Get a glimpse into the past and heart of the genius doctor society shuns, Black Jack.
Creative Staff
Story/Art: Osamu Tezuka
Translation/Adaptation: Maya Rosewood
What They Say
Black Jack is a mysterious and charismatic genius surgeon who travels the world performing amazing and impossible medical feats. Through highly trained, he freelances without a license because he disdains the medical establishment. This leads to run-ins with the authorities and unscrupulous, sometimes criminal, individuals. Because Black Jack keeps his true motives secret, his ethics are perceived as questionable and he is considered a selfish, uncaring devil.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
This collection of Black Jack will take the reader into some new territory as where the money from all of Black Jack’s operations is will be revealed when a group of robbers decides to make a giant score. Then his determination of beauty will be revealed and he will also face off against a member of a very famous lineage who cannot go into the sun. Finally he will have to face his greatest challenge ever when his own body looks to be failing him and leaving him in a state where he can no longer practice medicine.
Also along the way Black Jack will meet a young first year medical student as Black Jack converses with a dead man and later he has to deal with being forced to be a designated guardian for a young man who finds it as much a chore as he does. He will encounter a brilliant doctor whose country is keeping him from his greatest love, a doctor who has developed a vaccine against cancer though too late to be of use to cure himself and may be a danger to his patient when it turns out that an outbreak of Cholera might have also infected him.
Through these stories more of Black Jack’s personal morals will be shown as he encounters greed that surpasses that what he is known for to the public at large as well as dealing with people who are willing to pay his extraordinarily high fees even if it means just one more day may be added for someone they love. This volume collects a couple of stories that highlight Black Jack’s appreciation of natural beauty and his disdain for those who would change it for their own aesthetic tastes as well. Where Black Jack really shines is in his refusal to accept the limits of his abilities and to choose to try to bring life out of some of the most tragic situations while juxtaposing his stance that those who are unable to appreciate the same morals as him are not people he feels the need to go out of his way to save for humanitarian reasons. Perhaps it is in this that the true appeal of Black Jack is found-the enormous scope of his philosophy that makes it impossible to put the man in a single category which brings a spark of realness to a medium that is often two dimensional in ways other than just the physical limitations of the medium itself.
In Summary
This collection of Black Jack stories brings a rather sharper focus onto the man himself and some of his motivations. This doesn’t leave any of the appearing characters out in terms of their own flaws and angst but it is intriguing to see some of the depths and seeming contradictions that appear in-and possibly also haunt-this genius. Watching him struggle and sometimes fail brings humanness to a man who might otherwise appear as otherworldly as any alien born superhero and as unstoppable as any legendary hero from mythology.
Content Grade: A
Art Grade: A
Packaging Grade: A-
Text/Translation Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Vertical, Inc
Release Date: July 26th, 2011
MSRP: $16.95
