I’m fascinated by manga adaptations of classic tokusatsu series. There’s the classics like Shotaro Ishinomori’s Kamen Rider (1971), or new interpretations of classic heroes and monsters in a work like Shimizu and Shimoguchi’s relatively recent Ultraman (2011). I would love to review that manga on it’s own at some point, but I referred to it as “relatively recent” because I want to talk about the Ultraman manga that ran prior to the airing of the original show. If you don’t know, Ultraman is a tokusatsu series from 1966 created by Eiji Tsuburaya and Tsuburaya productions, which spun off of the mystery/horror anthology series Ultra Q (1965). It’s a great show and a great entry point into classic tokusatsu, as long as you don’t mind (or you enjoy) some 1960s sci-fi cheese. The production of Ultraman was a little rushed, most infamously resulting in the TV special, The Birth of Ultraman, in which the character and concept were introduced and elaborated to a live studio audience of children. This special existed to buy time for the production team to finish the last few episodes, right before the show aired. However, prior to the special’s airing on July 10^th, the Giant of Light first became known to Japanese audiences through the pages of Weekly Shonen Magazine, this time, realized through the lens of the late, great horror manga artist, Kazuo Umezz. There have been many articles, posts, and videos celebrating Umezz since his passing in 2024, but I wanted to celebrate his underappreciated contributions to Ultraman, and highlight an overlooked work from the start of his career. There’s not a lot of information about Umezz’s Ultraman on the English side of the internet, but we do know, thanks to an archived interview from The Comics Journal, that the manga was the character’s debut, that it began serialization 3 months before the television showed aired. Considering that Ultraman entered production around the middle of March of ‘66, a little under 4 months before the air-date of the first episode, it’s safe to say that Umezz was producing his comic alongside the production of the show. It’s also possible, although mere speculation on my part, that his rendition influenced creative decisions in the later-produced episodes. “I introduced it in the magazine and then it was on TV. I did not create Ultraman, “I changed some of it as I decided I wanted to do it my way.” These changes result in a distinctly different tone, which arguably helped the shift in tone between Ultra Q and Ultraman.

The manga itself is a relatively faithful adaptation of the series in terms of setting and design¹ with many characters somehow retaining key traits even when boiled down to a rubber-hose, Tezuka-esque caricature. It’s really cute how Hayata and Fuji are rendered in a much less cartoony style than the rest of the cast, with Fuji resembling Umezz’s later shojo horror protagonists. I also feel like Umezz must have hated Arashi, as he hardly speaks a word throughout the manga. There’s something intensely stylized about this rendition of Ultraman, in relation to the more straightforward version by Daiji Ichimine that ran alongsisde the show, or Yuzo Takada’s reinterpretation of the original series, Ultraman: THE FIRST. Umezz’s Ultraman is focused on the monsters, their grotesqueness or fierceness, and the destruction they carry. In comparison to both the show, and Ichimine’s version, the pacing of each storyline is dragged out a little more, leaving room for depicting the monster’s destruction and Ultraman’s brawl(s) with it. Umezz’s style really strikes the same balance of camp, sci-fi, and horror that characterizes the original Ultraman, although being proportioned more towards the horror side of things. Umezz was working on multiple comic series at a time, and burning himself out². He had not yet fully pioneered his particular style of horror, as he admits in the interview with Comics Journal, but his ability to properly sell the fearsomeness of a monster (and the subsequent fear of the people trampled underneath), shows his understanding of the genre, even at a stressful, early stage in his career. Big panels and simple layouts allow for quick action on the ground to be overscored by a looming destructive force, showing an understanding of the specific intersection of horror and kaiju. Huge splash pages like the one of Alien Baltan shown here sell this scale well, and you can also see how Umezz creates a sense of constant momentum and tension once the monster is revealed.

Speaking of Alien Baltan, the famous kaiju stars in the first story arc of the manga, loosely adapting the second Ultraman episode, Shoot the Invaders!. The entire intro of the episode is discarded in favor of a plot that diverges more from the source episode than any other of Umezz’s stories. The original episode is laden with mystery, as the Science Patrol responds to sightings of a UFO which they soon find out is the ship of the Alien Baltan. The manga also starts mysteriously, with the investigation of a mysterious red water by Ide and a local researcher. The researcher tells Ide and the rest of the Science Patrol that it’s a false alarm, and shuffles off to drink gasoline. Hayata and Hoshino are suspicious of the researcher, and witness him transforming into Alien Baltan. Chapter 1 ends with both Baltan and Ultraman both transforming to giant size, and preparing to square off. Only 2 of the kaiju, Hydra and Gavadon, are relegated to a single chapter, with the bout with Baltan taking 10 chapters to complete. Ultraman squares off with Baltan in the beginning of Chapter 2, and then Baltan flies away. While most of the episode consists of Ide and Arashi being chased around by Baltan in a somewhat comedic fashion, Umezz’s Baltan arc consists mainly of the Science Team barely making it away alive from an encounter with the alien, or Baltan barely escaping from a fight with Ultraman. For example, after Ultraman repels Baltan the first time, Ide and Hoshino investigate Baltan sightings, which leads them to a trap set in the aliens’ hideout. As the two escape, we see about a dozen Baltan swarm towards them, emphasizing the bat-like design of the monster that Umezz channels frequently. All of this shows an attempt to escalate the original stories into something more befitting of horror manga. The way the Baltans’ stand silhouetted and converge upon Ide and Hoshino’s car is genuinely terrifying, if you place yourself in that situation, and would have made for a crazy cliffhanger back in 1966. It almost has a golden-age comic vibe where the cliffhanger at the end of one issue is much more drastic than the situation at the start of the next. The shit Umezz puts Hoshino, the kid who’s always following the Science Patrol around, through is much more drastic in comparison to how he mostly stayed out of the way of real danger in the original series unless an episode revolved around him. Hoshino is involved in most of the science patrol battles throughout the manga, possibly in reference to the episode where Hoshino duels with a kaiju alone. Umezz frequently indulges in the destructive glee of the kaiju, giving life to the devastation in ways that television sets and special effects, as wonderful as they are, could not do at the time. As I’ve already somewhat identified, there is a fun juxtaposition between the dramatically detailed monsters and their chaos, and the caricatured renditions of the Science Patrol. Ide is always identifiable as Ide, even when his hair is singed off by Baltan, due to the goofy grin on his face and his constant, bumbling nature. Sometimes, the lines between these extremes are blurred. The Baltan’s mothership, in contrast with the bog-standard UFO they sport in the show, is this weird, rubber-hose octopus monstrosity with eyes at the end of its tentacles. It wrecks the Science Patrol building in a last ditch effort to invade the planet, with the Science Patrol and literal child Hoshino struggling to fight it back. Hayata transforms into Ultraman, fighting off the enemy ship by leaping through the center of it. In the TV show, the episode ends with Ultraman flying the Baltan ship into deep space. However, in the manga, the fight is not over once the Baltan ship has been destroyed. Afterwards, the Baltans are hiding out on Earth, and one is posing as Ide. After he is discovered, the crew rush back to the apartments they had fled from before, where they find the security guard frozen in place, much like the TV episode. There’s a straightforward horror to be found in the grimace of the frozen guard, and the shocked reactions from the Science Patrol. There’s a lot of great illustrations in the back part of this Baltan arc, like this one of a group of Baltans hanging like bats, or this page of Ultraman blasting through the Alien spaceship. There is such a keen sense of pacing and tension, that it would be really fun to see this rendition adapted back into a live-action format.

I wanted to cover these differences in depth because it really shows how Umezz’s approach understands Ultraman and how the character can best fit into the format. There’s already so many moments within Ultraman where the viewer is meant to be left in suspense, secretly knowing that he will always save the day. It makes sense to convert this into multi-chapter storylines, where cliffhangers can be interspersed throughout. Taking little pieces of the source material and expanding upon them helps to give this its own sense of style, but it also shows Umezz’s skill at composing and pacing a comic book. A lot of the other stories follow the plots of the episodes a little more closely, but I think Baltan’s is most interesting because of how it plays with a fan favorite in ways that aren’t even that metatextual considering the context for this comic’s release. While Umezz takes plenty of liberties with Baltan, he does keep one of the most iconic moments of the original episode. With his back against the wall, and a Baltan approaching menacingly, Hayata drops the Beta Capsule, which transforms him into Ultraman. Taking a leap of faith, he grabs the capsule on his way down and transforms into Ultraman before he can hit the ground. It’s a great moment, and it’s a moment for many, myself included, where Ultraman finally clicks. Umezz spends three pages on this moment, not only because it’s sick as fuck, but because the procession of page turns creates tension in a way no other medium can. This is an incredibly valuable tool for horror manga, and Umezz uses it, along with the juxtaposition of smaller and larger panels, to impact all sorts of things from the tension of a cliffhanger moment to the pacing of Ultraman’s brawls with kaiju.

The massive amounts of thick speedlines used to denote flying or leaping can often be a large part of the composition itself, and this doesn’t make things feel stripped back, instead leaving room for the scale of the giant battles to be shown. Letting these battles (and their set-ups) breathe on their own is part of what sets this apart from the other manga adaptation of Ultraman, which is paced much more like the show, with a battle with a kaiju being contained to a single chapter. It’s a shame that Umezz’s ability to translate tokusatsu monsters to the manga page was never shown again, because I could read much more of this. It’s simple, it’s easy to pick up, and it’s fun to breeze through, just like Ultraman itself. The only question I really have now is: just how much of the Ultraman series had Umezz seen at the time he was creating this manga? It certainly seems like these are based on the episodes themselves, and not just the scripts, as many of the characters and of course the monsters have similar appearances to that of the show. The chapters covering Dodongo and the Jirass are more close adaptations of the source episodes, albeit with a few changes in pacing or added characters here and there. I really recommend that you check out the manga yourself, especially if you’re a fan of this original Ultraman series. I’ve already said it, but Umezz’s attention to the minute details of each monster helps to elevate its design. Small things like Baltan sprouting wings when it flies, or the intricacies of Jirass’s frills allow Umezz to make these designs his own, without losing what makes the monsters recognizable in the first place. I think Jirass is a great example, as the cat-like features and piercing eyes of the reused Godzilla suit shine through, even when the monster is only presented as a menacing and mysterious figure in the deep, dark water. Wherever things are changed from the source material, they are also escalated or synthesized into something new by Umezz, much in the vein of Shotaro Ishinomori, whose manga tended to have a rougher, more graphic edge than the shows they were adapted into. A great example of this escalation can be found in Umezz’s adaptation of Ultraman’s 10^th episode, The Mysterious Dinosaur Base, in which the previously mentioned Jirass is summoned by a mad scientist obsessed with dinosaurs. In the episode and the manga, the scientist is visited by two young reporters asking questions about dinosaurs. In the episode, he confiscates their camera before they enter, and kicks them out after realizing that the reporters’ lighter is a fake camera. This scene is extended into a whole subplot in the manga, as Hayata joins the reporters in investigating the scientist. Instead of confiscating the camera, the scientist feeds it to one of the lizards he’s evolved by injecting something into their brains, and in place of a room with a bunch of cave drawings and birds, the scientist’s lab in the manga is mostly an area for creating and containing these giant monsters. After escaping from the lab and the giant lizards, the scientist sends them to ravage the city, and Hayata transforms into Ultraman to fight them off.

Because of this escalation of smaller plot events, as well as the presence of multiple Ultraman transformations within a story arc, Umezz’s Ultraman has a much different pacing than the show it’s based on. Although the horror is cranked up, we are often left without the sense of mystery that drives so much of Ultraman. Information that is revealed toward the middle or end of the episode is often moved to the front, or placed at a different point entirely due to changes in plotting. This is by no means a problem with the manga, it is simply a different take on Ultraman than the show, as Umezz said himself in that Comics Journal feature. This alternate view, the lens Umezz provides, adds a lot to in and of itself. This could have been a straightforward adaptation of each episode, with Umezz still knocking the monster illustrations out of the park, and it would still be noteworthy in that form. However, the extra style that Umezz heaped on top, his darkly cartoonish depiction of evil plotters and the giant monsters they use as tools, the way flames lick at people’s feet or the way debris rains from the sky, and the contortions of the kaiju themselves all add something unique on top of a beloved (although not at the time) source material. The only thing Umezz really misses in his adaptation is the unexpected brutality of Ultraman. Many of the fights feel anticlimactic and unimpactful. Perhaps it was a deliberate choice by Umezz to have Ultraman refrain from dismemberment and wonton desctruction, or maybe Tsuburaya productions had not produced enough fight scenes for him to use as reference material. I was hoping, with how goopy and gross Umezz can get, that the brutality and rawness of a drag-out fight with a giant alien would be just as escalated as everything else is in this rendition.

Ultimately, though, this is a small criticism and doesn’t take away from what this manga is trying to do. It is an interesting juxtaposition, as the television show often feels like it is either rushing towards or rushing through the kaiju fights. Umezz is a lot more fixated with the adventure, the harrowing cliffhangers, and the sheer, raw horror of it all. While he had not yet received the label of “God of Horror Manga” just yet, there is a familiarity with the genre that shines through his Ultraman. The mystery and the action certainly take a backseat to a streamlined horror, but the execution, the intention, and the attention to detail is there. Although it still feels jokey and silly at times, reminding us that Ultraman is truly for the children, it never stops being centered on horror, and elevating the horror of something as goofy and campy as the original. I once again highly recommend you read this if you’re a fan of Ultraman, although only 2 of the three volumes are currently translated into English. There are quite a few Ultraman manga from this time, as well as some Ultraman novels, although many have not been translated into English either. It’s interesting to see different interpretations of the original series, especially considering how culturally influential it was and continues to be. If you’re a fan of Umezz’s works, which I have only dipped my toes into personally, I also highly recommend this, as it is something different than the more well-known stories you might have read. The manga by Daiji Ichimine has also been translated to English and uploaded by the same user on MangaDex, KiyanShahab, so maybe I will cover that soon too. The other adaptation of the original Ultraman series, Ultraman: THE FIRST, is also really interesting to me. I love to see new renditions of classic series and characters in ways that feel fresh, or at least in ways where you can tell the creators actually cared about the source material enough to be intentional with their alterations. It can be very easy to look at the deluge of slop and regurgitation that plagues our modern entertainment industry and think that reimaginings of classic characters or stories can only be done as a cash-grab. However, Umezz’s Ultraman shows us how an adaptation can stray from the tone of the original work, while maintaining a healthy balance of the creator’s own style and the aesthetics and themes at the core of the source material.