Plot
In 1977 Kodansha approached Osamu Tezuka with a proposal to publish a complete library of nearly all his manga works. Although Tezuka was at first resistant to the idea (after all, it had been tried before and failed), Kodansha was insistent.
By some estimates, it would take you 145 hours 38 minutes to read the entire set… with no breaks!”
And so, published over a twenty-year period, from 1977-97, the Osamu Tezuka Complete Manga Works (tezuka osamu manga zenshū) edition by Kodansha has become the de facto standard in cataloging roughly 80,000 of the estimated 150,000 pages of manga produced by Tezuka during his lifetime. Although this 400-volume set is very comprehensive, it unfortunately does not include all his manga stories. Some of the notable exceptions include Cyrano, the Hero (1953), as well as Tezuka’s take on the Walt Disney classics Pinocchio (1952) and Bambi (1951).