Pretentious High Schooler Talks About Art : Mitsuteru Yokoyama

Personal: Mitsuteru Yokoyama was born in 1956 and died in a house fire in 1966. Much of Yokoyama's childhood was spent in World War II and was evacuated to Tottori along with his family. When he went to high-school he read Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis and it had a deep effect on him for years to come. This eventually drove him to become a comic book artist. However when he entered a banking corporation he realized he had no time to practice his craft and quit within 5 months. He found a new a jab as a department member for a movie company within Kobe and pursued his manga career in his spare time.

Career: Much like Osamu Tezuka himself, much of his work was inspired by his experience during the war as well as the bombing. When he was a fifth grader he returned to the city of Kobe to see it was completely flattened by the destructive force of the B-29 bombers. As a child he was terrified of their destructive power. Another on his eventual works is the Vergeltungswaffen, wonder weapons created by the Nazis for long ranged bombing. A sort of card up the sleeve had the war not gone in their favor. What inspired the mentality of tetsujin and other works is the 1931 film Frankenstein. This movie gave him the inspiration to make the "monster itself" neither good nor evil.
In 1956 Yokoyama revealed to japan his creation, Tetsujin-28 Go. A comic about a young boy who is tasked with controlling the giant robot Tetsujin-28. A giant robot originally built by his father as a super weapon to be used in the war. He would soon have a change of heart and sealed it away. It would eventually rise again with the death of his father and the return of several other ghosts of the war and the tetsujin project. A series that was praised internationally and was considered equal to Tezuka's Astroboy/Mighty Atom. His rise to glory would not halt as he would produce more hits such as Water Margin, Sally the witch, Giant Robo, Babel II and even his own adaptation of Records of Three Kingdoms.
Significance:

Tetsujin-28 and his other works have had inspiration to tons of other comic artists and creators.
Tetsujin and Giant Robo were the first in creating the Giant Robot genre.
Iga no Kagemaru popularized the ninja genre giving them super powers.
He's produced several historical based comics and novels.
He is cited as an influence on Hirohiko Araki for his "Hard-Boiled" style and suspense on the hero's character.
Katsuhiro Otomo, the creator of Akira, has named several characters after the ones in Tetsujin:

Otomo also keeps similair themes to tetsujin such as the fear of technology and rapid growth of technology and the world.
Because Marvel couldn't get the rights to Tetsujin Jack Kirby using the idea of a giant robot to create Machine Man.