Black Jack 7

Osamu Tezuka – Vertical – 2009 – 17 volumes

Reading “God of Comics” made me want to read something, anything, by Tezuka.  I was going to start in on Buddha, which is the only series by him published in English that I haven’t read yet, but then this came in the mail yesterday, so Buddha will have to wait for another day.  Probably tomorrow.

Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy this volume of Black Jack as much as I have the previous volumes.  The stories were just a touch more moralistic than I like.  For instance, there’s a story about a baboon (or some other monkey) mauling women, and when Black Jack wounds it and follows it back to its cave, he sees that he’s mauling women to steal milk (that they happen to be drinking?) for his two children, whose mother died while giving birth to them.  He then patches up the wounds he gave the baboon and goes on his merry way, only to curse a man who shoots the baboon later for mauling the women.  WHAT.

There’s all sorts of crazy on display here, as per usual, which is why I am okay with the moralistic endings a lot of the stories have.  One of my favorite morals came during a story where Black Jack was hired to cure a man with severe burns, which he later finds out he suffered when his sister threw him in a furnace after she thought he was dead… since she knocked him over the head while he was giving her one of her regular beatings.  When Black Jack finally fixes him up enough that he can lead a normal life, he turns a blowtorch on his sister and catches the whole house on fire, burning the two of them together.  The last two panels are pretty typical lame Black Jack wrap-up lines: “We doctors can heal the body fine, but not the depths of the human heart.”

One thing I wasn’t comfortable with was the backstory we got here, which gives Black Jack his reason for charging so much money.  Turns out he’s on some sort of crazy revenge fantasy.  Like, really crazy.  Buying islands and booby trapping them, only to patch up your intended victim to get them to confess crazy.  Holy shit.  At least we now know what happened to his family and his hair, I guess.

There was a really nice story that sort of went against the usual Black Jack story pattern.  Usually his patients are selfish and somehow that comes back to them, except in this one a man gives up his entire corporation and all his wealth in order to save the life of a man who saved his.  Even with the moral at the end, I loved the positive message.

There were two really, really sad stories, too.  One about a really goofy-looking bear and another about a little girl that looks exactly like Pinoko.  I’m sad Black Jack didn’t take matters into his own hands during the latter story.

Even though this volume had less of the insanity that I’ve grown to love in this series, and even less of the strange medical ailments that pop up so frequently, I still loved it dearly.  Black Jack is never a bad read, even in the off volumes.  You still get goofy bears and baboons and gangsters and canoes lost in the Pacific and what have you.