Bookwyrm is marking the whole series as read. Alright, I will read them all.

The second one (Future) was incredibly moving.

Nothing I have read in this Tezuka binge has been emotionally easy but it is all nourishing, even at its darkest.

When I started the binge I watched a video by a guy who trying to read his entire huge manga collection in a year. He spent a week reading Tezuka and kept reporting that each thing he read was a greater masterpiece than the last. Yes, that tracks. I loved him before but I only really knew Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion from my childhood. And Ode to Kirihito and MW as an adult reader. Those are all amazing in their own right. But going deeper into his work and feeling the entire range of emotions it can evoke, I am now convinced that his work can stand toe-to-toe with any artist in any medium when it comes to saying something about the human condition. And there’s still a lot more of it for me to discover…

I am finished all 12 volumes of Phoenix. It took nearly a month and it has left me emotionally drained and exhausted.

The last volume was a nice and light(er) departure that wove in through Ancient Egypt, Greece (with the Trojan War), and Rome. The whole series jumps a lot through history and the future, jumping around in genre and style as well. The only constant is the phoenix, who appears in every volume in some important way. Most volumes are self-contained, except for the big stories that take two volumes to complete. Sometimes characters appear in different incarnations -- reincarnation and being cursed to live out the same fate in different forms is a big theme.

This is a life, love, the universe, and everything type series -- Tezuka's life's work. It gets pretty dark at times and is quite critical of humanity. But it is also cute, sweet, and heartwarming at other times. And also very sad at points. He never completed it, but every story has closure on its own, the real pleasure isn't try to synthesize and make sense of it as a whole, each story is satisfying and different. He worked on it from 1954 to 1988. Imagine waiting years between the publication of stories? And the elation when a new one was published? I don't think I will binge read it ever again but I will definitely go back over the years and revisit my favorite stories.

Whatever my book count will be at the end of 2024, add 11 to it since all of the books in this series are somehow associated with the first volume in the bookwyrm metadata.

And I still have a lot more Tezuka to go...