紙の砦

A short story published in the magazine "Weekly Shonen King" in September 1974 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Tezuka Osamu's career as a mangaka. It is a semi-autobiographical manga that depicts Tezuka's main character, Tetsuro Osamu, modeled after Tezuka himself, who desperately lives his life with a passion for manga while the war intensifies day by day at the end of the Pacific War. In the postscript to the Kodansha edition of Tezuka Osamu's Complete Manga Collection, Tezuka wrote that the manga "contains a great deal of fiction", but many of the events depicted in the manga are based on his own experiences, which he also wrote about in his essays and other writings.