The NOW! Comics Astro Boy 

In mid-1987, American comic company NOW! Comics was producing multiple comic series, including The Real Ghostbusters, Speed Racer, and Green Hornet. After numerous suggestions, the company decided to go ahead with a comic series based on Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy.  NOW! Comics president Tony Caputo bought American comic rights for the franchise from Suzuki & Associates, a group who held the rights at the time to the dubbed version of the 1963 anime. In Japan, Osamu Tezuka's animated works were still in a copyright tangle after the closure of Mushi Productions years before.  Suzuki & Associates should not have been able to claim rights to the dubbed anime - it technically was a joint-owned by NBC and NHK - but nobody at NOW! Comics knew this.

 

Caputo nearly chose Real Ghostbusters artist Brian Thomas to lead the NOW! Astro Boy. Thomas had been a fan of the 1963s anime as a child, and even completed a short demo Astro Boy comic with elements of the 1980 anime. Canadian artist Ken Steacy was selected as artist instead; Steacy was originally planned to be the cover artist, but offered to be paid in Canadian dollars. Since Caputo was well-known (some may say "reputable") for cost-cutting measures, Steacy was selected. Michael Dimpsey was chosen as writer, and wrote just under half the series.

 

In his personal letter at the beginning of issue #1, Caputo declared that the Astro Boy comic would be only based on the original anime, pointing out it would be pointless to just recreate the anime as its original fans would already know this. The series was planned as a modernized re-imagining for older Astro Boy fans. This comic employed extremely dark themes early on, which proved problematic, since the 1980 anime was playing throughout North America at the time (with a separate dub even made for Canada) and any number of young fans picked up the comic without knowing what to expect.

 

Michael Dimpsey dropped off of the series without reason, but it is assumed that it had to do with NOW! Comics's extremely tight budgets and Caputo's tendency to "miss" employee pay. Ken Steacy became the lead writer from this point, bringing in a handful of comedic and far lighter one-shot stories. Comic sales begun to drop as his art quality did - most likely this came from having to write, pencil, ink, and do cover art for a comic he was being underpaid for. Brian Thomas was brought back in as the artist for issue 17, and became its writer until issue 20, when the series was cancelled. Thomas had been planning before this cancellation to have Astro go to Africa and meet Kimba the White Lion, and to have a batch of Italian Astro Boy comics translated and published.

 

The comic had been selling well when Thomas was leading it, but NOW! Comics was originally a small independent company that had to be mail-subscribed to or specially ordered. When its titles were being mass produced, the high sales that dominated a niche market were dismal for a wide release, so Astro Boy and other NOW! titles were cancelled. NOW! Comics went bankrupt and shut down in 1990. It would be twelve years until Astro Boy returned to the United States, when Dark Horse Comics published Tezuka's original Astro Boy manga, and a brand new anime series begun airing.

 

The NOW! Comics series stands as an interesting version of the Astro Boy mythos, and a piece of American comic history. It's this site's goal to preserve this series and to try and salvage what each of its three writers were hoping to for Astro Boy.