Black Jack 15

Osamu Tezuka – Vertical – 2011 – 17 volumes

The last volume of Black Jack has come out since the last time I talked about it here. I need to catch up. Writing these up is difficult, and for very good reason.

There is a story in here about a little boy that sprouts green buds all over his body. His brother calls Black Jack, and shortly, the little boy turns into a full-on cactus man. Black Jack removes a parasitic Brazilian cactus. The little boy is okay.

The story after this is about a girl suffering from anemia. Her teacher is concerned, so she goes for a home visit to see her parents. At the mansion they live in, the teacher runs into Black Jack, who insists the family is after her blood. There is an elaborate medical reason for this. The head of the family is staked at the end of the story.

The next story is about medical cadavers. Where they come from, who they are, how they wind up at medical school. There’s a story about a medical student struggling over why he should be a doctor, and another one about a thankful prisoner on death row.

What am I supposed to say about that?! I mean, the stories are all good. Every single one of them is a great read. The bizarre cactus boy. The vampire story. The sensitive story about medical cadavers. All of them are amazing reads. Every single one of them is bizarre in its way, whether because the story is outlandish in any context, outlandish in the context of Black Jack, or outlandish because it’s a sensitive story that followed two completely insane ones. Reading every book in this series is an amazing roller coaster ride, and you literally have no idea where any of these stories are going or what the turn of a page will bring. It’s truly an experience.

And that’s about all the elaboration this volume needs, I think. Black Jack is pretty much a must read for anyone, whether you read manga or not. It’s just great.

Black Jack 14

Osamu Tezuka – Vertical – 2011 – 17 volumes

I am behind on my Black Jack reviews! And my Tezuka reviews in general. I’ve got two more volumes of Black Jack to talk about, plus the new Book of Human Insects. And I should probably talk about the last of the bilingual volumes of Princess Knight before I get my Vertical volume one in the mail, so that I can pretend for just a little longer that the one I’m getting is one of the other two versions of Princess Knight and not the one I already own.

But admittedly, what can I say about Black Jack that I haven’t already? It’s pretty consistent all the way through. Then again, it’s consistently awesome, so every volume is worth reading.

Why is this volume worth your time? Well, Black Jack gets married, he saves Dr. Honma’s daughter from a really weird swelling disease, and he delivers a baby on a raft that has run aground on some rocks in the middle of a river during a flash flood. That story’s almost as great as the one where he operated on himself with dingoes bearing down on him. One of the stories ends with a bad man getting sucked into a jet engine.

Sometimes, Black Jack morality still bothers me, though. There’s a Kiriko story. At the beginning, Black Jack is brought in to operate on a patient who has been vegetative for 55 years. He says he can do it, but he only has a 3%-5% chance of success, and he would have to charge the hospital. The hospital can’t afford to pay him, and he says he doesn’t want to do a useless operation, so he leaves. On the way out, he runs into Dr. Kiriko, who has been called in for euthanasia on the same patient. The hospital can’t afford to keep the man alive anymore, since it costs them $6,000 a month and the man has no living relatives. For some reason, Black Jack decides to do an operation, one that lasts 18 hours and gives this man a 95% chance of dying, gratis when he learns that Kiriko has been called in. Maybe he wasn’t told the hospital couldn’t afford to keep the man alive anymore? Is euthanizing him via Dr. Kiriko less humane than shutting off his life support? And at the end of the story, the man wakes up for a second, cries, ages rapidly while asking why they even woke him up, and then dies.

Uh.

The last story in the volume is another interesting one, where Black Jack runs into another doctor just like himself. He champions the cause of a young girl who attempts suicide over her grandmother’s care, but finds out the treatment is being handled by a doctor who deals with the reality of their situation: the grandmother is terminal, and the family can’t afford any treatment. Black Jack is devastated to hear his own lines from another mouth. I was a little puzzled by this. He is frequently compassionate, of course, but just as often he does deny treatment to normal people, or charge an outrageous fee to people who can’t afford it, but agree to it anyway. Often the money has a moral price tag as well, but just as often it does not. So why is he so shocked that someone else is acting this way?

But the puzzles are part of the fun of Black Jack. Every single one of the stories is worth reading, and every volume of this series is an absolute pleasure when it arrives. It’s interesting, bizarre, and educational, and I can’t recommend it enough to those looking for an interesting, somewhat literary read.

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.

Black Jack 12

Osamu Tezuka – Vertical – 2010 – 18 volumes

Ooh, I think this has been the best volume of the series I’ve read yet. There were lots of stories that put Black Jack into difficult situations, most not offering any explanation as to what he may be thinking. Leaving Black Jack’s emotions up to the reader is one of the things I love about this series.

My favorite by far was “Prone to Laughter,” the last story in the volume. I was immediately won over because it featured Kuro’o, the tall bully, and a shorter classmate who stayed cheery no matter what happened to him. Bitter over what had happened to him, violent and dangerous, Kuro’o eventually takes comfort in Guffaw, his classmate, who is in a similar situation to his and takes it much better. Eventually Guffaw is in an accident that Black Jack blames himself for, and years later the surgeon seeks him out to try and save his life. There were lots of good things in this chapter, some of which I don’t want to spoil. It’s safe to say that Guffaw was a good character, though, and it was interesting to compare and contrast him with Black Jack and see everything he brought out in the other as a boy.

The other Kuro’o story was “The Second One,” about a man with cancer whose daughter eventually must beg Black Jack to save his life. Later, its revealed that the dying man is one of the five responsible for what happened to Black Jack and his mother, only the second that Black Jack was able to find. Considering the elaborate and sadistic revenge he sought against the first man, there’s no telling what he had planned here. He is bitter in the end, but for what reason it is unclear. It’s likely because his revenge remains unfulfilled, though, which is an interesting and ugly emotion to shed on your main character.

Another very Black Jack-centric chapter featured a young boy who was in an accident and couldn’t walk. Black Jack has to bully him and show him his own scars, telling him his difficult story, before the young boy agrees to treatment and therapy. Strangely, and very out-of-place, the boy is a user of PK psychic powers, something Black Jack acknowledges as fact. The supernatural doesn’t have much place in the series… but seeing science and the paranormal clash is interesting when it happens occasionally. It happens a couple more times in this volume alone.

In another chapter, Black Jack has a doctoring-off with an unfortunately-drawn gentleman who can heal and save lives just by laying his hand on/in people. The moral of this story is not to trust the supernatural, but to trust the doctor’s intentions. A very unfortunate birth defect is discussed at length.

Later, Black Jack must do a surgery on a boy who is possessed by a ghost that believes it needs an operation. He brings up the operation he did on the invisible patient of the airplane crash several volumes ago, and goes to work after charging his usual fee.

There are lots of other happy, sad, and pun-filled stories, and even a guest appearance by Golgo 13. But it was the interesting takes on Black Jack that made me like this volume more than the others. There was a little bit more to chew on here, even with all the varied medical conditions and outlandish stories that appear in the other volumes and make it so much fun to read.

I don’t expect more of the Black Jack-centric chapters next time, but I expect I’ll still love it all the same. Every volume is a treat. It really is a unique and extreme read. There’s just nothing like it out there.

Black Jack 11

Osamu Tezuka – Vertical – 2010 – 17 volumes

I’m late to the party with this volume. Normally I read these as soon as I take them out of the box, but this one got set to the side and forgotten. For that, I am sorry, because Black Jack deserves better.

It is consistently good, and this volume is no exception. My favorite story this time around was probably “Showa Shinzan,” about the volcano that appeared in Japan in 1944. This was my favorite purely for personal reasons, since I recall reading an article about this in a magazine in third grade and it scared me so much I never forgot it. The story is good too, about Black Jack riding up to help a man who has his arm stuck in the rock face. The locals complain about the constant parade of tourists who scale the mountain despite warnings about the active volcano. Black Jack has to operate amidst the hot rocks and sulfur clouds, and has a great deal of difficulty for what turns out to be a simple problem. He gets angry when he finds out the real cause of the man’s problems, but responds in a wonderfully Black Jack-like manner.

Childhood trauma aside, “Whispers of a Dog” was the other winner for me this time around. A man, grieving after the death of his lover, asks Black Jack to implant a tape of his lover’s voice into the throat of a dog they loved, so that whenever it barks he can hear her voice. Black Jack reluctantly agrees, then the man’s life plays out over the course of a year with this dog. He gets over his lover and begins seeing other women, but of course he has a dog that says “Tadaaki I love you” whenever it barks, which tends to scare people off. The implications of this, and the climax, were most uncomfortable, but the love the dog had for its owner conveyed in such a creepy way was one of the most touching things in this book.

There were lots of others. Black Jack operating on a boy with a spinal chord problem in a war-torn country, Black Jack operating on a boy with muscular distrophy, Black Jack helping a skilled doctor get his groove back, so to speak, and the last story was the original end to the series in the 70s, though more stories were published after that. There’s an interesting essay about it in the back of the book, although it’s not hard to guess by the content of the story itself (a kind of “This is Your Life” Black Jack-style), I was pretty sure it had served as some kind of conclusion before I read the essay. There’s even a story about a man with amnesia getting his memory of World War II back, with disastrous results. There’s a little something for everyone.

It’s slightly more tame than other Black Jack volumes (the dog story was probably the strangest, although there was another where Black Jack was accused of murder and eventually saved by a pocket monkey), but there’s still plenty of strange stuff in here. Perhaps I’m slowly being desensitized to Black Jack weirdness too, I don’t know. I do know that every volume is uniquely satisfying, and while it doesn’t have Adolf beat for my favorite Tezuka work, it’s pretty close to the top of the stack at this point.

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.

Black Jack 9

Osamu Tezuka – Vertical – 2010 – 17 volumes

Ah, I knew I had one more series with “black” in the title.

One of my favorite, if slightly far-fetched stories in the volume involved a couple at a hospital who decided to marry despite each having a slow-acting terminal condition.  The woman had a form of leukemia, while the man had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which I didn’t recognize until Black Jack shortened it to ALS.  It didn’t occur to me that Lou Gerhig’s Disease might not be a worldwide term for it.  But Black Jack helps out a Russian doctor who knows the real secrets of suspended sleep/cryogenic freeze that keeps people alive and brings them back when there is a cure for their disease, and after badmouthing the couple as a med student, Black Jack remembers them later in life.  Aww.

There was a strange story towards the end of the volume about a surgery that Black Jack botched twice and the stubborn patient that doesn’t value his life and refuses a third and final surgery.  I liked the ridiculous and over-the-top ending, a similar one happened earlier in the series.

Also in this volume, Black Jack confronts Iriomote Wild Cats, incompetent doctors that have to perform surgery on him, terrorists that try to blow up his house, a couple other terrorists and gangsters, sharks, and a not-so-angelic Astro Boy.  I’ve already read this story in Astro Boy, and I still don’t like it even after reading a good chunk of Black Jack.  The ending doesn’t make any more sense this time around.  I mean… why?  Why do that to the little boy?  How cruel.

One of the first stories in the volume is about Pinoko coming down with an incurable illness.  Even though I was 100% certain that Pinoko wouldn’t die, it was still a very touching story.  I still think Pinoko is quite creepy, but it is very touching that Black Jack cares about her so much.  One Pinoko joke puzzled me thoroughly, though.  She and Black Jack are performing a complex surgery in another story, and she says she can stay awake because she stayed up watching “woots” the other day.  Black Jack asks, “As in ‘yay?’” and Pinoko replies “not ‘woot,’ ‘Woots!’”  She always speaks with an impediment, and is probably talking about “Roots” here, which fits in with the Black Jack time frame, but… is Black Jack referring to what I think he is?

But yes, Black Jack keeps delivering the good stuff.  From the first story about a teacher trying to use verbal abuse to motivate his students to the stories about his ethics and when he will and won’t accept payment, to the incredibly interesting and detailed cases he covers (in addition to ALS, we also see icthyosis, rare heart conditions, and one or two other oddball ailments), Black Jack keeps delivering the good stuff nine volumes in.  It’s probably not for everyone (the moral situations are still ambiguous and nonsensical sometimes, and the stories don’t vary that much in structure, though the subject matter keeps them interesting and entertaining), but it’ll keep me entertained for a long time to come.

And for the record, Lamp is in here twice.  Once he is killed away from the storyline and discovered later, which makes him angry, and later he gets to have a prominent role and wear a beard.

Black Jack 8

Osamu Tezuka – Vertical – 2009 – 17 volumes

This volume was all about Black Jack taking crap from everyone.  A few stories had a lot of other doctors talking down to Black Jack in them, and Black Jack either ignored them, showed them up smugly, or was weirdly affected by them.  He treats a hysterical patient, who he slaps around a lot and does an almost-pretend-rape.  He gets bit by a rabid dog.  He gets beaten up and robbed.  The police come after him for his lack of license and also for being a murderer.  Kiriko calls him an asshole.  The poor guy just can’t catch a break.

The strangest story in the volume was one of the first, called “A Wrong Diagnosis.”  This features a full-of-himself doctor (the head of a hospital) trash-talking an intern and insulting him in regard to a question about a diagnosis before stepping out to attend a wedding.  At the wedding, he proceeds to berate Black Jack for several pages, then gets called into the hospital to attend to a dying patient, the one the intern had been asking about earlier.  He asks Black Jack to come with him as a second opinion.  Once there, he to majorly botches the surgery and refuses admit he misdiagnosed the patient until Black Jack just… takes over in the OR.  You would think the moral of the story here would be something about swallowing your pride, or being able to admit your wrong, or… something.  No, the actual last page has Black Jack sternly telling the intern not to become a doctor who invites contempt.  What?  WHAT?!

Another memorable story is called “Fits.”  This is the one I mentioned earlier where Black Jack slaps around the patient and rips off her clothes to get both the girl and her mother to realize the girl is physically healthy, but is prone to hysteria, a psychological disease.  He makes some side comment about her mother disciplining her differently (huh?  so she doesn’t seek attention like that?).  The girl was one that Pinoko had recommended in hopes that Black Jack would make enough money to buy the furniture that she picked out and he angrily sent away at the beginning of the story.  The last page wound up being a very sweet moment between the two.  I wouldn’t have expected it in this story, which was a pretty cruel one, nor would I ever have expected to like any sweet moments between the creepy Pinoko and Black Jack.

His fondness for Pinoko is quite touching, as creepy as she is.  Another story, called “A Visit From a Killer” has the good doctor willingly sacrificing his hands during a hold-up as long as he can operate on Pinoko to save her life.  The killer threatening Black Jack is appalled and amazed by Pinoko’s puppet body, and seeing Black Jack so genuinely distraught is also nice.  Not to say he’s totally stoic.  He frequently gets emotional over his patients.  It was different with Pinoko though, since you’re always under the impression he’s looking out for number one in most other stories.

There were some amazing afflictions on display once again.  I mentioned the rabies earlier, and I was wondering when the story would get around to that, but we also get a fossilized fetus, a vein that somehow generates obstructions, a rickets patient, liver cancer, hysteria, bringing patients back to life on the brink of brain death (thanks, Dr. Kiriko), a couple blunt trauma/car wreck patients, and one story involving a vacuum (in the physical sense, not the machine) that was killing everyone in an Alaska town.

The stories are always strange, surreal, puzzling, gripping, and some of the best pulpy entertainment money can buy.  They do have some inappropriately timed jokes, and sometimes the entertainment value hinges on how into the situations you are (ie I would guess it’s easily not for everybody), but Black Jack is still one of my favorite series.  I’ve read it the same day it’s arrived for the last several volumes in a row, and there are very few series that don’t have to wait their turn these days.

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.

Black Jack 6

Osamu Tezuka – Vertical – 2009 – 17 volumes

On one hand, having just finished the volume, the moralistic twist at the end of the last chapter has me in shock.  An officer who condemned three improving patients to death at the hands of Dr. Kiriko winds up slipping and falling on a cliff, and Dr. Kiriko’s laugh as he says he knows how to fix him is quite chilling in the context of the story.

On the other hand, this is one of those volumes where the morals at the end of each chapter wear on you.  The second-to-last chapter in particular bothered me because of its ambiguity, but I think Black Jack’s position is supposed to be ambiguous, always.  A little girl who had called Black Jack a devil at the beginning of the story asks him at the end why a devil would save the life of her mother.  It’s unclear whether the meaning is that Black Jack isn’t really a devil, or if we were supposed to ponder the fact that Black Jack only found himself at that hospital because he was being paid well to perform the operation by the staff there.  Is he an angel, or is he a devil driven by money?  Such is the question behind most of the Black Jack series.

That particular chapter also featured the entertaining plot device of having Black Jack impersonate someone else. Now, when you think of Black Jack, you think of the huge scar on his face and his two-tone hair.  But let’s say you cover that up with a beard and a wig, maybe he’d look just like whoever it is that you want him to impersonate if said person was in an accident that may have left a scar on their face.  Except Black Jack also has a mismatched skin graft on his face, so his skin is actually two different colors and he would never look like anyone else, ever.

I liked this volume a lot for the strange medical conditions it showcased.  It wasn’t quite as out there as volume 3, which is still my favorite, but it did have some of the most unusual cases yet.  Black Jack deals with a case of “Lion-Faced Disease,” explains a hereditary condition that involves a shorter-than-usual ring finger, operates on a boy whose entire body is ossifying/”turning to stone,” and all sorts of other rare diseases, cancers, tumors, uh… and a man who kicks a rock towards a train and it ricochets and goes through a window and nearly kills his wife.  You know.  Most of the stories in this volume were compelling because of the strange and extreme extent of the things that Black Jack was being forced to cure.

My two favorite chapters were the one where the boy turned to stone (which has a very twisted outcome) and a later story where a boy was brought back to life, only to be tried for murder.  I figured there would be some greater purpose to the requests to save his life, but there wasn’t.  Black Jack’s point was that it was such a waste to offer him a second chance only to take it away when he’d already opted for suicide.  My question came more from the fact that… why would the chief of police try so hard to revive the boy?  Why?  Why, when he knew exactly what would happen and made no effort to stop it?  This was a case of the moral… really not making much sense, because normal people do not act this way.  This story does feature an absolutely lovely panel/full page illustration when the boy makes the decision to end his life at the beginning of the story.  This story also fulfilled my Lamp/Hamegg requirement, which I’m sure I’ve mentioned before is all I ask of a volume of Tezuka manga.

Actually, Lamp appears again in the very next story.  It’s strange he seems to appear in Black Jack as law enforcement, but my reason for bringing him up here was that the final panel in this story was actually the most touching moment I’d ever seen in Black Jack.  Lamp had been trying to bust Black Jack for practicing without a license, and gave him the impossible task of curing his son.  He expected him to fail, just like all the other “phony” doctors.  But he succeeds.  And the final panel is a wonderful one where the two characters pass each other on the street and Lamp doesn’t find the words for gratitude.  The expressions on both character’s faces and the unspoken thing between them was just lovely.

And that’s all I have for you this time around, friends.