The history of manga and anime is, at its core, a history of individual human beings — working at desks, in studios, through illness and exhaustion and personal crisis — producing work that outlasted them. The medium's greatest creators share a discipline that borders on pathology: the willingness to sustain creative production week after week, year after year, decade after decade, at a pace that would break most people. They also share the capacity to create characters and worlds so vividly imagined that millions of strangers feel genuine grief when those characters die and genuine joy when they triumph. This is the central mystery of popular fiction, and manga and anime have produced some of its most extraordinary practitioners.
Osamu Tezuka: The God of Manga
Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989) is not the most-read manga artist in history — that distinction belongs to Eiichiro Oda. He is not the most commercially successful — Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball franchise has generated more revenue than any single Tezuka property. But Tezuka is the creator without whom modern manga and anime as we know them would not exist, because he was the person who invented their visual grammar, established their narrative ambitions, and proved their cultural legitimacy through fifty years of work so voluminous — over 700 manga series, dozens of animated films and television series — that subsequent generations of creators have spent careers merely exploring the territory he mapped.
Tezuka's greatest works include Astro Boy, the robot-boy science fiction series that became Japan's first major anime television property; Black Jack, a morally complex medical drama about a unlicensed genius surgeon that remains in print and deeply beloved fifty years after its debut; and Phoenix, a twelve-volume meditation on life, death, and the nature of humanity across thousands of years of history, which Tezuka considered his life's masterwork and was still working on when he died of stomach cancer in 1989 at age 60.
Akira Toriyama: The Creator Who Made Fighting Beautiful
Akira Toriyama (1955–2024) created two of the most influential popular culture properties in Japanese history: Dr. Slump (1980), a comedy manga that demonstrated his extraordinary gift for physical comedy and character design, and Dragon Ball (1984), which became the template for the shōnen battle manga and generated a franchise worth over $23 billion.
Toriyama's character design influence extends far beyond his own work. His character sheets for the Dragon Quest video game series — which he contributed to beginning with Dragon Quest I in 1986 — have sold over 85 million games and constitute perhaps the most recognisable character design vocabulary in JRPG history. His ability to convey personality through silhouette and posture, and to make combat dynamics visually legible at high speed, influenced virtually every battle manga creator who came after him. When he passed away in March 2024, the mourning response from fans, fellow creators, and entertainment companies worldwide was immediate, global, and genuinely grief-stricken.
Eiichiro Oda and the Endurance Record
Eiichiro Oda (born 1975) has been drawing One Piece every week since July 1997. As of 2026, he has produced over 1,100 chapters — roughly 22,000 pages — of a single continuous story, making it the best-selling manga series in history with over 530 million copies in print. Oda's achievement is not merely commercial; it represents a feat of sustained creative world-building without precedent in any narrative medium. The world of One Piece — its geography, history, political systems, mythologies, and dozens of returning characters — is maintained in Oda's head and in notebooks of staggering density. Creators who have visited his studio describe it as a research library as much as an art studio, with reference volumes on sailing, marine biology, naval history, and pirate lore covering every surface.
Oda's working habits are equally documented. He reportedly sleeps three hours per night during serialisation weeks, rises at 5 AM, works through the night, and takes Sundays partially off. He has had corrective eye surgery and wrist procedures necessitated by years of repetitive drawing. He has maintained this schedule while raising children and managing a team of assistants. That One Piece's narrative quality — the emotional resonance of its characters, the intricacy of its plotting — has remained consistently high across nearly thirty years is, by any measure, extraordinary.
Hayao Miyazaki: The Animator Who Wouldn't Retire
Hayao Miyazaki (born 1941) has announced his retirement five times. He has returned from it five times. Now in his eighties and still working, he is perhaps the clearest demonstration that certain creative temperaments are simply incapable of stopping. His films — My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, The Wind Rises, The Boy and the Heron — are, taken together, the most critically acclaimed body of animated work in cinema history. Spirited Away won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003 and remained the highest-grossing film in Japanese history for nineteen years until Demon Slayer: Mugen Train surpassed it in 2020.
Miyazaki's creative philosophy — grounded in the physical world, suspicious of digital shortcuts, committed to the hand-drawn line as the basis of all animation — has put him in permanent tension with the economics of modern animation, and it is this tension, as much as anything, that explains why Studio Ghibli's films cost what they cost and take as long as they take. His insistence that animators understand not just how to draw motion but how the physical world actually behaves — how cloth folds, how water flows, how a body distributes its weight — is documented in the production diaries and "making of" materials that Ghibli has released for each film, and constitutes a curriculum in observational drawing as demanding as any art school programme.
The New Generation: Isayama, Gotouge, Akutami
The manga generation that emerged in the 2010s has broken records that Tezuka and Toriyama's generation set. Hajime Isayama's Attack on Titan (2009–2021) told a complete, planned narrative over twelve years and generated more cultural conversation — including furious debate about its ending — than any manga since Evangelion. Koyoharu Gotouge's Demon Slayer became the fastest manga to reach 150 million copies in print. Gege Akutami's Jujutsu Kaisen surpassed 80 million copies within five years of its launch.
What is notable about all three is their willingness to kill beloved characters without redemption, to complicate their moral frameworks beyond simple good-versus-evil binaries, and to end their stories — definitively, on their own terms — rather than extending them indefinitely for commercial reasons. They represent a generation that learned from manga's history and made choices based on what that history revealed about what works and what exhausts its readers. The medium they inherited from Tezuka and Toriyama remains as vital as it was in 1963 and 1984, because each generation of creators has found new things to say with it.