Kirihito duly contracts the disease while simultaneously distilling the cause, and proving his own theories, but is unable to create an antidote. Tezuka brings his own medical education to bear in creating a disease that affects bone, transforming it leaving sufferers with a canine face and skull. Kirihito Osinai is an idealistic young doctor dispatched to a remote area to study the previously unknown Monmow disease. It’s interesting to note it was created around the same time Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams were scything through social ills with their Green Lantern/Green Arrow pairing, yet even for Adams setting an entire story around a dog-faced man would have been a giant leap into the unknown. The first result of that conscious change of direction was Kirihito, as bleak a story as he ever wrote, incisive as a condemnation of the way he saw society declining, yet still cut through with a broad streak of whimsy. To shed that reputation he looked for ways he could become more relevant to the then present day audience. While he retained the reverence for his vast contribution to Japanese comics, at that point he was considered old-fashioned.
Ode to Kirihito is an uncharacteristic work from Osamu Tezuka, who began the serialisation in 1970.
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