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The artwork was etched onto a metal plate (zinc), and the speech balloon areas were cut out with a fretsaw.
Movable type was then embedded into these cutouts—a process called bun-sen, where each character is selected and arranged manually to match the manuscript.
It sounds like something from the Gutenberg era, but this method was commonly used until the late 1970s.
Even the early issues of Weekly Shonen Jump featuring Go Nagai’s Mazinger Z used metal plates and movable type.
However, despite these stories, the actual zinc plates and type were melted down and reused at the printing sites, leaving no surviving examples or photographs—until now.
Thanks to the cooperation of Kazui Kobo (Shinjuku, Tokyo), a company still capable of producing zinc plates for manga manuscripts, we were able to recreate manga printing using metal plates and movable type.
Back then, magazines were printed on recycled paper using letterpress rotary presses.
No works were ever printed on 100% cotton paper using flatbed letterpress machines.
This art print, therefore, is an OOPART (Out Of Place ARTifact)—a discovery that doesn’t belong to its time or place.
It will be sold as a set along with a photograph of the plate.
The photograph is a collotype print by Benrido (Kyoto), printed with ink so that the texture can be felt when touched.
Go Nagai made his manga debut with Meakashi Polikichi (serialized in Bokura) in 1967. In 1968, he began publishing Harenchi Gakuen in Weekly Shonen Jump. The series was a tremendous hit. In 1972, he launched two series, Devilman in Weekly Shonen Magazine and Mazinger Z in Weekly Shonen Jump, while the animated versions were being developed for television simultaneously. In 1973, he started serializing Cutie Honey in Weekly Shonen Champion. His works span a wide range of genres, from gag comedy to dark fantasy, science fiction, and horror. As of 2024, he continues to publish series. In 2019, he was awarded the Order of Arts and Letters (Chevalier) by the French government.
The protagonist rides on a giant robot, battling strange enemies.
In 1972, Go Nagai launched both the TV animation and manga series projects at the same time. By bridging the story’s world with character merchandise, this franchise created a giant robot universe and a new market, which continues to thrive today. This paved the way for such series as Getter Robo (1974–), Mobile Suit Gundam (1979–), and Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995–).
Mazinger Z was followed by the sequels Great Mazinger (1974) and UFO Robot Grendizer (1975–), which were big hits in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. In 2024, Grendizer was rebooted as the animated series Grendizer U.
A metal plate features an inverted image. The type is embedded in the speech bubbles.
Even if you're a manga fan or a manga researcher, you're unlikely to have seen such an image. Plate-making and typesetting were used to produce manga from the postwar period to the 1970s. We have revived this technique, which we learned about from veteran printing and plate-making company employees and editors. However, we have not been able to find any real artifacts of this process, or any archival photographs.
The manuscripts that are currently seen at many manga exhibitions are illustrations drawn by artists with phototypesetting pasted on them. When people think of manga originals, they often picture these illustrations with text pasted onto the speech bubbles. But before the invention and popularization of phototypesetting, the manga typesetting and printing process was done differently.
The old-fashioned method was to etch the manga illustration into a metal (zinc) plate, carve out the speech bubbles with a thread saw, and embed the "type-picked" text in the space created. Type-picking refers to the task of selecting and arranging each letter of type according to the original. It sounds like something out of the days of Gutenberg, but until the late 1970s, this was a common practice. The first chapter of Osamu Akimoto's KochiKame: Tokyo Beat Cops, which was serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1976, was also typeset using movable type.
However, although this information has been passed down, the zinc plates and type that were actually used were melted down and reused at the workshops. As far as we know, none of the actual plates or type still exist, and we were not even able to find any photographs of them. In 2022, with the help of the Kazui Press (Shinjuku, Tokyo), we found a company that can still produce zinc plates of manga manuscripts, so we launched a project to recreate the process of printing manga using metal plates and moveable type. We recorded the following processes in a video: the production of etched zinc plates, type casting, integrating typesetting, and letterpress printing.
For the recreation of this process, we chose to use the final page from the first chapter of Eiichiro Oda's ONE PIECE. This art print, which is a kind of OOPArt ("out-of-place artifact," or a discovery made in an unusual context), will be sold as sets that include photographs of the plate. The photographs were taken by Naoki Honjo, winner of the Kimura Ihei Award for photography. Each sheet of photographic paper is handmade using platinum palladium printing, a technique said to have been perfected around the end of the 19th century. They are hand-printed. Also included is the type for the double exclamation marks (!!) used on the page. This is a challenging project that brings us back to the origins of manga and ties it together with its future.
Reviving the letterpress printing technique using zinc plates and metal type that was employed in the production of Weekly Shonen Jump in the 1970s, the work is printed on 100% cotton high-quality paper. It is presented as an art piece alongside collotype prints of photographs capturing the printing plates.
