You've Seen the Anime (dubbed in English) and the Comic Book Adapted from It... ...now here's the original manga story that both were derived from! To Be Concluded Next Monday! Written & illustrated by Osamu Tezuka, and serialized in Kobunsha's Shonen Boy #8 & 9 (1959).
...this manga-to anime character was America's first exposure to Japanese pop culture's passion for artificial life-forms!
Now, we're presenting the first American comic book adaptation of one of the episodes from the 1963 series, which aired afternoons Monday through Friday on local channels!
But Wait!
Do You Believe the Threat of the Weird Robot is Over???
If you're the Electric Patrol, tasked with guarding the globe, you throw up your hands and call upon that tiny triumph of technology, Radio Boy!
Eclipse's never-reprinted Radio Boy #1 (1987) one-shot is loosely-based on Osamo Tesuka'sAstro Boy, which had achieved success as a translated anime in the early 1960s and opened the door for a flood of Japanese cartoons on American TV that continues to this day.
Note: Though Astro Boy is best-known in the US as a tv cartoon series, it began as a wildly-successful manga in 1954.
The premise of Radio Boy is that the creator himself did the translations for this American edition, resulting in a mish-mash of syntax and tenses as well as some literal translations of Japanese phrases.
As a collector of foreign videos (including Japanese and Chinese DVDs), I can attest that the English subtitles on them often do read like the captions and copy in this spoof.
I suspect writers Chuck Dixon (yes, that Chuck Dixon) and Jim Engel had also seen some mis-translated films/videos, and wanted to re-create the experience on the printed page.
