It’s with both great sadness and a sigh of relief that BLACK JACK: VOLUME 17 arrives — sadness, because this marks the end of Vertical Inc.’s trade-paperback reprints of Osamu Tezuka’s “peerless medical drama” manga; relief, because the publisher actually saw it through to the very end, as promised. I guess that meant the thing continued to sell.
If so, I’m not the least bit surprised. From the start, Tezuka’s series — first serialized from 1973 to 1983 — was a work of creative excellence, and stayed that way, through all these thousands of pages. If you’re looking to make an investment in a series that will pay off more than what you put into it, look no further.
Other than an appendix that points to which volume any given tale can be found, this one is like any other, offering a string of standalone adventures for Black Jack, our rogue, unlicensed surgeon with a scarred face and skunk-colored hair. Yes, he’s kind of a dick, but what surgeon isn’t, really?
In these stories, Black Jack:
• sends his Frankensteinian creation, Pinoko, on her way;
• turns a young woman into a literal bird;
• is asked to perform a sex change on a girl because her father wants it;
• is tricked into aiding a people smuggler;
• commits an unspeakable act of science on a horse;
• removes a stone from a man’s bile duct, then puts it right back in;
• tends to a little girl who jumped off a building to get her dad’s attention;
• actually refuses to administer life-or-death care to another child;
• digs out a tumor;
• creates a fully formed human out of a cystoma;
• works on a pop starlet’s lady parts during a typhoon; and
• performs emergency surgery on himself. Hey, he has mirrors.
As if you couldn’t tell, this Black Jack character is one of a kind, a real kick. I will miss him so. This body of work is one of genius, an ahead-of-its-time macabre soap opera that sliced open the boundaries of comics. —Rod Lott
Related posts:
- Black Jack: Volume 10
- Black Jack: Volume 14
- Black Jack: Volume 11
- Black Jack: Volume 13
- Black Jack: Volume 12
