Black Jack 13

Osamu Tezuka – Vertical – 2011 – 17 volumes

Another round of Black Jack stories! I actually read this volume some time ago and put off reviewing it, but since I got the new one in the mail yesterday, I figured it was about time.

My favorite this time around was “Move, Solomon!” about a boy that Pinoko befriends who is very interested in animation. But the studios don’t want to pay him for quality animation where the characters really move. The boy gets sick, Black Jack saves him, blah blah blah. In addition to being just as charming and interesting as any other Black Jack story, this one also had Pinoko making faces in the corner of the left-hand pages, so that when you flipped the chapter it was an animation. Genius!

Another one of my favorites, purely for the sweet adolescent romance factor, was a story about a little boy who lost his arm to gangrene, and needs to find a fresh perspective on his life when he can no longer do the gymnastics he was so good at. A girl that watches him from afar is there to help.

Actually, a lot of the stories were about Pinoko. One story features the good doctor operating on another cystoma. Pinoko “bonds” with it in various ways, and by the end of the story, it looks like Black Jack is going to have another tumor-child to take care of. The first story in the book is about a somewhat despondent boy that Pinoko befriends that needs to be helped adapt to his ataxia (a degenerative brain disease, and apparently one the good doctor can’t fix). “Move, Solomon!,” one I already mentioned, is also about Pinoko befriending a boy and helping him with an illness.

Does all this story time with Pinoko make her less creepy?

No, no it doesn’t. She’s still a walking tumor that looks like a little girl and insists that she’s Black Jack’s wife. There’s not a whole lot to do about making her less creepy. But Tezuka does do a good job, through various stories, to show us that she’s still just a regular 18-year-old girl. Or as regular as an 18-year-old girl can be when you spend 17 years of your life as a parasitic tumor.

On the “bizarre stories only Black Jack can pull off” front, there is a story about Black Jack operating on an alien. It is both cute and very, very wrong. Does it top the dingo story for extreme-ness? Well, the aliens do knock a building down on a man and force Black Jack to operate and save the man’s life before they let him in to work on them. That’s pretty extreme. As extreme as the dingoes? Maybe.

All in all, Black Jack is still a magical read every time. Almost any kind of short story works for this series, and the volumes are always full of different, interesting, and truly bizarre stories. Doing the header for this article, I just realized that there are only a few volumes left, and I’m a little disappointed that we’re coming up on the end. It’s been a wild ride so far, and I am looking forward to what the rest has to offer.