There seem to be a lot of work that's 1-2 volumes and longer series that nobody has picked up. Are these volumes rare/expensive or is the interest just not there?.

Last edited by lupianwolf at 12:33 pm, Aug 10 2015

A lot of his stuff is translated, but look how many titles he's got under his author page. And the little info blurb says he's authored over 700 series.

Even if there's a reasonable interest in scanlating his stuff, he authored so many manga that it's not surprising tons of it hasn't been touched.

And it probably is hard to find copies of his less famous works considering they were originally released a while ago, and scanning manga is pretty recent in comparison.

________________
"It is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."

Sadly, there's a lack of interest in older manga in general - look at how few series have been scanlated out of the year 24 group, for example. However, in the case of Tezuka, all of his series are theoretically licensed now, so some groups that have worked on his stuff in the past aren't going to be doing any more series from him.


No, there are decent public raws for the entire "Osamu Tezuka Complete Manga Works" reprints from Kodansha, which covers the vast majority of his manga work. (Though not quite everything, despite the title...)

Yep. It´s impossible to make money with such old series regardless of quality or importance so official translations now need to be crowd funded. Scanlations would have very few people reading or even caring (i had to polish up so many MU entries...) due to content, art style and so on but they do chug along (thx to all involved). I also don´t think that all works can be found easily as of now.
Enough of his animationed works are also left (mostly) untouched for these reasons. Even the high quality adaptation of Hidamari no Ki that had some noticeable people and Madhouse working on it! I lot of this should be a matter of time so just wait another decade or two and then the web will truly have the complete Tezuka library. In one way or the other. Unless Skynet takes over .
Now go and read the completed Hi no Tori as it is the 2nd best manga of all time.
A shame that the 11/10 OVA only has 3 episodes but even the cash filled days of the late 80s couldn´t give us that one due to similar reasons. At least his name lives on but the new Buddha adaptation in inacceptable and i guarantee you that the new Black Jack anime won't get much traction either.

________________
I also read EU/US comics and am a librarian.
Manga-Masters, My ANN-Lists + Imdb