Black Jack 1 (hardcover ed.)

Do you know how long I’ve waited for this?  I spotted this series in the spring 1999 Viz catalog, and didn’t bite back then since it sounded incomplete, which it was (I’m not sure how it “sounded” incomplete, but I was also right about Ogre Slayer and Eat-Man in the same catalog).  But that means I had to wait ten years for the definitive edition to come out.  It was worth it.

I went to great lengths to procure the hardcover edition, because I had to know about the stories that were in such poor taste that they were not collected in Japan.  I assumed one of them was the first story in the volume, where a boy wrecks a car that he was driving stupidly (he almost ran over several people), then his father grabs a random boy from the accident scene and has him sentenced to death so that his body parts can be used to replace his son’s damaged ones.  I found this to be pretty deplorable (though it all works out in the end, of course), and was shocked when I found out that wasn’t actually the story.  The uncollected story is in the back of the book, and is about Black Jacks separating a pair of conjoined twins that share a body with two faces on the skull.  He keeps the brain of the removed twin alive after it is extracted by request of the scientists who asked him to perform the operation.  The moral of the story is that the brain shouldn’t have been kept alive, because then it could be used for experiments like the Nazis performed during WWII.  Until the last two pages, after having read the rest of the book I thought maybe the brain was being kept alive so it could be put back in a donor body later (something that Black Jack could do).  I assume the hint that the brain would be experimented on was what kept it out of the Japanese editions?  Up til that point, though, I thought it was pretty significant the brain was being kept alive at all, a sort of “all life is sacred”-type thing.

Anyway.  My mind boggled at the surgeries performed during these stories.  Black Jack does everything you can think of and then some, including the above-mentioned conjoined twin surgery and another twin surgery where he excises a growth that contains a parasitic twin that he then puts in some sort of robot body and keeps with him as his assistant.  I… had no idea that was the true identity of Pinoko.  Pinoko bugged me a bit, but I can see how he wanted to include her as a little comedy relief and to give Black Jack more humanity when he’s at home.

My favorite story was one about a little boy with Polio who walks from one major city to another in order to aid his recovery and raise awareness for his disease.  Not only is it a nice message, we also get some back story about Black Jack.  I was surprised that two or three of the stories were actually pretty detailed accounts of Black Jack’s background, I didn’t think it was ever alluded to during the series.

There were some things I didn’t like.  As much as I liked the stories, I hated the antiquated device that was used in the last panel of nearly every single one where the moral was summed up in one line.  I hate things like that since it makes me feel like I can’t be trusted to pick up on the obvious themes, plus it seems like sort of a sloppy technique to tack something like that onto the end after the rest of the story is so well-told.

I also took serious issue with a story about a woman who had her ovaries and uterus removed due to cancer.  Apparently, without these female organs, she was no longer female and not only lost her romantic relationships, but also was unable to live her life as a female anymore.  I didn’t quite understand why the other characters had to view her differently after this life-saving surgery, nor why she felt that not having female sex organs meant that she had to live her life as a man, nor why her identity was kept secret while the story was being told (perhaps it was the character’s wish, but Black Jack is the one that tells the fib at the beginning).  I was also pretty appalled that patients were never told when they had a terminal illness, and Black Jack was considered coldhearted for being honest with her.  Of course, one of the later stories in the volume is set in North Dakota and features a blackface character, so… yeah.

Other than that, I pretty much enjoyed everything about these stories.  There’s a pretty wide range of surgeries, and while Black Jack is often working for or on criminals, there are a fair number of good things he does too, like helping that little boy with polio on his mission.  He’s seen as evil by many, and maintains this image for himself by saying he’ll only do things for exorbitant fees, but I suppose he’s popular for having a heart of gold.  I like him well enough, and it’s actually his character that makes almost all these stories worthwhile; there are only one or two other stories in the volume driven by other characters.

Not only are these really great stories, they also have all of Tezuka’s stock characters in them, which was kind of unexpected.  Hamegg (my favorite), Lamp, Duke Red, and Ochanomizu appear in the first story, and Hamegg and Lamp reappear in one or two other stories.  Higeoyaji is in somewhere, as is Rock, and where there’s Rock, there’s also Kenichi, who I almost missed save for the way his eyes were drawn, which clued me in that it was an older character (he’s the polio victim).  Sapphire’s in there for a minute.  There’s even an appearance from Makeru Butamo, a character I’ve only seen once or twice before, but I like him because he’s sort of a jerk whenever he appears.  Not a bad guy, just a jerk.  Saruta appears as an important series-related character.  We also have two appearances by Tezuka himself (one blatant, one more subtle), and several appearances of the hyoutan-tsugi cartoon face, which I had to cheat and look up the name for.  I could keep going, I’m sure there’s more if I look, including a whole ton of minor characters I didn’t catch.  But I’ll stop for now.  Know that spotting these characters in every Tezuka manga gives me great pleasure.

But yes.  Was there any question I wasn’t going to like this?