20th Century Boys 16

Naoki Urasawa – Viz – 2011 – 24 volumes

I think one of my favorite things about this series is the little kid logic. The main plot is all about little kid logic, adults that grew up while clinging to ridiculous and childish plans, and, as revealed in this volume, spiteful childhood vendettas. And yet, it takes the little kid logic very seriously in a non-ironic way, and the fate of the world literally rests on this little kid logic. I love it. I love every volume, but this volume in particular helped shed a lot of light on this facet of 20th Century Boys.

The first half of this volume is all about Fukube, and we see many of the main events from Kenji & company’s childhood from his perspective. As expected, he’s a demented little kid, and also a little sad and lonely. Most disturbing are the ways he manipulates people as a child. Sadakiyo especially, but Yamane, too. I love these flashbacks. Not only are they a nice break from the very serious present storyline (they’re usually very lighthearted, and even this disturbing Fukube flashback was less serious than… you know, resurrection), I also like that not much has changed over the last 40 or so years.

We see how Fukube met Manjome for the first time. He has a business card that identifies him as Chuck Manjome, which has forever linked him with another person in my mind. I’m not sure why his business card gave his name as Chuck. Elsewhere, he is Manjome Inshu.

The second half of the book is about Otcho and a couple of kids. About the last thing I want, at this point, are new characters, but I’m quite fond of these little Hulkamaniacs. Wrestling is discussed several times (the children think that Otcho is a professional wrestler, for some reason), and everybody seems to remember different details about these celebrities. I’m not sure of the significance, unless the unreliability of human memory is about to come up as a plot point.

Three years have passed in the main storyline since the game-changing events last volume. Otcho has been separated from Yoshitsune, Kanna, and the others, and he’s trying to follow a lead in order to meet up with them. For some reason, the children are with him. While he doesn’t meet up with the others by the end of the volume, Kamisama makes another appearance, and that’s never a bad thing. He gets upset when the younger child confuses corned beef with a steak.

After I was so upset with the end notes spoiling the next volume teaser in volume 15, that scene didn’t even remotely come to pass in this volume. What. Hopefully we’ll see that character in volume 17. Or better yet, maybe that was just messing with us, and we won’t see him until the end, and he won’t play any role at all. That would be awesome.

But yes. This volume is one of my favorites, simply because of the Fukube flashback. It’s hard to top the rather epic storyline from last volume, and while all of it is good, this is more my flavor. But 20th Century Boys has yet to disappoint in any way, and I’m hoping it maintains this wonderful quality all the way through the end.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.

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.

20th Century Boys 14

Naoki Urasawa – Viz – 2011 – 24 volumes

Okay. I love this series to pieces. But I realized something this volume. Something I should’ve realized a long time ago. The foreshadowing? It’s getting absolutely ridiculous. No major event passes in this series without several characters seeing/remembering it, then talking about it very seriously for at least several chapters before it is revealed to the reader. That was fine when it was the identity of the Friend, or other people, but it happens with two separate events in this volume. I’m not even sure that they’re major plot points. All I know is that the characters are scared. Of something. Something that might be bad.

Actually, one of the events was more… bizarre than it was bad. I don’t even know if what we saw actually happened (because the ending was, in theory, impossible). But I don’t… I don’t know what it proves, other than the Friend is batty and eccentric. And we already knew that. The other thing is the identity of someone. And we don’t know who that someone is yet. But apparently several of the characters do.

Having said that, this series is pure, undiluted awesome. Most of this volume is a flashback to 1971, with Kyoko and Yoshitsune using the Friend Land program to enter a flashback of “what really happened in 1971.” These flashbacks are always an awful lot of fun, because even if the actions only have an abstract bearing on what happens in the present storyline (one that the reader isn’t privy to most of the time), I adore watching younger versions of all the characters as kids. Urasawa pegs everything about these flashbacks perfectly. They are simply kids being kids, with kid-like worries, fears, and dreams. All they wanna do is sneak back into the school and turn the fish pump back on, because they forgot. Telling ghost stories along the way is just par for the course.

We learn a little bit more about Manjome, the second-in-command of the Friend Party. We even get to see a past version of him. I’m not quite sure what his role is from here on out, but watching this poor shell of a man deal with grief and leadership is very interesting, even if we don’t know much at all about him. I’m looking forward to what he does.

Speaking of future roles in the story, I have absolutely no idea where the story is going from here, especially after the events of last volume. That was pretty much all I was expecting. There’s still the Friend Party, of course, and the characters still need to deal with the grip it has on the world, not to mention that silly virus, but the main threat seems to have been neutralized. Maybe. I’m looking forward to just what the plot is going to do with all these bizarre and fantastic story threads it’s been accumulating.

One more minor nitpick. So, Yoshitsune visits a bowling alley in 1971. In it, kids are playing pinball in a few panels. Now, I am what you might call a Pinball Wizard. A pinball otaku, if you will. Those pinball machines the kids are playing? Those are Williams SS machines, Pin-Bot and Comet, and they came out in ’85-’86. There is a third, but I don’t recognize the backglass. Shame on me. But judging by the score counters (they appear to be digital rather than reels), it’s also a solid state machine, which puts it post-’77.

Any sort of pinball in a manga is awesome, though, let alone seeing it in a manga as great as 20th Century Boys. This volume isn’t quite as action-packed, and I think serves more as exposition towards the next major storyline. Luckily I have one more volume here, so I intend to find out where this next little bit of story is going. I am currently very puzzled, but intrigued.

20th Century Boys 13

Naoki Urasawa – Viz – 2011 – 24 volumes

Wow. I wondered about the aftermath of… well, the Friend/Shogun business last volume. Naoki Urasawa really knocks my socks off with his skills at facial expressions and pacing. When a news announcer is speaking of the Friend at the beginning of the volume, there’s a series of panels where he silently moves through a few different facial expressions that are not only wonderful (a lot of artists have trouble nailing facial expressions this subtle), they convey better than words just how shocking the news really is.

Aside from the Earth-shattering and spoileriffic news, and the wonder of just how deep the Friend’s plans go, there were a handful of little things I really enjoyed. I loved seeing Maruo unite with the main Kenji faction (which has everyone accounted for at this point save for Kenji himself, right?), and I also really liked the background story about his boss, the celebrity Haru Namio. I knew there was a story behind him, and it was a pretty classy (if slightly cheesy) one.

I also liked seeing Kyoko’s slow transition from empty-headed schoolgirl to a player with a vested interest in what goes down in the Friend organization. Seeing her fear about what’s happening on the news broadcast contrasted with her group of school friends and their relatively petty concerns was interested, and I loved that her friend was the link that took us into the new direction for the series.

And yeah, the series does shift gears here. Radically. There are hints that it was coming, but given the… extreme actions taken at the end of last volume, something big had to happen in order for the characters to move on and tackle another challenge.

It… uh, reminded me a lot of The Stand. Different countries and all, but the little peek at what was happening in the US definitely helped me make the connection.

Yeah. As always, this is great stuff. Every volume really throws you for a loop, but these last two have really turned things in a different direction. I think there will be plenty of death and devastation in the volumes to come, and I’m very interested in seeing how the Kenji faction will manage to take on the Friends as “terrorists” in the face of a globally-loved political group.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.

20th Century Boys 12

Naoki Urasawa – Viz – 2010 – 22 volumes

I’ve been away a while. It’s nice to get back to this series, though. I know I sound like a broken record, since I have a lot of favorites, but this is one of them. It’s just gripping stuff, and with all the craziness it’s been building up since the first volume, now that we’re starting to get explanations for some of it, I can’t read the volumes fast enough.

What kind of explanations? How about the friend. Oh yes, no fake-outs this time. At least, I think so. We find out who the friend is at the end of the volume. And it made me want to read back through all the old ones. That’s all I’ll say on the subject.

What else happens? It hasn’t stopped dipping into the past, and I love that, even still, memories of Kenji inform absolutely everything that’s going on, both on the Friend side and the anti-Friend side. Connections to Kenji’s sister and the scientists that worked with her keep popping up, and Otcho investigates a lead at his old school based on a secret message system he remembered one of his more sinister classmates telling him about back in grade school. Apparently, because of this, Donkey saw something he shouldn’t have, though Otcho declined to tangle with them back in school. Nowadays, though? It’s on.

Hilariously, in the same school, the same room, and with the same book, copyright 1968, that has stayed in the library for 45 or so years.

What else? We also catch up with Maruo. His role in the story is an interesting one, and gives us yet another angle. I don’t want to say too much about it, but I liked him a lot in this volume, and am looking forward to where his story takes us.

And that’s it for this time around. Looking forward to the next one, which I’ll probably read this weekend.

20th Century Boys 11

Naoki Urasawa – Viz – 2010 – 23 volumes

This volume was a lot more exposition than we’ve yet seen in this series. Not a whole lot of action, nor any detailed flashbacks, nor were there Earth-shattering revelations of any kind. Just a lot of talking. It was still interesting though, and even 20th Century Boys needs to catch its breath sometimes.

Sadakiyo… hm. The situation with Sadakiyo gets very strange, very fast, and that develops while Kanna is being told that her father is the Friend (something I still doubt, though it was brought up in the early stages of the story). Basically, Sadakiyo knows damn near everything, and he learned it all from Mon-chan. Of course, we don’t learn what “everything” is, and “everything” is written in a cryptic, stained, and crumbling shorthand. So we’re left with the characters puzzling through their memories. Unfortunately, their revelations don’t really mean much at this stage, they mostly seem like major plot points for another day. But it’s still fun to see Yoshitsune and Yukiji hanging out together. And “everything” is important enough that the Friend organization would torch a building full of elderly people to destroy it. The head Dream Navigator is a ruthless, ruthless lady, and it looks like she’ll be back for more at a later date.

The story does explore Kanna’s background a little more, as it moves on from the point where she is told she is the Friend’s daughter (and why would you believe that? Especially under the circumstances in which she was told?). She learns what she can about her mother, absent for all these years. The truth of the matter winds up being pretty ugly, though it makes sense in a way, too. After all… would a nice lady have a kid with a man who turned into the Friend? Hmmm.

At this point, when it’s been established that all manner of craziness can and will happen, there are nonsensical things I am waiting to happen. I don’t know that the characters have ever said that Kenji was actually dead. In this volume, they mention he went off by himself, he put his life on the line, pretty much everything except “he gave his life.” I’m waiting for Kenji to show up. And I’m waiting for him to show up in some outlandish role that doesn’t make sense until three volumes of action/explanations make it clear that it somehow fits perfectly in the logic of the story, and has since the beginning.

As for the Friend, other than a lingering theory that it’s some sort of double personality for Kenji, I have no idea who it could be, and it seems like he’s relatively unconnected to Kenji’s group of friends at this point, at least the ones that had been established at the beginning of the story. That makes him a little less interesting, especially since the significance of Kenji’s class is lessened by new people coming out of the woodwork now, but… who am I kidding? I’m still dying to know who he is and how he fit in with Kenji’s group.

I’m also interested in the role of music in the series. Kenji is a musician, a tape of his songs is what keeps Kanna going, and in this volume, we see a speech he made about how all the classic rock songs are simply a part of his flesh and blood, and he only needs to close his eyes to feel any one of them. Also, given the fact that the series is named after a T-Rex song, and the first scene of a boy being bound and gagged and a song blasted over the PA has still not been explained… I’m waiting more and more for music to come into things. I’m not sure if I’m reading too much into it or not, but it’s still an interesting element.

A quiet volume, sure, full of characters pausing to try and sort things out, but I still have yet to see 20th Century Boys lose its forward momentum. It’s still getting better and better. It trumps Monster about a hundred times at this point, and is probably the best series I’m currently reading. Amazing stuff.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.

20th Century Boys 10

Naoki Urasawa – Viz – 2010 – 23 volumes

Interesting. So the storylines are all starting to come together. I really like Kyoko now, who is just a hapless victim with no clue as to what’s going on. She just keeps running into all the wrong people. People who others have been trying to find their entire lives. And it gets her in all sorts of trouble. Happily, she does meet up with Kanna in this volume, and Kanna hears all that she knows. They are soon separated, which would be annoying in any other series but so much exposition happens that I completely forgot to be angry.

They did cop out of showing the Friend’s face, but the cop-out was so bizarre and unexpected that I forgive it. The lead-in to the cop-out in this volume alone was very epic, visually (lots and lots of teasing, face-hiding, views of the back of the head, et cetera). And I even laughed a little, because… it was so weird, and the explanation made a lot of sense (though Yoshitune’s panic will need some work to make it sound like less of a weird plot hole). We finally got to meet Sadakiyo, both in the past and the present. And he tells his side of the story. Sadakiyo is all sorts of crazy, which says something in a story this insane, but he’s unhinged in a way that nobody else is. It’s interesting that, amid all his crazy, he doubts what he’s believed his whole life. He doubts friendship, which is all he’s really had.

And with all the action going on, Sadakiyo made me tear up a little when he met up with his old teacher. This story isn’t really one for sentimentality (Pluto more than makes up for that), so it made it all the more powerful. And it made me like Sadakiyo quite a bit.

And, of course, Kyoko winds up with Sadakiyo at the end of the volume. As if she hasn’t had enough crazy already. I want her to be someone important in the end.

There is some Kanna, but it’s mostly some short wrap-up from the big meeting last volume and her being brusque with Kyoko. We’ve met most of the major players at this point, I think, though I still expect Kenji is alive and well somewhere, possibly acting out the role of Robert Johnson. Now that really would be a trip.

Holy crap, but is this series good. A hundred times better than Monster, and a lot more inventive and strange than Pluto. Easily the best of the Urasawa I’ve read, and probably the best seinen manga I’ve read period. And I’ve read lots of good seinen manga.

20th Century Boys 9

Naoki Urasawa – Viz – 2010 – 22 volumes

As much as I love marathoning this series, it ultimately makes little difference since the storyline jumps around so much. Luckily, two of the main plot threads join here as Kanna and Otcho (sort of) come face-to-face at the very end of this volume. There are a few chapters that deal with Kyoko, but her story winds up copping out a little bit more than I’d like. She’s still on the cusp of seeing the Friend’s face in a flashback, but as soon as she ran into a kid wearing a mask, I knew where that was going. There is… sort of a wind-down to that story, but I can tell we will come back to it later. Which is great. It’s fertile ground for the fun childhood flashbacks, and I do like Kyoko despite her shortcomings. She’s great as a neutral third party.

Most of the volume, however, follows Kanna as she goes her own way when recruiting allies to her cause. She uses… the luck that was mentioned very early on in the series, but she uses it in an interesting, non-exploitative way, and doesn’t actually force anybody to follow her. But she still winds up attracting rough types that are not what one would expect to be the forces of good. Then again, this series is all about doing things that you wouldn’t expect.

As fun as all this is, and with the spectacular recruitment scene that manages to be extremely thrilling across several chapters while the characters are all seated, this volume was still mostly exposition. Amazingly, I didn’t really mind since the exposition is still so good, but I can’t wait to get into some of the more mobile parts of the story. I still have very little idea where all this is going, and we are very nearly at the halfway point now.

It is, however, one of the most amazing manga I’ve ever read. I’m not really doing it justice. It’s extraordinarily original, and has a great story that incorporates so many elements of what makes manga fun to read. There’s really nothing like it. I know I say that a lot, but I really mean it this time. I promise.

20th Century Boys 8

Naoki Urasawa – Viz – 2010 – 22 volumes

I’ve saved up enough volumes of this. It’s time to marathon them and see how good the story works that way. I suspect it will be very, very amazing.

Unexpectedly, the story switches focus and we follow a student, Kyoko, as she goes through with her decision to study the Kenji Faction for a report at school and is subsequently whisked away by the Friends and brainwashed. Normally, I hate it when stories have several different main characters and settings for their narrative, but I found myself liking even this tangent. Kyoko isn’t at all likable, but she’s easy to sympathize with, and she also finds herself in an extremely terrifying situation. And even in this situation, unrelated to the other characters, we eventually re-join the main story with a fresh perspective and more flashbacks, particularly to the day of attack.

These flashbacks are FRUSTRATING. Really, really good, but still frustrating. We get a little taste of what we want to know, mostly about the robot that is terrorizing the city. And what we find out is completely unlike what is expected. I don’t even know what to make of the difference in expectation in that situation. But we still don’t get to see what actually happens to Kenji, nor do we get to see the face of the Friend. The last chapter leaves off in a place that seems to make the reveal inevitable in volume 9, but this story is good at dodging expectations.

There’s another way we might find out, too. There’s the direct face reveal of the Friend as an adult courtesy of the flashbacks to the fight, but Kyoko is experiencing a strange flashback herself at the hands of the Friends (they put her in a virtual reality machine that sends her back to the past with Kenji and company as kids, and she interacts with them… bizarre, but I found myself not questioning it too much). This flashback is an entertaining and very true-to-kid story of a haunted house exploration, but it leaves off in a place that promises we’ll get to see, if not the Friend’s face, at least something relatively disturbing.

Kenji, while not present, is still known. There are the flashbacks, of course, where we see him at all stages of his life, but there’s also a nice, sentimental scene where he records a song right before going off to fight the robot. I liked this part, because it’s an unexpected quiet interlude, but also because it had the guitar chords printed next to the lyrics, so you could play it if you wanted.

Another thing I liked, that I assume will be important later, is that the Friend’s plans unexpectedly diverge from what Kenji had come up with as a kid. Kenji notices, but nothing has really come of it yet. I do wonder.

20th Century Boys 7

Naoki Urasawa – Viz – 2010 – 22 volumes

Yes.  Lots and lots and lots of epic goings-on happen here.  In the present storyline, we see Shogun begin to make his move, and Kanna is AWOL and replaced by a girl named Koizumi who randomly decides to do a research paper on the Kenji faction and, somehow, is not blinded by the Friend propaganda and winds up meeting the right people to hear the story.

Meanwhile, Shogun is free, and we also re-encounter Kami-sama in the present storyline.  Shogun is just how we left him, but Kami-sama’s new lot in life is pretty hilarious and unnecessary, and somehow fitting.

After that, the story flashes back to December 31st, 1999, and we begin to see how the day unfolded.  I wasn’t expecting the explanation this soon, nor was I expecting it to be as straightforward as it is.  There are still some flashbacks to childhood mixed in too, along with some 1999 explanations that go back to childhood, which makes the timeline for this series even weirder, if that’s even possible.  I loved the childhood memories this time around, a little more than the robot battle, but I have a feeling that the most exciting parts of that are going to be in the next volume.  Which I now need desperately, because this one ends on an awful cliffhanger.

I think the thing I like most about the childhood memories in this volume is that they are all nice and a little bittersweet, which this volume desperately needs for contrast to its dark, action-packed story.  Kenji rocking out to 20th Century Boy as a little kid, contrasted with him rocking it as an adult while driving a truck full of dynamite up to a giant robot is pretty awesome.  I also liked how they had to analyze the final battle in little kid terms, like taking hints about how the giant robot was controlled from the evolution of the giant robot in Japanese popular culture.  Awesome.  I also like that there is a manga story subplot running with the manga artist that escapes with shogun, but he will never be as awesome as Jewel Sachihana from Otomen.

Also worth pointing out is the fact that the Friend modification to the Tower of the Sun doesn’t hurt that (horrible) thing.  Maybe in a worldwide takeover, it would replace the torch on the Statue of Liberty, or perhaps set atop the tines of (horrible) Joan Miro’s Chicago (I would suggest the more famous Picasso across the street from it, but it wouldn’t be much of a modification since it’s already mostly there).

Anyway, yes.  I am still completely addicted and in desperate need of more volumes of this series, stat.  May this never change as long as it runs.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.