A Manga Introduction to the Japanese Economy may have been enthusiastically received by people who did not otherwise read manga, but it was widely scoffed at by manga enthusiasts. In the first place, the initial volume bore Ishinomori's signature but the style was clearly not his own, while the second and third volumes were clearly his work. The reason for this inconsistency might be assumed to be the following.

When Ishinomori first received the commission to do this job he was entirely uninterested, not only because not a single manga released from the start as a book had ever been a hit, but also because this kind of manga as economics textbook was not considered appropriate work for a first-rate manga artist. Producing manga study aids for children was mainly seen as a leisure-time occupation for manga artists who had retired from an active career.

For these reasons, Ishinomori turned the project over entirely to his assistants and simply lent his name to the finished product. Contrary to all expectations, however, the first volume became a bestseller and naturally the request came for more volumes. Ishinomori had no choice but to take up his pen himself. This made the work a rather bizarre bestseller of which the first volume was written by someone other than the ostensible artist and the subsequent volumes were the work of the artist himself. Needless to say there are often cases where a work becomes a best seller and the author decides to leave the work of producing sequels to ghost writers. But A Manga Introduction to the Japanese Economy was extraordinary because the situation was reve rsed.

Despite its rather dismal reception by manga enthusiasts, this work deserves credit for having helped to establish the genre of information manga. In particular we should take note of the following two points. First off, it helped to raise society's awareness of manga as a whole, and secondly it created more job opportunities for manga artists who had withdrawn from the forefront of the manga world. Both of these points are of course from the perspective of manga as an industry. At the risk of repetition, however, I would like to emphasize that information manga were nothing more than an application of what had already been developed in more established manga genres, both in terms of content and technique. As such they had nothing to contribute to the larger development of manga as a whole.

Ishinomori Shotaro was born in 1938. He moved to Tokyo after graduation from high school and took up residence in the legendary Tokiwa-Sapartment building. This building, located in Tokyo's Shiina Machi, housed the studio of Tezuka Osamu and the residences of other promising young manga artists in addition to Ishinomori, including Fujiko Fujio, Akatsuka Fujio, and Mizuno Hideko, all of whom were to become pillars of the explosively expanding manga world in the 1960s.

Ishinomori Shotaro was a genius who employed radical new techniques of cut-backs, fade-outs, and black-white inversion to enhance frame-articulation and narrative development. In terms of content he produced manga adaptations of highly influential and intelligent works by writers such as Ray Bradbury, Jack Finney, and John Wyndham. In the 1960s these were all completely without precedent.

From the 1970s on Ishinomori became a best-selling author of popular works. In the 1980's he went on to set the standard for information manga. There is no disputing Ishinomori's status as an artist always on the forefront of his age.

Cyborg 009 + Kamen Rider, Shotaro Ishinomori