Issue 51 of this year’s Weekly Shonen Champion magazine announced that the one-shot Black Jack Osamu Tezuka’s new collaboration between AI and human creators will release on November 22, 2023.
The new one-shot will have a title Black Jack Kikai no Shinzo – Heartbeat Mark II (Black Jack Mechanical Heart – Heartbeat Mark II) and will consist of 32 pages.
It was previously revealed that Tezuka Productions collaborated with AI to co-create the new work.
It was created after the success of the “TEZUKA2020” project in 2020, where the creators of Tezuka Productions and AI collaborated to create new works “Paidon,” in which the AI learns to imitate Tezuka’s style.
The project uses AI created through work commissioned by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO). It features Professor Satoshi Kurihara from the Faculty of Science and Technology at Keio University, Director Makoto Tezuka of Tezuka Productions, among others
Black Jack is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Osamu Tezuka in the 1970s, following the medical adventures of the main character, Dr. Black Jack. It consists of hundreds of short, self-contained stories, usually about 20 pages long.
Black Jack has also been adapted into an OVA, two television series (directed by Satoshi Kuwahara and Tezuka’s son Makoto Tezuka), and two films.
Black Jack is Tezuka’s second most popular manga, after Astro Boy. In 1977, it won the first Kodansha Manga Award for the shounen category. It has since become Tezuka’s second best-selling manga with over 50 million copies sold in Japan alone.
Source: ANN