Ranked #10561

Nextworld (Manga)

Nextworld is a manga written by the famous Tezuka Osamu in 1951. As said in the after notes, Tezuka removed over 400 pages for the release, originally being 1000 pages long. The artwork is influenced by old western cartoons, as usual.

Note: Tezuka did not intend for this to be an "imitation" or a "rip-off" of the HG Wells film 'Things to Come', as he found the film boring. Anyway, Dark Horse Comics release this manga along with several of his other works.

Story: The concept of the story is pretty interesting, as you can see from the synopsis above, but is driven down my aimless writing. I simply can't imagine reading the unabridged version, Tezuka simply spends too many panels with useless dribble. Considering the amount of text on each page, this should have been about a volume long, but like I said, it's driven down by way too much useless content. Sometimes it's even hard to follow, apparently this is because of the removed pages, which I can understand. Overall the story is pretty rough...kind of like this poor excuse of a review.

Art: Inspired by Disney, obviously, I'm not really fond of it. The panels are way too small for their own good, probably limiting Tezuka's artistic talent.
There are a few 2 page illustrations and Tezuka crams quite a few of his characters in them. There's also a bunch of reoccurring character designs, which slightly bothered me.... Pretty decent overall, though.

Character: Racial stereotypes to the max! Not only are they outdated and crude, they're also amusing! There's also a few reoccurring characters like Rock, Mustachio, and Kenichi! The characters are usually quite comedic, even during serious scenes. Not much I can say about characters that lack depth, though.

Enjoyment: Nice ideas, poor execution. I hope to see some of these ideas used properly in his newer works, which I will start reading quite soon.
Read this if you're looking for a nice and rough piece of copper.

Suggestions: Any other Tezuka work, Captain Harlock, and Queen Millennia. read more