20th Century Boys 3

Naoki Urasawa – Viz – 2009 – 22 volumes

I think one of the reasons I like this series so much is that it has one of the most outlandish premises I’ve ever seen, yet goes about unveiling it and solving the resulting conflicts with a totally straight face.  I can’t laugh while I’m reading it, and yet the world is being threatened based on a superhero plot a bunch of kids came up with.  Kenji feels tortured because he invented all these things when he was young, but what little kid doesn’t imagine giant robots and laser guns?  It’s a really serious, epic story with the most hilarious plot imaginable, and it works SO WELL.

Surprisingly, there’s a confrontation between Kenji and Friend almost immediately in this volume.  Again, I thought this was the sort of thing that would wait til later.  They reveal the “face” of the friend in an incredibly creepy scene.  As I mentioned last time, this series takes the interesting path of giving you information you don’t know what to do with, rather than depriving you of information to create suspense.  The friend’s “face” means nothing to us, and Kenji spends the entire volume reflecting on it and asking around before he fits all the pieces together.  Also, thankfully, the identity of the friend isn’t as clear-cut as it seemed last volume… but again, whether it’s one person or another doesn’t really mean very much at this point in the story.

I’m curious what role music will play.  It’s been mentioned that Kenji was in a band for a long time, and the series starts with a record played over a school PA.  Kenji gets in a mood and rocks out really hard on his guitar in this volume.  One wonders if perhaps music will save the world, because if so, I’d love to see the series do it with a straight face.

The subtle look at how people change over the years is really great, too.  Kenji continues to run into more of his former classmates, and they all lead pretty normal, mundane lives.  They’ve got boring jobs, a kid or two, problems with their wives, and they get drunk and hang out with their friends, just like regular people.  As insane as the story is, it’s nice that the characters are so utterly normal, and have normal relationships between one another.  So normal, in fact, that Kenji doesn’t really have anyone to go to with his insane story.

The covers of the English editions are about 100 times better than the Japanese ones, which were all kinds of florescent with gigantic photos and a full summary of the book on the front.  The original large image is the one in black and white on the English covers (or at least mostly, I think), and here the illustration looks like something straight from War of the Worlds.  I like the comparison.

The story continues to build exponentially in this volume.  Amazingly, aside from reading back through the last chapter of volume 2, I have had no trouble remembering either the story or characters so far.  It’s also nice that there’s almost no foreshadowing, so the unexpected directions the story takes are a real treat, and don’t rely on clues from previous volumes.

As far as intricate and well-put-together plots go, I’m just going to go ahead and say this series is the best one I’m reading right now.  It really is unlike anything else I’ve read… plot, story structure, characters, all of it is good.  Way better than Monster.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.