October 18, 2009

Panels from Tezuka's Crime and Punishment

Earlier this year I reviewed Osamu Tezuka's take on Crime and Punishment. I just want to share a few pages from the end of the book where a young Tezuka, 25 at the time, is trying things the older Tezuka would eventually master. The text is from the bilingual edition translated by Frederik L. Schodt. Read the right-to-left!

The following pages are out-of-order (there is one additional page in between them) and left untranslated because you don't need to know what they are talking about to fully appreciate or understand the panels.

I just love the onomatopoeia in the rain and how heavy the raindrops feel in the third panel. What do you think?

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Wow, this is great stuff. I should try to look this up sometime. That anthropomorphization in the first sequence is incredible. I love that; everybody got the metaphor when it was explained, but Tezuka took the time to dramatize it and give the idea emotion. Beautiful.

ratbat said...

fantastic! I don't suppose anyone has a link to download...i'm working on a stage production of C&P and this looks like fantastic inspiration....

James Moar said...

I got this book (Japanese edition) during a recent holiday, though I haven't read it properly yet.

Find 10-year-old-looking Raskolnikov unintentionally funny in places (the axe-toting scene, mostly), but then it's a kids' adaptation from the mid-50s. Would've looked totally different if Tezuka had done it in the 70s or 80s, I'm sure.

The change to the ending doesn't really fit Dostoyevsky's intentions, but considered as Tezuka it's rather good.

Antonyo said...

I like this comic a lot, it's not among Tezuka's best but it has really impressive scenes, it's seems that Tezuka experiments with each scene giving it some kind of theatrical feel. Current artist have so many thing to learn from him.