Black Jack 5

First things first: one of the opening chapters in this book is about an armless boy who is something of an expert abacus user.  Black Jack gives him new arms and he is now competing at a national level in abacus competitions.  Apparently abacus competitions are… something like spelling bees?  This is one of those things that blew my mind because I’m too young to imagine this sort of thing.  Very rarely do antiquated things like this strike me as fantastic, but this did.

If they’re not real, that’s even better.  My hat would be off to you all the same, Black Jack.

Also, I haven’t thought of Pink Lady in years.  The extent of my Pink Lady knowledge is that there was a Pink Lady show starring the two women and Jeff Altman that had something to do with Sid and Marty Krofft.  Apparently it was one of the worst shows ever made.

Anyway.  This volume leans more on the heavily moralistic side, and I tend to prefer the insane no-strings-attached adventures of Black Jack.  We learn how to value our loved ones, when not to lose hope, when doing what comes naturally is better than forcing nature, that sort of thing.  The thing about the moralistic stories is that you can usually see the ending coming, and then it blares the lesson as loud as possible on the last page.  I enjoy the more subtle stories more.

There are still a few insane gems in the bunch, though.  Well, the stories are all pretty good, but you know what I mean.  My favorite is a story which features a takeoff on Hideshi Hino’s character designs on the 2nd or 3rd page of the chapter.  I did a double-take on the girl since the gigantic round eyes look extremely out of place in Black Jack.  The gigantic eyes are used as a symptom of Graves’ Disease in the story, but the nod to Hino is in there, too.

The most disturbing was a story at the very end called “Wolf Girl,” where Black Jack helps an outcast girl who was born with a cleft palate.  He fixes her, but tells her that the payment is that she can’t go down into the village.  She goes anyway since she wants to show off her new face to everyone who was absolutely terrible to her over the years, and is promptly killed due to military activity in the area.  I’m not sure why Black Jack didn’t explain to her his reasons for staying out of the town, it seems a much easier way to save a life than heart surgery.

Another great story was about Black Jack helping out a pair of ghosts who wanted him to save their invisible mother.  All three of the visitors died in a nearby plane crash.  Towards the end, they wanted Black Jack to join them.  It made me think of that “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” story about the elevator with the man that offered “room for one more.”

There are several stories that feature Kiriko, Black Jack’s rival and opposite, the mercy kill doctor.  His stories usually wind up being pretty heavily moralistic, as much as I like the idea behind him.

Pinoko continues to be scary.  The chapter where she winds up getting spanked and is smiling happily while it happens… while its intentions are not disturbing, the image is.  I’m sorry, Pinoko.  You’re just creepy.

There’s a chapter with an adult Rock, which is a little strange because Rock is normally portrayed as a little kid even when he’s not supposed to be.  In his story, he’s a childhood friend of Black Jack’s, so we also get a few more details on Black Jack’s background in addition to a nice story starring the evil Rock.

I may complain, but Black Jack is still one of the best series I’m reading at the moment.  I’m really surprised the stories aren’t more dated and uninteresting (like Astro Boy), but almost every single one of them manages to be entertaining and extreme to this day.  It’s incredible.

Black Jack 4

The tone of this volume is much more serious than the last one was.  Where volume four seemed to revel in really outlandish, straight-from-left-field situations, most of these stories are comparably grounded and are a great deal more moralistic and emotional.

Not that the Black Jack stories aren’t always a little emotional.  But it’s hard to feel a warm, fuzzy feeling inside when a family lands an experimental jet in Black Jack’s front lawn, the mother and son are surgically attached to share a set of lungs, and then the father gets blown up in the plane later.  I mean, you’ve got other things to think about in a story like that.

The stories here are things like Black Jack helping a heroin addict recover and get his life back, Black Jack tricking a girl into not using her voice so she can properly recover from an operation, the touching love that even a mob boss has for his son, the difference between doing a surgery right and doing it for notoriety… uh, Rock getting his face eaten by rats… you know, regular Black Jack stuff.

About the only one that goes way over-the-top is the story that involves Pinoko taking a cyanide capsule.  Black Jack has 30 minutes to find where it is in her body, including the length of her intestines, before it opens up and kills her.  Amusingly, when he pulls it out, he sets it in a tray, where it immediately cracks open.  I know that’s not exactly a “gag,” but I was waiting for that to happen as soon as I found out the operation had a time limit.  Also, the last page is just Pinoko farting a lot, which doesn’t do much for my image of her, even if she is complaining about it.

My favorite was a story about a huge student who was under pressure from his father and various agents to join up with professional wrestling/sumo teams.  He’s not a violent kid, and in fact prefers the company of his carp pond.  Black Jack helps him out after he sees his carp breeding skills, and comes up with a couple legitimate and/or entirely fictitious ailments that take the kid out of the running for being a wrestler.  I liked the kid a lot, the plot was a really interesting one, and I laughed at the twist ending.

As I’ve mentioned before, I take great delight in picking out Tezuka’s characters in these stories.  There’s a lot that appear in this volume, but again, my favorites are always Hamegg and Lamp.  Lamp appears twice, once as a rough-looking outlaw that needs an amputation, and again as… er, a policeman, which is weird only because he never plays a good guy.  Even more incredibly, he’s going after Shunsaku Ban, a pickpocket in that story, and Ban never plays a bad guy (notably, he gets his fingers cut off, which I suppose is worlds better than MW, where he gets his testicles bitten off by a dog).  Even better, the end of the story is all about the weird friendship the two of them have developed over the years, which works really well only because yeah, those two have done a lot of stuff together.  Hamegg appears in his usual slimy, sleazy gangster role, but the fact that he always smiles is why I like him so much.

I like pretty much everything about these stories, though.  Even in a volume like this, which was relatively normal and even quite touching, there’s still lots of crazy stuff going on like skin transplants, an operation on a boy who has his organs in backwards, operations on dogs… yeah, none of Black Jack’s surgeries are normal, really.  It’s quirky, compelling, and enjoyable in a way that most episodic series like this are not.  I feel like there’s no way I will ever get tired of it, and I’m so glad it’s coming out in English.

Black Jack 3

…Yeah.  The thing about reading this series is that every story is so over-the-top in a different way that the entire experience is a “Wait, what?  Wait… WHAT?!” kind of thing.

For example:  The first story was literally one of the most depressing scenarios I could imagine.  A 60-year-old woman is expecting her three sons to convene for her birthday from their successful businesses all over Japan.  You know where this is going.  Turns out she has a fourth son (one she disowned) that remembered it was her 60th birthday, and he shows up with a present and is all ready to celebrate.  She won’t have anything to do with him.  This story just broke my heart.

The next story is about a disease that makes everything, humans and animals, shrink down to tiny sizes before they die.  Black Jack has to find a cure for Professor Togakushi before it’s too late.  We get to see small Saruta, along with cannibalistic Zebras and tiny lions and rhinos, by the end of this story.

The next story is about Black Jack operating on his own intestines in the Australian Outback, hundreds of miles from help, while being attacked by dingoes.

Another story is about a robin who leaves money in Black Jack’s yard on a fairly regular basis.  He investigates and finds that the robins are trying to pay him to help a really sick boy that had previously helped the birds.  This story is very heartwarming until the end, which was really tragic and horrible.

Later, there is a story about the love between Black Jack and Pinoko.  I still think Pinoko is freaky, so the heartwarming scene where she spies in on Black Jack’s anguish after losing a patient and then quietly says “Pinoko loves you” while she’s sneaking around in her naked little robot body is more disturbing to me than it is heartwarming.

I mean… what can I add to this?  I didn’t even mention things like Black Jack surgically stitching a mother and son together to share the same set of lungs, or the story where a surgeon dies early on during a procedure and finishes his operation while clinically dead.  I mean, I don’t need to elaborate on Black Jack.  If you like awesome comics, you will like Black Jack.  I have to say, one wonders about the mental processes behind some of these stories.

There’s also a really nice essay in the back of this volume about Tezuka’s Star System, the thematic contents of Black Jack, and what some of the stories that are excluded from the collected versions of Black Jack contain (apparently the estate of Tezuka still has stories that haven’t seen the light of day since they were published in Shounen Champion, we only got three from that set in the hardcover editions).  The parts about the Star System were interesting, especially since it named a few of the characters from his early work that show up randomly without real names.  Picking who’s who out of Black Jack is fun, and is also sometimes an exercise in frustration.  For instance, the spiky-haired winking doctor that appears twice in this volume?  I know he’s been in Astro Boy and maybe a couple other things.  I just spent 40 minutes looking up his name online and totally failed.  Notably, the essay excludes Shunsaku Ban, who is one of Tezuka’s oldest and most frequently-used characters.  He’s only a bit player in Black Jack, but he does put in an appearance as the dead husband in the first chapter here.

Anyway.  The reasons for the stories being excluded from collected editions are interesting and sometimes horrifying.  It’s a really awesome essay.

Black Jack 2

It took me absolutely forever to find the hardcover version of this.  Of course, it’s only available through Diamond, so you should ask your local comic shop to order it for you.  Except I asked no less than six local comic shops about it and none seemed very willing to be civil to me, much less order a book.  This is including the shop I go to at least a couple times a month.  There was one nice guy out in the suburbs who told me when it would be in, then told me they weren’t getting it and couldn’t order it.  eBay and Amazon both failed me.  I finally tracked it down at scifigenre.com and had it in a matter of days.  It pains me when stuff like that happens when I try so hard to support the series in comic shops, but really, how hard do I have to try to give someone my business?

There were two stories that stood out.  One assured me that Tezuka realizes how ridiculous his stories get sometimes.  An earthquake snaps the tip of a needle off in a man’s bloodstream, and Black Jack carves the man up in a desperate race to get the tip before it lodges itself in the man’s heart.  It’s ridiculously over-the-top and melodramatic, and it reassured me about what lies behind the relatively straight face this series keeps.  It also has a ridiculous ending to go along with it.

The other story that stood out was one about how one of Black Jack’s classmates gave him a skin graft for his face when he was very young.  The only classmate who was willing to help young Kuro’o happened to be black, and after some misgivings from some of the doctors, they graft the skin to his face and save his life.  Kuro’o's gratitude is such that he never has his face changed.  Notably, the black classmate wasn’t an appalling racial caricature.  I’ve read… I don’t know, 50 or 60 volumes of Tezuka’s manga, and this is the only time I can think of where that happened, which is really sad.  Keeping his face as it was after his accident meant a lot to Black Jack since this friend was the only one who was willing to save his life.  The message is one of racial tolerance, of course, and it works a lot better here than it does in Ode to Kirihito, where the caricatures are present.  The chapter ends with the friend becoming an extreme environmentalist, a “doctor for the world,” who winds up losing his life in some sort of terrorist action to save the Earth.  It is this point that the story leaves us to ponder.

I wasn’t sure what to think of that chapter, honestly.

Notably, even before this operation, while he’s being cared for right after his accident, he has his two-tone hair.  I still want an explanation for this, now that I know there’s a reason half his face is black (but is never toned as such, and is usually illustrated in color as blue for some reason).

Pinoko still figures prominently in Black Jack’s life.  She scares the living daylights out of me.  She’s a little tumor robot girl who jealously guards Black Jack from EVERYTHING.  It’s weird.  There’s no other manga… couple like them.  Are they a couple?  Pinoko thinks so.  Black Jack seems to take a fatherly approach to her, except sometimes the two of them seem to bond… not on a romantic level, but on a very friendly level.  Pinoko is quite troubling.

The bonus story that was taken out of the original Japanese edition… well, it’s easier to see why people would think it was in poor taste.  In it, a set of sextuplets dies one by one, with the only really healthy baby rife with horrible birth defects and deformities.  Black Jack cannibalizes the dead babies onto the healthiest baby’s body.  Yeah.

Actually, I’m not sure what to think of a lot of these stories.

Black Jack 1 (hardcover ed.)

Do you know how long I’ve waited for this?  I spotted this series in the spring 1999 Viz catalog, and didn’t bite back then since it sounded incomplete, which it was (I’m not sure how it “sounded” incomplete, but I was also right about Ogre Slayer and Eat-Man in the same catalog).  But that means I had to wait ten years for the definitive edition to come out.  It was worth it.

I went to great lengths to procure the hardcover edition, because I had to know about the stories that were in such poor taste that they were not collected in Japan.  I assumed one of them was the first story in the volume, where a boy wrecks a car that he was driving stupidly (he almost ran over several people), then his father grabs a random boy from the accident scene and has him sentenced to death so that his body parts can be used to replace his son’s damaged ones.  I found this to be pretty deplorable (though it all works out in the end, of course), and was shocked when I found out that wasn’t actually the story.  The uncollected story is in the back of the book, and is about Black Jacks separating a pair of conjoined twins that share a body with two faces on the skull.  He keeps the brain of the removed twin alive after it is extracted by request of the scientists who asked him to perform the operation.  The moral of the story is that the brain shouldn’t have been kept alive, because then it could be used for experiments like the Nazis performed during WWII.  Until the last two pages, after having read the rest of the book I thought maybe the brain was being kept alive so it could be put back in a donor body later (something that Black Jack could do).  I assume the hint that the brain would be experimented on was what kept it out of the Japanese editions?  Up til that point, though, I thought it was pretty significant the brain was being kept alive at all, a sort of “all life is sacred”-type thing.

Anyway.  My mind boggled at the surgeries performed during these stories.  Black Jack does everything you can think of and then some, including the above-mentioned conjoined twin surgery and another twin surgery where he excises a growth that contains a parasitic twin that he then puts in some sort of robot body and keeps with him as his assistant.  I… had no idea that was the true identity of Pinoko.  Pinoko bugged me a bit, but I can see how he wanted to include her as a little comedy relief and to give Black Jack more humanity when he’s at home.

My favorite story was one about a little boy with Polio who walks from one major city to another in order to aid his recovery and raise awareness for his disease.  Not only is it a nice message, we also get some back story about Black Jack.  I was surprised that two or three of the stories were actually pretty detailed accounts of Black Jack’s background, I didn’t think it was ever alluded to during the series.

There were some things I didn’t like.  As much as I liked the stories, I hated the antiquated device that was used in the last panel of nearly every single one where the moral was summed up in one line.  I hate things like that since it makes me feel like I can’t be trusted to pick up on the obvious themes, plus it seems like sort of a sloppy technique to tack something like that onto the end after the rest of the story is so well-told.

I also took serious issue with a story about a woman who had her ovaries and uterus removed due to cancer.  Apparently, without these female organs, she was no longer female and not only lost her romantic relationships, but also was unable to live her life as a female anymore.  I didn’t quite understand why the other characters had to view her differently after this life-saving surgery, nor why she felt that not having female sex organs meant that she had to live her life as a man, nor why her identity was kept secret while the story was being told (perhaps it was the character’s wish, but Black Jack is the one that tells the fib at the beginning).  I was also pretty appalled that patients were never told when they had a terminal illness, and Black Jack was considered coldhearted for being honest with her.  Of course, one of the later stories in the volume is set in North Dakota and features a blackface character, so… yeah.

Other than that, I pretty much enjoyed everything about these stories.  There’s a pretty wide range of surgeries, and while Black Jack is often working for or on criminals, there are a fair number of good things he does too, like helping that little boy with polio on his mission.  He’s seen as evil by many, and maintains this image for himself by saying he’ll only do things for exorbitant fees, but I suppose he’s popular for having a heart of gold.  I like him well enough, and it’s actually his character that makes almost all these stories worthwhile; there are only one or two other stories in the volume driven by other characters.

Not only are these really great stories, they also have all of Tezuka’s stock characters in them, which was kind of unexpected.  Hamegg (my favorite), Lamp, Duke Red, and Ochanomizu appear in the first story, and Hamegg and Lamp reappear in one or two other stories.  Higeoyaji is in somewhere, as is Rock, and where there’s Rock, there’s also Kenichi, who I almost missed save for the way his eyes were drawn, which clued me in that it was an older character (he’s the polio victim).  Sapphire’s in there for a minute.  There’s even an appearance from Makeru Butamo, a character I’ve only seen once or twice before, but I like him because he’s sort of a jerk whenever he appears.  Not a bad guy, just a jerk.  Saruta appears as an important series-related character.  We also have two appearances by Tezuka himself (one blatant, one more subtle), and several appearances of the hyoutan-tsugi cartoon face, which I had to cheat and look up the name for.  I could keep going, I’m sure there’s more if I look, including a whole ton of minor characters I didn’t catch.  But I’ll stop for now.  Know that spotting these characters in every Tezuka manga gives me great pleasure.

But yes.  Was there any question I wasn’t going to like this?