Black Jack 3

…Yeah.  The thing about reading this series is that every story is so over-the-top in a different way that the entire experience is a “Wait, what?  Wait… WHAT?!” kind of thing.

For example:  The first story was literally one of the most depressing scenarios I could imagine.  A 60-year-old woman is expecting her three sons to convene for her birthday from their successful businesses all over Japan.  You know where this is going.  Turns out she has a fourth son (one she disowned) that remembered it was her 60th birthday, and he shows up with a present and is all ready to celebrate.  She won’t have anything to do with him.  This story just broke my heart.

The next story is about a disease that makes everything, humans and animals, shrink down to tiny sizes before they die.  Black Jack has to find a cure for Professor Togakushi before it’s too late.  We get to see small Saruta, along with cannibalistic Zebras and tiny lions and rhinos, by the end of this story.

The next story is about Black Jack operating on his own intestines in the Australian Outback, hundreds of miles from help, while being attacked by dingoes.

Another story is about a robin who leaves money in Black Jack’s yard on a fairly regular basis.  He investigates and finds that the robins are trying to pay him to help a really sick boy that had previously helped the birds.  This story is very heartwarming until the end, which was really tragic and horrible.

Later, there is a story about the love between Black Jack and Pinoko.  I still think Pinoko is freaky, so the heartwarming scene where she spies in on Black Jack’s anguish after losing a patient and then quietly says “Pinoko loves you” while she’s sneaking around in her naked little robot body is more disturbing to me than it is heartwarming.

I mean… what can I add to this?  I didn’t even mention things like Black Jack surgically stitching a mother and son together to share the same set of lungs, or the story where a surgeon dies early on during a procedure and finishes his operation while clinically dead.  I mean, I don’t need to elaborate on Black Jack.  If you like awesome comics, you will like Black Jack.  I have to say, one wonders about the mental processes behind some of these stories.

There’s also a really nice essay in the back of this volume about Tezuka’s Star System, the thematic contents of Black Jack, and what some of the stories that are excluded from the collected versions of Black Jack contain (apparently the estate of Tezuka still has stories that haven’t seen the light of day since they were published in Shounen Champion, we only got three from that set in the hardcover editions).  The parts about the Star System were interesting, especially since it named a few of the characters from his early work that show up randomly without real names.  Picking who’s who out of Black Jack is fun, and is also sometimes an exercise in frustration.  For instance, the spiky-haired winking doctor that appears twice in this volume?  I know he’s been in Astro Boy and maybe a couple other things.  I just spent 40 minutes looking up his name online and totally failed.  Notably, the essay excludes Shunsaku Ban, who is one of Tezuka’s oldest and most frequently-used characters.  He’s only a bit player in Black Jack, but he does put in an appearance as the dead husband in the first chapter here.

Anyway.  The reasons for the stories being excluded from collected editions are interesting and sometimes horrifying.  It’s a really awesome essay.