Osamu Tezuka died

Osamu was responsible for the creation of anime and manga. His studio produced some of the very first Manga and proto Anime like Astro Boy Kimba the White Lion and Princess Knight. Lets say Osamu met's his end during one of the many bombing raids on Japan. How would his death affect pop culture?
 
Actually Jun'ichi Nakahara and Macoto Takahashi would still be around, they would be the ones that are behind the manga revolution but it would only be on the shoujo side.
 
Tezuka's good, but he's not absolutely irreplaceable aside from the properties he created (or in the case of Kimba, uh, "borrowed"), We still have the likes of Nagai Go, Ishikawa Ken, Matsumoto Reiji, and even Miyazaki Heiyao (Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind was a manga before it was a movie, and the movie only {re}told 1/3 of the manga's story.)

Basically, if Jonathan Jacob "Jack Kirby" Kurtzburg stuck to illustrating pulp magazine covers, he'd be missed, but the world would still have had Joe Schuster, Bob Kane, Bill Everett, C. C. Beck, and George Papp. Same thing with Tezuka.
 
They are the ones responsible for the shojo revolution in the 70s aside from Tezuka.
Tezuka's career and revolution started in the forties...
If we're talking about his shojo work, Ribon no Kishin started in 1953.
(But Nakahara and Takahashi are the same period, so... misprint?)

And wasn't the fortyniners the seventies shojo revolution?

But, yeah, there would be others, and different outside influences, but then again, that was implied in the question, wasn't it?
 
Tezuka's career and revolution started in the forties...
If we're talking about his shojo work, Ribon no Kishin started in 1953.
(But Nakahara and Takahashi are the same period, so... misprint?)

And wasn't the fortyniners the seventies shojo revolution?

But, yeah, there would be others, and different outside influences, but then again, that was implied in the question, wasn't it?
The 49ers were influenced by Nakahara and Takahashi, that is why they are important as well.
 
Well, obviously, no one is completely irreplaceable. I'm sure anime and manga would still exist and be great even without Tezuka.

But a lot of the stylistic and plot conventions in the medium are directly or indirectly derived from his work. He was the one who started drawing characters with oversized eyes, for example. Also, his adhesion to gekiga in the 60s surely did a lot to popularize the movement and helped to breach the divide between "children's" and "adult" comics. If it helps, imagine what would have happened if Walt Disney decided to start drawing graphic novels at some point.
 
So what I'm reading is that Tezuka was to manga what Stan Lee was to American comics?

A lot more. Stan Lee was an extremely important figure in the world of American superhero comics, only. Tezuka was the godfather of anime and manga as we know them today, and he left his mark across basically all styles and genres. The only fit American comparison I can think of would be Walt Disney, but even that falls flat given that Disney worked almost exclusively on children's cartoons
 
His influence is closer to Will Eisner, if Will Eisner hadn't jumped ship from comic book publishers to newsstrip syndicates and had gotten as big as Walt Disney, too. Compare Tezuka's Buddha with Eisner's The Ten Commandments and A Contract With God.
 
Let's put it this way: Tezuka pretty much defined, if not outright created, a lot of different manga conventions. The medium would be almost unrecognizable without his influence.

Side note: when I saw the title, I was very tempted to post a meme involving a certain Pokémon.
 
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