They have mostly been in madcap-verging-on-goofy mode, with often-grotesque characters emoting at top volume and rampaging around the pages, seemingly to entertain an audience of easily-distractible hellions. On the positive side, his art is always clean and crisp and his stories move swiftly, though often in arbitrary directions, the better to keep the audience on board.

Shakespeare Manga Theater is a collection of stories, or chapters of stories, with Shakespeare connections, from about twenty-five years of Tezuka's career. Other than their inspiration, there's nothing to unify them. Well, they are all in that audience-pleasing Tezuka style: all big and flashy and in-your-face, like a three-card monte dealer laying down a line of patter for an easy mark.

I'll be blunt: I find Tezuka in this mode to be a purveyor of disposable entertainment for young boys. There's some glimpses of depth, or more nuanced thought, but the morals tend to be obvious and the action tends to be frenetic. I gather his iconic work in this mode - things like Astro Boy and Black Jack - were beloved by a couple of generations of Japanese boys, and slightly less so by their compatriots in other countries, but I didn't read Tezuka at that critical age, and that work has never struck me as more than adequate as an adult.

We start off with a fairly straight adaptation of Merchant of Venice from 1959 - entirely Tezuka-ized, but the same plot, and the whole play. Then a story called "Robio and Robiette" from Astro Boy a few years later - a looser adaptation but with the essential bones of the original still entirely visible.

There are two chapters from a project called Vampires, which the editors claim to be inspired by Macbeth. I will grant them that there are three witches who a major character consults, and their dialogue is Macbeth-adjacent, but none of the rest of the plot, as much of it as we see in this excerpt, seems to have anything to do with Shakespeare. We instead have a boy lycanthrope, a dastardly villain hiding as the trusted aide of the great man he's trying to ruin, and the gorgeously fragile girl love interest who just gets to cry and be kidnapped in these pages.

The back half of the book has three stories from an '80s series called Rainbow Parakeet, in which a master of disguise takes last-minute parts in plays so he can use that access to do major thefts of the rich people attending the opening nights of those plays. Well, that's the set-up in the first story - in the second he's on vacation and the third just randomly traveling. There's also a nemesis/potential love-interest female detective who is central in the first two stories and entirely missing in the third.

In the first Rainbow Parakeet story, the play he's dropping into - the star was just arrested by the FBI on drug-smuggling charges, and the understudy was humorously injured by the director at the last dress rehearsal - is Hamlet. I think this may actually be the actual first story about Rainbow Parakeet, since he explains his deal, and we get a lot of background on the female detective, too.

The second story is supposedly an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, but much more loosely. Parakeet and the detective (Senri) land at a horse farm out somewhere in rural Japan, and investigate the mysterious disappearance of a once-famous racehorse and his apparent reappearance every night to cheer up his "wife." (This story does not accord to anything I know about horse breeding, even granted that I know very little.) Senri is also dodging a potential suitor, who turns out to be the owner of the farm. It is a much vaguer adaptation of that play; I suspect every Rainbow Parakeet story was given the title of some other famous story, and used elements of that without directly adapting it as such.

And the last story sees Parakeet in another remote rural location, this time in Polynesia. There lives a world-famous dancer, Boroguirre, and Parakeet plans to "steal" his dancing style. But he instead gets caught up in a villain's plan to actually steal the secret mixture of forty plants that Boroguirre's tribe uses to create a unique mind-expanding potion. Boroguirre is black, and has a white wife, so this is all supposedly an adaptation of Othello, and as such, Boroguirre does get unreasonably jealous out of nowhere when the plot requires him to do so.

These are all sturdy, audience-pleasing manga stories, full of action and humor. None of them have anything you would hesitate to hand to a relatively bright seven-year-old, or a particularly dull twenty-year-old. They don't make particularly interesting use of their Shakespeare references, but it is true that all of them have Shakespeare references.