Black Jack 4

The tone of this volume is much more serious than the last one was.  Where volume four seemed to revel in really outlandish, straight-from-left-field situations, most of these stories are comparably grounded and are a great deal more moralistic and emotional.

Not that the Black Jack stories aren’t always a little emotional.  But it’s hard to feel a warm, fuzzy feeling inside when a family lands an experimental jet in Black Jack’s front lawn, the mother and son are surgically attached to share a set of lungs, and then the father gets blown up in the plane later.  I mean, you’ve got other things to think about in a story like that.

The stories here are things like Black Jack helping a heroin addict recover and get his life back, Black Jack tricking a girl into not using her voice so she can properly recover from an operation, the touching love that even a mob boss has for his son, the difference between doing a surgery right and doing it for notoriety… uh, Rock getting his face eaten by rats… you know, regular Black Jack stuff.

About the only one that goes way over-the-top is the story that involves Pinoko taking a cyanide capsule.  Black Jack has 30 minutes to find where it is in her body, including the length of her intestines, before it opens up and kills her.  Amusingly, when he pulls it out, he sets it in a tray, where it immediately cracks open.  I know that’s not exactly a “gag,” but I was waiting for that to happen as soon as I found out the operation had a time limit.  Also, the last page is just Pinoko farting a lot, which doesn’t do much for my image of her, even if she is complaining about it.

My favorite was a story about a huge student who was under pressure from his father and various agents to join up with professional wrestling/sumo teams.  He’s not a violent kid, and in fact prefers the company of his carp pond.  Black Jack helps him out after he sees his carp breeding skills, and comes up with a couple legitimate and/or entirely fictitious ailments that take the kid out of the running for being a wrestler.  I liked the kid a lot, the plot was a really interesting one, and I laughed at the twist ending.

As I’ve mentioned before, I take great delight in picking out Tezuka’s characters in these stories.  There’s a lot that appear in this volume, but again, my favorites are always Hamegg and Lamp.  Lamp appears twice, once as a rough-looking outlaw that needs an amputation, and again as… er, a policeman, which is weird only because he never plays a good guy.  Even more incredibly, he’s going after Shunsaku Ban, a pickpocket in that story, and Ban never plays a bad guy (notably, he gets his fingers cut off, which I suppose is worlds better than MW, where he gets his testicles bitten off by a dog).  Even better, the end of the story is all about the weird friendship the two of them have developed over the years, which works really well only because yeah, those two have done a lot of stuff together.  Hamegg appears in his usual slimy, sleazy gangster role, but the fact that he always smiles is why I like him so much.

I like pretty much everything about these stories, though.  Even in a volume like this, which was relatively normal and even quite touching, there’s still lots of crazy stuff going on like skin transplants, an operation on a boy who has his organs in backwards, operations on dogs… yeah, none of Black Jack’s surgeries are normal, really.  It’s quirky, compelling, and enjoyable in a way that most episodic series like this are not.  I feel like there’s no way I will ever get tired of it, and I’m so glad it’s coming out in English.