THOUGHT BALLOONISTS

Highlights of 2008: Black Jack, Volume 1

by Osamu Tezuka. Translated by Camellia Nieh. Vertical, publisher. $16.95.

I'm on record that Tezuka gives me nightmares, Black Jack in particular. What a pleasure it is to see a new and more thorough English edition of this jaw-dropping serial masterwork.

Black Jack is a long string of short, self-contained medical thrillers about a dashingly Byronic outlaw surgeon, with the requisite mysterious past and a slashing stitch-mark scar from brow to left cheek:

The Black Jack series, reported to be Tezuka's most popular among adult readers in Japan, perfectly distills what I've come to expect from him: a volatile, superheated mashup of melodrama, moral fable, philosophical problem-posing, and jouncing, unexpected humor; a rough mix of chain-jerking sentimentality, lancing cruelty, jolting plot twists, occasional raw horror, and broad, broad cartooning.

Uzumaki (CH replies)

Craig has pointed out that Uzumaki is a supreme example of horror as a body genre (in Linda Williams' sense). Yes, its horrors and its appeal have everything to do with the human body: hybridized, distorted, violated, twisted and parodied, and grotesquely aestheticized. As Craig says, Ito's bodies become "€œfusion figures"€ which are carthartically nauseating.

Uzumaki is also horror based on obsession. In essence, it'€™s about a town full of people who, individually and communally, become obsessed with a shape.

Uzumaki

by Junji Ito. Viz, 2007-2008. 3 Volumes, $9.99 each. 

Charles and I usually review new books on Tuesday, but we're making an exception with Uzumaki. The original Japanese version of Uzumaki was written and drawn by Junji Ito in 1998-99, and first translated into English in 2001-02 as one of Viz's early forays into manga book publishing, so it's been around for years in both languages. Uzumaki was also made into a Japanese movie in 2000, so its bizarre plot--of a small town haunted by spirals(!)--is familiar to Asian movie fans as well as comics otaku. Viz's English-language edition of the Uzumaki manga lapsed out of print, though, until last year, when they began to republish the entire story in three paperbacks with stylish, pitch-black covers engraved with portraits of tormented teenagers.

It was time for me to catch up with Uzumaki.

MW (CH replies)

(Hey, if you haven't read Craig's review, the first part of this Super Tuesday twofer, go there first!)

手塚 治虫

As for me, Tezuka gives me nightmares. Seriously.

Some years back, while I was away on conference and staying at a hotel (in fact I was in Bethesda, MD, at the combined International Comic Arts Festival and Small Press Expo), I happened to have brought along Vol. 1 (1998) of the VIZ translation of Black Jack, Tezuka's very popular series about a darkly Romantic outlaw surgeon who saves patients that no-one else can.

(Re: Black Jack, as near as I can tell, the original Japanese series ran regularly  from 1973 to 1978 in the Weekly Shonen Champion, then continued sporadically to 1983. In all, Tezuka did over 240 episodes. VIZ translated two volumes of Black Jack in the US in 1998-99. Vertical reportedly will be releasing a new translation for the US this fall, in hopes of eventually publishing the entire series in an estimated twelve volumes. You can read about the original here, at Tezuka Osamu World, Tezuka Productions' official site.)

On my first, maybe only, night in the hotel, I read Black Jack, Vol. 1, or a good chunk of it, before falling off to sleep...

MW

by Osamu Tezuka. Translated by Camellia Nieh. Vertical; $24.95.

I feel uneasy writing a review of Osamu Tezuka's MW, since there's much about the book I don't understand. On the surface, MW is a lurid thriller, albeit one with so many twists that I can only summarize it in broad strokes here. In 1960, a young man, a hippie named Garai, meets a 4th-grader named Yuki on a remote island and, disturbingly, seduces the child. As the two have sex in a cave, a leak at a government storage facility accidentally releases the biological weapon MW, a gas which kills everyone on the island (approximately 800 people) except Garai and Yuki. Fifteen years later, Garai--now a Catholic priest!--realizes that Yuki's exposure to MW has poisoned his mind and turned him into a homicidal madman. Garai, however, cannot bring himself to end his physical affair with Yuki or turn him into the police. Meanwhile, Yuki conducts a string of kidnappings and murders designed to bring him closer to the men responsible for the MW leak. Over the course of the graphic novel, it becomes clear to both Garai and the reader that Yuki also wants to obtain a sample of MW for himself, so he can mass-produce the agent and "bring human history to an end."

This end-of-the-world plot is straight out of Dr. Doom's playbook, but what I don't understand about MW is its treatment of homosexuality. That's what I ruminate about in the rest of this post, so please read MW before you continue. I don't want to give away spoilers, particularly because the book is such a bizarre melange of pulp adventure, polymorphous sexuality and Hitchcockian melodrama that it deserves to be experienced by readers with as little advance information as possible. Besides, anyone who's a comics fan knows that Tezuka is the "God of Manga" and a figure equal in importance to Herge; all of Tezuka's books belong on the must-read list. It's a blessing that Tezuka's books are being translated and made available to us for the first time in comics history, especially in editions as beautiful as Vertical's. Go read MW, and then come back.