I’ve spoken about a few important mangaka on this blog, Osamu Tezuka and the Year 24 Group being the two most obvious examples, but another important figure in the manga industry that I’ve only touched on a few times is the legendary Shotaro Ishinomori. Despite contributing greatly to the medium of manga, Shotaro Ishinomori is a relatively unknown name here in the West. Therefore, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at who he is, some of his history and why manga fans should know of Shotaro Ishinomori.
Shotaro Ishinomori was born in Tome, Japan on January 25th, 1938 as Shotaro Onodera and later adopted the pen name Shotaro Ishinomori. He released his first manga in 1955 at the age of 17 and later became an assistant to Osamu Tezuka, the man whose work New Treasure Island had inspired the young Shotaro to become a mangaka. Over the course of his lifetime he produced an incredible amount of content, so much so that he has the Guinness World Record for most comics published by one author!
Arguably his most popular manga work is a series called “Cyborg 009”, a manga about a group of nine people who are kidnapped by an organisation called Black Ghost and turned into cyborgs in order to serve as supersoldiers. However, with the help of a scientist, they manage to escape and end up fighting Black Ghost in order to save the world from war. The series ran from 1964-81 and has been adapted into numerous anime films, TV series, video games etc.
Additionally, it’s also worth noting that Shotaro Ishinomori has had an incredible impact on the medium of tokusatsu, specifically superhero TV series. In 1971, Shotaro Ishinomori co-created Kamen Rider, which he also produced a manga adaptation of. Kamen Rider proved to be an enormous success and spawned a very popular franchise as well as popularising Henshin Heroes. Shotaro Ishinomori would go on to produce many more tokusatsu series with perhaps the most notable besides Kamen Rider being Super Sentai which has since been adapted in the West as the Power Rangers franchise.
The impact that Shotaro Ishinomori has had is truly immense and so it’s tragic that so much of his catalogue is unavailable in English. Comixology licensed Shotaro Ishinomori’s manga catalogue in 2012 but it seems that they ended up running into problems and only released a fraction of his manga. Seven Seas has ended up releasing both the Kamen Rider manga and the Super Sentai manga while Viz Media released Shotaro Ishinomori’s adaptation of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Additionally, I was very pleased to see that a classic Kamen Rider TV series, Kamen Rider Black, has been licensed for release by Discotek Media. However, a staggering amount of his work continues to be unavailable in English and so I can only hope that these few recent releases of Shotaro Ishinomori’s work continues into the future.
Let me know your thoughts on Shotaro Ishinomori, whether you agree that manga fans should know about his work, which manga of his you have read and, if you have, what you thought of them, what you think about the tokusatsu series that he helped to create and any additional information you might have on the topic.
Hopefully you have found this article interesting and informative and, if you wish to seek any of the works I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs!