This manga series is comprised of 12 self-contained yet interlinked stories. All 12 stories in Phoenix are linked by the presence of the mythical bird, an immortal guardian of the universal lifeforce. 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. Composed over a span of decades (initial versions appeared as early as 1954), serialized in a number of venues, and left incomplete with the author's death, Phoenix represents Tezuka's ambitious attempt to push all he knew about the comics medium to address fundamental questions about existence.