When the daughter of late manga godhead Osamu Tezuka announced last week that she’d managed to open his long-locked desk, the discoveries included ephemera (a half-eaten chocolate bar), critical writing (an essay about Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo), and, perhaps most curiously, various sketches, several of which depicted a curvaceous mouse lady lounging seductively. This last detail delighted certain elements of the comics internet, although the stunned prurience of some reports was kind of silly: Tezuka might be best known for characters like Astro Boy, Japan’s Walt Disney and Jack Kirby combined, but his style and audiences changed over his career; the avuncular master also produced the lurid ’70s thriller MW.
If the funny-animals trope has been used throughout cartooning history to simplify, interpolate and transfigure, then lust defines the medium too, even when it was necessarily sublimated beyond the sleaziest outlets. And what would be a more suitable way to illustrate that than counting down the sexiest anthropomorphic characters in comics history?
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1. If comics has a single emblematic Everyman, it must be Krazy Kat—not an Everyman at all but a genderqueer feline, forever seeking affection from Ignatz the Mouse only to receive bricks flung at their head. Is that sexy? Certainly it feels redolent of love.
