Black Jack 2

It took me absolutely forever to find the hardcover version of this.  Of course, it’s only available through Diamond, so you should ask your local comic shop to order it for you.  Except I asked no less than six local comic shops about it and none seemed very willing to be civil to me, much less order a book.  This is including the shop I go to at least a couple times a month.  There was one nice guy out in the suburbs who told me when it would be in, then told me they weren’t getting it and couldn’t order it.  eBay and Amazon both failed me.  I finally tracked it down at scifigenre.com and had it in a matter of days.  It pains me when stuff like that happens when I try so hard to support the series in comic shops, but really, how hard do I have to try to give someone my business?

There were two stories that stood out.  One assured me that Tezuka realizes how ridiculous his stories get sometimes.  An earthquake snaps the tip of a needle off in a man’s bloodstream, and Black Jack carves the man up in a desperate race to get the tip before it lodges itself in the man’s heart.  It’s ridiculously over-the-top and melodramatic, and it reassured me about what lies behind the relatively straight face this series keeps.  It also has a ridiculous ending to go along with it.

The other story that stood out was one about how one of Black Jack’s classmates gave him a skin graft for his face when he was very young.  The only classmate who was willing to help young Kuro’o happened to be black, and after some misgivings from some of the doctors, they graft the skin to his face and save his life.  Kuro’o's gratitude is such that he never has his face changed.  Notably, the black classmate wasn’t an appalling racial caricature.  I’ve read… I don’t know, 50 or 60 volumes of Tezuka’s manga, and this is the only time I can think of where that happened, which is really sad.  Keeping his face as it was after his accident meant a lot to Black Jack since this friend was the only one who was willing to save his life.  The message is one of racial tolerance, of course, and it works a lot better here than it does in Ode to Kirihito, where the caricatures are present.  The chapter ends with the friend becoming an extreme environmentalist, a “doctor for the world,” who winds up losing his life in some sort of terrorist action to save the Earth.  It is this point that the story leaves us to ponder.

I wasn’t sure what to think of that chapter, honestly.

Notably, even before this operation, while he’s being cared for right after his accident, he has his two-tone hair.  I still want an explanation for this, now that I know there’s a reason half his face is black (but is never toned as such, and is usually illustrated in color as blue for some reason).

Pinoko still figures prominently in Black Jack’s life.  She scares the living daylights out of me.  She’s a little tumor robot girl who jealously guards Black Jack from EVERYTHING.  It’s weird.  There’s no other manga… couple like them.  Are they a couple?  Pinoko thinks so.  Black Jack seems to take a fatherly approach to her, except sometimes the two of them seem to bond… not on a romantic level, but on a very friendly level.  Pinoko is quite troubling.

The bonus story that was taken out of the original Japanese edition… well, it’s easier to see why people would think it was in poor taste.  In it, a set of sextuplets dies one by one, with the only really healthy baby rife with horrible birth defects and deformities.  Black Jack cannibalizes the dead babies onto the healthiest baby’s body.  Yeah.

Actually, I’m not sure what to think of a lot of these stories.