Of course, from a contemporary perspective the technical standards of New Treasure Island appear almost primitive. But Tezuka continued for over forty years to work at the forefront of the manga world and was himself responsible for a great number of technical innovations until his death in early 1989 (this year also saw the death of the Showa Emperor and the end of the era by the same name which began in 1926 with his ascension to the throne). It is important to note that Tezuka was able to incorporate the techniques of the new genre known as geki-ga as it emerged in the 1960s without completely assimilating to it.

The geki-ga first emerged in books produced for lending libraries in the late 1950s. They took Tezuka's narrative manga as their point of departure but developed along different lines.

As I mentioned earlier, Tezuka's work had a strong influence on young manga artists after the war. Several of them formed the famous Tokiwa-so Group and became professional manga artists under Tezuka's tutelage. For the most part their work was didactic in nature, intended to educate and guide young people in the right direction. But unlike the simplistic moralism and entertainment of the prewar era, their manga had a modern and metropolitan flair.

But among the artists inspired by Tezuka there were also those whose works were not necessarily educational or didactic. These artists wrote for people of their own age in their late teens and produced realistic depictions of the cruelty of society and life in general. Needless to say, these kinds of depictions were completely reliant on the "modern prose" techniques pioneered by Tezuka. Because these authors preferred shocking images (although compared to manga today they seem almost pastoral) they were refused publication by the major Tokyo-based magazines. Instead they appeared in lending magazines published by houses out of Osaka and Nagoya, or minor Tokyo firms.

The books for lending I have mentioned were published for circulation in the more than 30,000 private lending libraries in existence at their peak in the 1950s. The vast majority of the books made available there were manga. These lending libraries often sold cheap candy as well and were strictly forbidden to children from good families. A certain segment of young manga artists saw this network of lending libraries as a venue for their own creative output. They called their work "geki-ga" in contrast both to older forms of manga and to the works that were being produced by those associated with Tezuka. The "geki" of "geki-ga" encompasses the two meanings of "dramatic" and "action-filled," so that one might best translate the term as "action comics."

Beginning in the mid-1960s the manga generation was entering college and demand increased for manga of interest to university students and adults. This was a great opportunity for the manga artists of the lending libraries, the geki-ga artists, whose livelihood was being threatened by the eclipse of the lending library system as a result of the spread of television. They began to produce manga treating themes hetertofore unseen in the child-centric manga world--works about history, social problems, news events, and love.

Not to be outdone by this rising new force, Tezuka himself began to come out with manga dealing with history and politics done with a geki-ga touch beginning in the 1970s. He was not, however, influenced by the sensationalism and vulgarity of the geki-ga. When readers eventually tired of the geki-ga, Tezuka's choice proved to have been the right one.

Today there is no real distinction between the narrative manga and the geki-ga. But technical matters in the finer sense--the detail of depiction, techniques of deformation, the rich variety of the frames, and the use of effectlines continue to show a steady improvement.