20th Century Boys 15

Naoki Urasawa – Viz – 2011 – 23 volumes

I knew it. I think we all did. It went down a little differently than I thought it would, and I thought the Pope would play a different role. What happens in the story is much more fantastic than what I expected. As everybody says: deified. My only question is if… what I’m talking about is the same as before. Somehow, I suspect that is not the case. I am curious.

Unfortunately, the translation notes ruined the surprise at the end of the volume for me. We see an unusual two-page preview for volume 16, featuring a character strolling down an empty street. I wasn’t sure what the significance was until the translation notes identified the character. Then I freaked out. Again, this… particular thing isn’t that hard to pick up on, and I’ve been expecting it since the post-1999 story started. But I’ve been curious how this will be re-introduced into the story. All sorts of things can happen from this point.

Anyway. Enough of the veiled spoiler-free commentary. There’s plenty to like here, even without major bombshells from the story. The volume starts with a new character, an Italian priest named Luciano who bears an uncomfortable resemblance to John Belushi. In his youth, he was a drunk counterfeiter, until another priest and future mentor crossed his path. Luciano stumbles across the Friend’s New Book of Prophecy, and while at first he laughs it off as nonsense, he realizes that many of the items in it are true, and he begins to fear that the Pope will be assassinated when he visits Japan for the World’s Fair. He tries to warn the Cardinals, but this only triggers a very obvious cover-up operation, so Luciano flees Italy for Japan to try and save the Pope. He doesn’t speak a word of Japanese, but somehow he finds Kanna and the Kenji Faction and warns them with enough time to take action.

Father Luciano, awesome as he is, bothers me. One of the weaknesses of both this story and Monster is that they have far too many characters, each with their own section of story to tell. It’s less of a problem in 20th Century Boys, but Father Luciano is a great example. I doubt this man will be a major player ever again. He does illustrate the global influence of the Friends Organization, but did we really need to introduce and spend half a volume with a new character to learn that? And that a man that doesn’t speak a word of Japanese happens to find Kanna and her crew, along with a Priest that happens to speak Italian and is sympathetic to Luciano’s cause, along with being a former gang member himself, seems a smidge unlikely to me, even for 20th Century Boys. Having said that, I still think Luciano’s a great character, and the fact he looks like John Belushi and doesn’t speak Japanese will definitely make me remember him if he does reappear later. His tattoos are also pretty memorable, and very elaborate for a priest. The man running around in America right now? Any of Kenji’s classmates that aren’t Yoshitsune or Otcho? Random police officers and gang members? Not so much.

I loved the way Otcho and the anti-Friend group took action when they learned about the plans to assassinate the Pope. Seeing them getting the mobs to work together, and watching many different small groups comb for assassins in an enormous crowd around the Pope was pretty fantastic. But even this was overridden by the pair of bombshells dropped at the end of the volume. The 13th Assassin really does a number on the story when he finally does appear, and Urasawa really knows how to make the most of a ridiculously dramatic moment.

Even though I do hate it when authors involve too many extraneous characters in a story, I do like Father Luciano, I like the conspiracy that the Friends Organization seems to have cooked up against the Pope, and I adore what happens at the end of the volume. This has been the best volume of the series yet, and given the peek we see into volume 16, it’s only getting better from here.