Considered by many the peak of Osamu Tezuka's artistic achievement and called his "life work" by the author, PHOENIX is made up 12 complex stories linked by the presence of the mythical bird, an immortal guarden of the universal life force. Read in order, the separate stories jump across time, alternating between a distant future and a distant past, converging on the present, with characters from one story being reincarnated in another. The 12 stories over 3000 pages.
The second part of Civil War makes up the majority of this book. The second short story Robe of Feathers is about a time-travelling woman who gets manipulated into a marriage in the 1100s. The comic is all told with a single repeated comic frame, sort of like a stage play with just the characters and dialogue changing.
This revealed the logic in Hi no tori's reincarnation. It showed how people may reincarnate to pay in "the past" for what they've done in "the future" - the concept introduced in Vol 3 for Saruta's case (Space chapter).
Another sad ending for this series. Another reflection on life, death, and the paths we take, what possibly happens after we pass away, and, according to the author, how we are destined to keep the same cycles of errors over and over.
In this chapter, Osamu brings a short story at the end, which is told as in a typical Japanese play. The static camera and sound effects mimic those of Japanese theatre. It was really interesting, and it rhymed with the melodrama.
"Power is ultimately meaningless, those in power are destined to lose it." Such the sentiments of the old tengu with the bulbous nose up in the mountains. I wasn't as impressed by civil war as i was by sun later in the series. The phoenix actually doesn't really show up anywhere in the narrative, just a fake phoenix. There were some cruel moments in one and two that stung Benta for sure. War did really seem useless and futile.
Delightfully meh -- retold much of the first story, nothing earthshatteringly cool. Robe of Feathers was great though, nice and new format, whose name I wish I knew, for Tezuka. Ready for some future stories!