In a Tokyo hospital in 1989, a 60-year-old man dying of stomach cancer begged nurses to let him keep drawing. Osamu Tezuka produced over 700 volumes and more than 150,000 pages of manga, and this episode examines the machinery behind that output. We trace his Osaka childhood between a mother who took him to the Takarazuka Revue, whose stylized stage makeup inspired the large expressive eyes of manga, and a father who screened Disney's Bambi for him more than 80 times.

We follow his wartime factory labor, his medical studies at Osaka University, the 1947 breakthrough New Treasure Island with its cinematic panel layouts, and the punch from an American GI that helped give Astro Boy his sense of alienation. Then we dig into the founding of Mushi Productions, the impossibly low 2.5 million yen weekly budget that forced the invention of limited a ...