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.

20th Century Boys 6

Naoki Urasawa – Viz – 2009 – 22 volumes

It seems like the story has finally stabilized and calmed down enough that I can see a volume into the future.  This is both good and bad, since I enjoyed the way it was constantly coming up with new ways to baffle, but even without the constant questions and mysteries flying around, it’s still a pretty enjoyable read.  And the fact that this is still a pretty action-packed volume and still managed to be the most quiet in the series so far bodes well for the future.

Two major storylines are going on here.  One involves Kanna trying to shelter a transvestite from the police after seeing an officer shoot a civilian, and the other involves a manga artist trying to escape from prison with the help of the inmate that has been there since the prison was created 14 years ago, after the battle on New Years.  Things are more normal here only because we are not given the larger picture, nor are we given hints about it as we were in the early volumes.  We know that the government is corrupt, and that an organization (possibly the Friends, though a hint is dropped that the characters don’t pick up on) still controls the police and what people can say and do, but aside from the general problems this creates for the characters, there is no larger picture of an enemy as of yet.  I’m sure it’s coming, and that it’ll be spectacular.

I’m a little leery that a manga artist seems to be stepping in as a regular character.  While I get a kick out of stuff like this when used infrequently, it can wear on me a little when a character is constantly talking about how much he likes manga and continually makes blatant manga references.  I also don’t like it when writers use writers as characters in their stories all the time, Stephen King.

The prison parts are my favorite so far, only because the situation is so much more restricted and dire than the police problems that Kanna deals with, and also because one of the old characters is re-introduced in a clever way.  It is courtesy of this storyline that we get another one of those flashbacks to the 1970s, where the boys discuss Charles Bronson, Steve McQueen, and The Great Escape, and one of the characters in prison applies the conversation to their current situation.  Again, I love the kid logic used in this series, and the way it takes itself totally seriously when all these situations from childhood wind up being useful in rather dire problems they have as adults.

Also, the kids keep calling Charles Bronson Mandom, after a brand of Japanese men’s… cologne or something from the 70s that Bronson was a spokeman for.  Not only is Mandom the best nickname ever, but it leaves the story open to more fond Charles Bronson memories, which means someone could go “Death Wish” at any time.

Even with all the action and fun stuff going on, I think this volume was mostly exposition.  It’s good that it’s pausing to take a breath, though, because it’ll be nice to get back into the crazy plot with at least a little insight into what’s happening and how it will affect the characters.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.

20th Century Boys 5

Naoki Urasawa – Viz – 2009 – 22 volumes

HOLY CRAP, WHAT?!

That’s about all I can say about this volume.  It was excellent.  Everything about it was completely unexpected.  I can’t say too much about it without giving everything away, however.  This volume just needs to be read to be believed.  You will not regret it.

Urasawa avoids the problem of dragging a month out to fill 20 volumes by just getting the thing over with.  I couldn’t believe it.  I was not expecting the event in volume 5.

Moreover, the scene was spectacular.  The way it started, the way the action panned around to all the different scenes, the different reactions, the final stand.  It was beautiful, and I’ve never seen a sequence quite like it.

On the other hand, it cuts off and we still know absolutely nothing.  My mind boggled when that awesome action scene suddenly just stopped in its tracks.  It’s amazing it didn’t get whiplash.

Basically, we still know nothing.  Well, I take that back.  Now we know less than nothing, because in addition to all the unanswered questions from the previous volumes, now everything we know was taken away and we are following a different set of characters.

20th Century Boys, I could sit and watch you read the newspaper for 200 pages and I would still love you.  Everything that’s happened so far has been nothing less than perfect and baffling in an addictive way, and this volume only cemented my admiration.  I’m ready for the long haul, and as per usual, I have absolutely no idea where the story is going from here.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.

20th Century Boys 4

Naoki Urasawa – Viz – 2009 – 22 volumes

This volume was all about a man named Shogun living in Thailand.  I liked the way he was introduced a lot, since it set up a bit of a personal drama for him, and then connected the upheval in his life back to the “Friends” cult in Japan.

At first, Shogun’s just trying to save a prostitute named May from a crime lord.  Then he realizes he’s going to have to go back to Japan, and “takes care of some things.”  In addition to showing us some of the fear training he underwent (think Apocalypse Now, and keep that in your mind while you read it), we also see a possible connection between the cult and a new type of hallucinatory drug, which would explain a couple things.

Then the story moves back to Japan.  Three years elapse, and Kenji, now with his pal Otcho, have to somehow destroy the giant robot that will inevitably wipe out humanity.  The “Friend” has a prophecy for Kenji about this, too, and I’m sure we’ll see the “team of nine” gather in the “three weeks” we have before the apocalypse.

Again, as serious and straight-faced as this story is, I love that it is realistically trying to explain how a group of old dudes are going to take out a giant robot that shouldn’t exist.  It’s what I’ve wanted out of every giant robot plot ever.  And maybe it won’t actually be about that in the end, but I don’t care.  I’m still not sure where the story is going next, because the plot is so out there that literally anything could happen and make a lot of sense in the context of the story.  In that sense, 20th Century Boys is one of the best stories I’ve read.  I’m just sad I have to wait so long between volumes, because I think this would be a much more incredible read if you could tear through several volumes at once, having these questions answered left and right.  But the waiting and wondering are all part of the experience, I suppose.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.

20th Century Boys 3

Naoki Urasawa – Viz – 2009 – 22 volumes

I think one of the reasons I like this series so much is that it has one of the most outlandish premises I’ve ever seen, yet goes about unveiling it and solving the resulting conflicts with a totally straight face.  I can’t laugh while I’m reading it, and yet the world is being threatened based on a superhero plot a bunch of kids came up with.  Kenji feels tortured because he invented all these things when he was young, but what little kid doesn’t imagine giant robots and laser guns?  It’s a really serious, epic story with the most hilarious plot imaginable, and it works SO WELL.

Surprisingly, there’s a confrontation between Kenji and Friend almost immediately in this volume.  Again, I thought this was the sort of thing that would wait til later.  They reveal the “face” of the friend in an incredibly creepy scene.  As I mentioned last time, this series takes the interesting path of giving you information you don’t know what to do with, rather than depriving you of information to create suspense.  The friend’s “face” means nothing to us, and Kenji spends the entire volume reflecting on it and asking around before he fits all the pieces together.  Also, thankfully, the identity of the friend isn’t as clear-cut as it seemed last volume… but again, whether it’s one person or another doesn’t really mean very much at this point in the story.

I’m curious what role music will play.  It’s been mentioned that Kenji was in a band for a long time, and the series starts with a record played over a school PA.  Kenji gets in a mood and rocks out really hard on his guitar in this volume.  One wonders if perhaps music will save the world, because if so, I’d love to see the series do it with a straight face.

The subtle look at how people change over the years is really great, too.  Kenji continues to run into more of his former classmates, and they all lead pretty normal, mundane lives.  They’ve got boring jobs, a kid or two, problems with their wives, and they get drunk and hang out with their friends, just like regular people.  As insane as the story is, it’s nice that the characters are so utterly normal, and have normal relationships between one another.  So normal, in fact, that Kenji doesn’t really have anyone to go to with his insane story.

The covers of the English editions are about 100 times better than the Japanese ones, which were all kinds of florescent with gigantic photos and a full summary of the book on the front.  The original large image is the one in black and white on the English covers (or at least mostly, I think), and here the illustration looks like something straight from War of the Worlds.  I like the comparison.

The story continues to build exponentially in this volume.  Amazingly, aside from reading back through the last chapter of volume 2, I have had no trouble remembering either the story or characters so far.  It’s also nice that there’s almost no foreshadowing, so the unexpected directions the story takes are a real treat, and don’t rely on clues from previous volumes.

As far as intricate and well-put-together plots go, I’m just going to go ahead and say this series is the best one I’m reading right now.  It really is unlike anything else I’ve read… plot, story structure, characters, all of it is good.  Way better than Monster.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.

20th Century Boys 2

Naoki Urasawa – Viz – 2009 – 22 volumes

Man, I don’t know how this series can keep getting awesome like this for 20 more volumes.  The pace is pretty fast now, and so much has been added in just these first two volumes that it’s almost impossible for me to guess how much else will be added to the mix.  It’s also rather impossible to tell at this point where the story is going at all, which is great in this case since it means all bets are off.

I was rather surprised that information about “friend” was revealed in this volume.  It was made pretty clear that he was one of Kenji’s friends, but I thought that there would be a lot more reminiscing and details added before the story got into what happened to the friend between being a kid and being the leader of some hardcore cult.  It’s also interesting because the name and identity of the “friend” mean literally nothing at this point past the fact that he grew up with Kenji and is now the leader of a cult.  It doesn’t really matter who he is or what else he’s done.  But having the information available at this stage is interesting, and I know it will be useful later.

The most touching thing in this volume was the parts in the middle and towards the end of Kenji’s sister.  Kenji was spoiled by her growing up, ridiculously so, and seeing his devotion to her daughter Kanna, when it would be easier to do something else with her, is really sweet.  It also looks like Kenji’s sister is (surprise, surprise) somehow involved with the cult, and it will be interesting to see how deeply she is involved.

The machinations of the cult are, as revealed in the first volume, entirely based on Kenji’s childhood fantasies.  I like that he’s being called a “prophet” for saying things any normal kid would say.  That the possible end-of-the-world nature of the series is literally based entirely in childhood fantasy is a level of awesome I diddn’t think it was possible to convey.

But yes.  At this point, two volumes in, this story has a lot more polish and depth than Pluto.  I like Pluto a little more still, but it’s hard to say that it is superior in any way to this one.  At least while both are two volumes in, anyway.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.

20th Century Boys 1

Naoki Urasawa – Viz – 2009 – 22 volumes

Now, I wasn’t as excited about this one as I was Pluto, Naoki Urasawa’s other new series.  I think the main reason was that I had no clue whatsoever what this was about.  I gathered it had something to do with the apocalypse, a cult, and little kids, so I figured my roommate would enjoy it more than I would.

After reading the first volume, I still am not entirely sure what the series is about, but I do know it’s really, really amazing.  One of my favorite things is variation in storytelling structure, both in novels and in manga or comics, and this has one of the most novel approaches to telling a story that I’ve ever seen.

Let’s see, how do I describe it?  There’s the story that takes place in the modern day that mostly focuses on a group of grown men in a small town.  These men have lived and worked with each other forever, and this volume covers events like weddings, funerals, nights on the town, complaints about minor annoyances in everyday life, passing greetings, etc.

A significant part of the plot is also based in flashbacks to when these men were all children.  There’s not a set number of characters yet, so some of the side characters are still sort of ambiguous between the present-day and flashbacks, but there’s still a main character, one or two important side characters, and a handful of faces to go along with them.  Also, the men aren’t necessarily remembering the flashbacks as we see them… it seems like they have little recollection about what is going on in them.

Then there’s the cult scenes.  These usually follow the flashback scenes, and whatever the cult leader is saying usually has something to do with the flashback we’ve just seen.  How the two are connected is not clear, especially since the memories for specific events don’t belong to the cult leader.  The cult is also taking place in the present-day storyline.

The cult scenes will usually lead back to the main character and group of men.  A mystery is sort of forming surrounding the disappearance of one of the main character’s customers, a friend of theirs that passed away, and a few students that seem to be connected to the cult.  The cult also uses a symbol that the group of friends made up in their youth that not a single one of the men recalled.  The end of the volume sets up the group of men in a somewhat ridiculous hero role which I’m sure will turn into something awesome as things move forward.

My favorite thing about the series so far is how accurately small-town life is portrayed.  It may not be a small town, for all I know (they seem to have a university), but it is at the very least a tightly-knit neighborhood.  Having just visited my old town for the holidays, I can identify with this type of place, where you walk into the shops and pass the time with the owners, get greetings shouted to you from car windows, and sit in a bar and have literally everyone you want to see walk in and talk to you.  I’m hoping the setting sticks to the small environment where everyone knows everyone.

Hilariously, the series is named after a T-Rex song.  After reading the first volume, I figure that’s about right.

I’m literally dying to know where this goes.  I can’t even imagine what the sum of everything in this volume means, and I know that things are only going to get weirder and weirder as the series goes on.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.