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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.
金属活版印刷
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.
The monochrome original artwork on the pages of the manga was scanned using a dedicated scanner and saved as two-tone data consisting of black and white only. This resulted in a clear image with no halftones. Marks left by pasted phototypesetting, editorial instructions, and stains were retouched to produce data ready for printing. At this stage, the data was output to negative film. The plate was brought into contact with a zinc alloy plate covered with a blue photosensitive film and irradiated with ultraviolet light. When the plate was developed, the coating in the unexposed areas dissolved away, leaving the exposed areas protected by a blue film. The plate was then placed in an etching machine, where the zinc was etched with nitric acid. The result was a plate where the blue image areas remained, while all the other areas were etched away, creating recessed areas. The plate was washed, and then finished by removing the unnecessary areas with a router.
The type was produced at Sasaki Katsuji (Tokyo). It was cast using a casting machine manufactured by Hakko Type Caster.
Type is produced by melting the base metal (an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony) in the furnace of a typecasting machine and casting it into molds. A brass matrix is placed at the end of the mold, and the metal is pressed against it, forming individual pieces of metal type one by one.
At the Kazui Press, the speech balloon sections of the etched zinc plates are cut out using a fretsaw and processed to allow the type to be inserted. Holes were first made with an awl, after which the fretsaw blade was passed through, cutting the metal plate. The type was set, and its position was adjusted using metal blocks and leading for line spacing. Since pressure needs to be applied equally on the entire printing surface, fine adjustments were repeatedly made, such as by pasting paper onto points with low printing pressure.
Even today, manga manuscript paper is marked with reference grids, and artists are instructed to keep important text elements within these lines. This shows that, in the era when manga was typeset using physical type, text could only be set within those boundaries.
In earlier manga printing practices, the completed metal plates were pressed into paper to form molds, and the resulting paper molds served as the base molds for printing. Lead was then poured into these molds to produce printing plates. The metal plates and type are said to have been melted and reused after the paper molds were made.
In this case, the finished metal plates were used directly, and printing was performed on the printing presses at the Kazui Press. Manufactured by the German company Heidelberg, the machine known as the “platen press” has been in operation since 1963. To ensure that sufficient ink is supplied to the plate, the timing of paper insertion is controlled manually during the printing process.
