MYTHCOMICS: CAPTAIN KEN (WEEKLY SHONEN SUNDAY, 1960-61)

I hope to slowly work my way through the early works of Osamu Tezuka in quest of mythcomics, since the only ones I've mentioned thus far have stemmed from the latter part of his career. So far I've found nothing in the corpus of his most famous creation, ASTRO BOY, which his PRINCESS KNIGHT works didn't quite make my cut. But CAPTAIN KEN, a "space western" from 1960, proves a happy exception. This essay makes heavy use of--

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I don't have any knowledge of Tezuka's no-doubt-complex feelings toward American culture, given that it was the source of many of the early comics that influenced him, yet also spawned the atomic bomb with which American forces humbled the martial might of Japan. I doubt that he set down any thoughts about one of the most archetypal genres of America, the western, but in CAPTAIN KEN the artist managed to produce a commentary on the genre that may offer a reconciliation of both good and bad sentiments.

According to a prologue, uttered by a member of the Martian race (the "Indians" of the story), the first Earthlings to colonize Mars in 1983 were Americans, and so these are the people who institute the wholesale slaughter and enslavement of the natives for several generations to come. However, the prologue also mentions a single Earthling who saves the Martian race. American westerns had their share of "savior-figures" who sought to save Native Americans from a dire fate, however temporarily, and in modern politics these are deemed as bad juju for not allowing the Indians to save themselves, or something like that. Long before this political trope evolved, Tezuka dodged this particular bullet by making his savior-hero a member of a marginalized community on Mars: Japanese colonists, who have become part and parcel of American's Westernization of the Martian environment.

Mamoru, who fills the part of a viewpoint character for the work's early chapters, has lived on Mars all his life, though Tezuka is careful to point out that some if not all Japanese emigrants still esteem the culture of their society on Earth. Mamoru is attacked by hostile Martian tribes known as "the Moro," but he's saved by a strange young man known as Captain Ken, accompanied by Arrow, his resourceful robot horse. Mamoru assumes that the so-called captain is a distant relative who's expected to visit Mamoru's family, but the young man disappears. When Mamoru gets home, he finds that the actual traveler, a young woman named Kenn Minakami, has appeared at his family's house. Since she looks to be the spitting image of Captain Ken, but says she has no siblings or similar relatives, Mamoru wonders if Ken and Kenn are one and the same.

Tezuka keeps this suspicion going for several chapters, probably encouraging readers to believe that he Tezuka was mining the same tropes he'd used with PRINCESS KNIGHT, wherein a young woman masqueraded as a male for fight for justice. I'll spoil the big reveal right now: Captain Ken is the time-traveling son of the adult woman that Kenn will later become, which explains the resemblance. Ken's mission will also be revealed late in the series, and once the reader knows it, it may seem somewhat counter-intuitional for the hero to run around fighting assorted menaces that don't have anything to do with his main mission.

Still, on some level Tezuka wanted his readers to invest in a traditional Western protagonist, who does not hesitate to stand up for what's right, even when most of the people in his culture have become corrupt. So Ken, with or without help from the locals, opposes the town's corrupt mayor, his rowdy son Double, the gunfighter Lamp and a mysterious supercriminal named Napoleon. He also champions the insect-like Moro against the ruthless exploiters from Earth, and bonds with a female Moro named Papillon (French for "butterfly"). Despite the fact that they are of different species, Tezuka strongly implies that Papillon cherishes erotic feelings for Ken, though the hero does not notice her lovelorn nature and remains focused on his general mission.

After several peripatetic adventures, some of which find ingenious ways for the hero to interact with the Martian environment, the Moro launch a major offensive against the Earthlings. This pushes the Earthling president-- who is actually the criminal Napoleon-- to launch a solar bomb designed to wipe out the Martians, with all the settlers as collateral damage. Around the same time, Ken reveals to Mamoru his true origins: that he comes from another time-line in which the solar bomb went off and caused his mother, Kenn Minakami, to suffer awful delayed-reaction symptoms. Utilizing a convenient time machine, Ken and his robot horse travel back to the earlier phase of Martian history to undo the injury to Ken's mother. This mission also dovetails with saving the Martian race from extinction, but given Ken's democratic treatment of the natives, the two goals seem coterminous in terms of justice rather than mutually exclusive. Ken, accompanied by Papillon in what might be read as a "love-death," sacrifices his life to avert the solar bomb. His mother Kenn never knows what her son is destined to do, but Mamoru does, and by story's end it's clear that Mamoru is destined to marry Kennn and become the father of the doomed hero.

Like many time-travel paradoxes, one is not meant to poke at the dominos too much. If in the new reality Kenn never suffers the solar bomb's effects, then does Ken have any motive to go back in time and change reality? Does he go back at all, and if he doesn't, does the original reality re-assert itself? The time-travel part of the story is CAPTAIN KEN's least interesting aspect. A note from Tezuka in the manga's second observes that the artist's readers didn't quite know what to make of this space-western, with the result that CAPTAIN wasn't as popular as other contemporaneous works. Perhaps those Japanese readers weren't quite ready to grapple with the trope of the Western hero, an idealized hero who was meant to redeem the misdeeds of his own culture in the name of higher justice.

The 2014 English-language reprints of the manga also include a disclaimer about Tezuka's representations of race. Maybe this was a boilerplate they prepared for other works in which Tezuka made use of caricatures now considered politically incorrect, but there are no such images in CAPTAIN KEN, unless one is triggered by the idea of the insect-Martians being compared to real Native Americans.