Black Jack 10

Osamu Tezuka – Vertical – 2010 – 17 volumes

See, this is what happens when you leave boxes unopened on your floor for a week.  I thought it was just volumes of stuff I needed to catch up on, and here it was the next volume of Black Jack.  I tend to rave about it on here, but it doesn’t dominate my thoughts the same way a lot of other series do.  All the same, it’s one of the only ones I read straight out of the box every time it comes in the mail.

There was a strange, strange mix of stories this time.  All were thought-provoking, and I don’t think there were any duds in the bunch this time (though some of the endings were ambiguous).  Two of the stories featured Black Jack’s father.  While his past has been hinted at and his strange thirst for vengeance illustrated in at least one story, it’s unusual to see his father just step into the picture like this, and twice in one volume.  Not that we ever have to worry about that again, but even so.  The first story was about Black Jack’s father begging him to heal his wife, who had recovered from Hansen’s Disease but suffered from a horribly disfigured face.  Black Jack gets his revenge in an interesting way, though a little too poetic for my taste.  The second story was twisted and suffered a bit from Tezuka logic, but was of the extreme and nonsensical variety that I prefer.  Assassination, inheritance, and little half-sisters are all part of it.

Speaking of assassinations and Tezuka logic, I think my favorite story in the volume was one where Black Jack was flown into Hawaii every time a man was shot in order to save his life.  At the beginning of the story, he actually arrived after the man had died and brought him back to life.  Hilarious.  There was a political message in there somewhere that made it a bit more sober than what I’m describing, but I couldn’t get over the premise enough to appreciate the message.  Also, the man was Lamp, which helped, too.  There’s just something about seeing Lamp shot in a serious situation that is impossible to take seriously.

There is a resemblance betwee Black Jack, his father, and his younger sister in the eyes (which look extremely out of place on the sister), but there’s an even bigger resemblance between him and Hyakkimaru, the protagonist of Dororo and the character on whom Black Jack was based.  The story that may be one of Hyakkimaru’s only appearances outside his own series appears in this volume, and I loved the way the two characters disagreed and ultimately bonded in the end.  It was a nice way to display their similarities.  I think this was one of my favorite stories so far, because of the character bonding, but also because it was about an old man that hired Black Jack to surgically implant 300 diamonds in various parts of his body.  The old man was Shunsaku Ban.

There’s a cute story towards the end where a little kid gets one of his friends to pretend to be Black Jack in order to appease his very sick younger sister.  There’s another one where, inexplicably, Black Jack helps out the princess of an island nation and her lover (inexplicable, mostly, because of the ending).  A story where Pinoko gets sorta-kidnapped was mixed in there somewhere, and I loved that Pinoko’s attitude about what was going on was left completely ambiguous.  At one point in one of the stories I’ve already mentioned, Black Jack operates on his own leg to save it from being amputated.  In another, he puts a young woman back together using the parts from her dead family members.  In another, he operates on and saves a dolphin out of boredom.

Forget what I said at the beginning.  This series is the absolute best.  No joke.  I will declare a new winner when someone else can show me another story where a doctor is hired to fly across the pacific to resurrect a dead victim of assassination on more than one occasion.