Black Jack: More observations, less structure

Check this out: Connor Willumsen is posting his graphic-novel-in-progress, Everett, on his site as a webcomic.  I got a glimpse of this at MoCCA last year, and those first ten pages or so still blow me away.  I can't wait to see what he's got coming up.


Black Jack, volume 5
By Osamu Tezuka

This volume of Tezuka's "awesome surgeon" comic sees more along the same lines as the previous installments, and there are certainly some good stories, including return appearances by the proto-Kevorkian Dr. Kiriko (first planning to kill his own father, then later himself), the blind acupuncturist Biwamaru (he and BJ both go to one of those hermit-craftsmen to get their sharp implements forged), and the Black Queen, a female surgeon who can't quite manage to maintain our hero's aloof nature and devotion to medical excellence, perhaps due to all those pesky mood swings that women are prone to (women's lib apparently wasn't in full effect in 70s Japan).  There's an example of how dark Tezuka could be with a story of a "wolf girl" living in Communist Russia, and an especially weird story in which Black Jack operates on a ghost.  That's all well and good, but by this point, it's hard to find something unique to talk about with each new volume.  The stories are as good as ever, but it's a consistent level of goodness, so any commentary from the previous volumes would just be repeated.  So rather than reiterate previous praise for Tezuka's storytelling skills, I'll just point out a couple techniques that he uses that impress me.

For one, there's the anatomical cutaway.  Since there are often strange medical conditions that need to be explained to the reader, Tezuka will spend a page or two having Black Jack (or a disembodied narrator, which could be interpreted as Tezuka himself) describe whatever is going on with the patient, accompanied by an illustration:

But this being Tezuka, his cutaway illustrations are never dry diagrams, but rather cartoony bits of expressiveness, with the abstracted "model" often reacting in pain or disbelief to whatever is wrong with him:

As with everything he did, it's another chance for Tezuka to express himself and do something unique and unexpected in his stories.

I also like the simple, effective design of the main character.  The black cloak that he wears makes for a wonderful visual, often blowing around him dramatically as he makes a bold statement, observes some tragedy, confronts an opponent, or strikes some other dramatic pose:

It also makes for an excellent bit of iconography on which to end stories; the sight of Black Jack walking off into the sunset, having completed whatever monumental task was set before him this time, is often little more than a somewhat abstract black shape:

But with the readers having grown familiar with the sight, it's something recognizable and effective, a good bit of punctuation on which to end.

Finally, there's the occasional expressive flourish that Tezuka was so good at throwing into his stories, often to illustrate some emotional state or other.  He was always stretching himself to come up with new ways of depicting mental states, and one in particular is probably my favorite image in this volume, and one that caught the attention of the designer, since it ends up on both the back cover and the spine of this edition.  It's in a story about an actress/singer who was paralyzed in a car accident, and while Black Jack manages to operate on her spine and heal her, she still doesn't seem to be able to move:

It turns out that she was suicidal, feeling trapped in a demanding life of celebrity and exhausted by the constant demands heaped upon her by her fans and bosses.  That bit of information is what makes the image so striking; she's not just physically paralyzed, but emotionally as well, held down into a life that she doesn't want and unable to escape.  That distortion of her body and the "bonds" holding her down emphasize that, but the solid black of her image and her face make the oppression clear, and the shapes in the background suggest that it feels like something that is affecting her at a basic, cellular level.  It's a portrait of tragedy, and Tezuka sums it up incredibly effectively in this single image.

And that's what makes this series work so well: Tezuka's inventiveness and willingness to try anything.  The episodic structure gives him free reign to go in any direction he wishes, and if there's anything Tezuka wasn't afraid of, it was the blank page.  His stories might seem somewhat simplistic, but on closer look, there's plenty to get out of them, and each person will probably come away with something different.  Luckily, he produced so much content, we'll never run out of material to interpret.
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Bonus: funny Pinoko faces!

These always crack me up.

Black Jack: I apparently can't make this flow together very well

Hey, I'm still alive!

Elsewhere: In my absence of posting, I did manage to finish some writing, reviewing PunisherMAX #5 and Siege #3 for Comics Bulletin.

Links: I thought this story that the Same Hat! guys posted from Epic Illustrated by Keiichi Koike was pretty great.

Hey look, Salgood Sam has a webcomic called Dream Life.  It's purty.

I'm not really all that interested in Savage Dragon, but this announcement of a indie-creator-focused series of stories along the lines of Marvel's Strange Tales or DC's Bizarro Comics interests me.  We'll see if I ever read any of them.

If I was anywhere near New York, I would definitely try to make it to the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art for their NeoIntegrity exhibit, which Connor Willumsen informed me about.  It contains work by over 200 incredible comics artists, mostly of the indie variety.  Damn, that looks like something to see.

And now, some fairly unfocused thoughts on the two most recent volumes of Black Jack that I read.

Black Jack, volume 3 and 4
By Osamu Tezuka

Black Jack: still badass - Volume 3 has what might be the most famous example of our awesome surgeon's skill, as he ends up performing surgery on himself in the middle of the Australian Outback, while fighting off attacking dingoes at the same time.  Holy crap.  There's also a story in which he replaces the skin of a dying man as a favor to a lost love (the guy wanted to get rid of a tattoo; it's a long story).  And he gets to explain why he charges patients so much in a typically pompous statement (which gets undercut by his kindness in the same story):

And check out how he manages to chase off some gangsters who want to kill one of his patients:

Ha ha, guts are stinky.

Tezuka: still a weirdo - Man, Tezuka could sure come up with some crazy stuff, including a case in which an African country is struck with a plague that makes people and animals physically shrink until they end up dying at the size of babies:



Or a boy who has a heart condition that Black Jack solves by surgically connecting him to his mother until an organ donor can be found:



And there's plenty of other acts of medicinal awesomeness, but at some point, the parade of amputations and reattachments, open heart surgeries, and who knows what else starts to blur together.  But then something will stand out again, like a chapter in which BJ has to cut Pinoko open to remove a poisonous pill from her intestines before it dissolves.  It's pretty amazing how Tezuka could make this all seem fresh, over and over again.

Black Jack gets a nemesis - Volume 3 sees the introduction of Dr. Kiriko, a sort of opposite number to our hero, who functions as a proto-Kevorkian, offering patients a high-priced, painless suicide rather than curing them.  He's a good character, with a similarly dark appearance, sporting long white hair and an eye patch.  The two of them end up fighting over a seemingly doomed patient:



It's a pretty cool idea, and hopefully he'll show up again.

The Star System works - The regular Tezuka "actors" show up in these volumes as always (with an especially good one being Acetylene Lamp as a good-hearted bandit in a sort of Western-themed story), but perhaps the best use yet is one chapter that features a cop and pickpocket who both frequent a Tokyo train line and have had a long, adversarial relationship over the years.  They're "played" by Acetylene Lamp and Mr. Mustachio:



Which gives them instant characterization, painting the cop as the mean persecutor and the pickpocket as a sort of lovable scamp.  As of their first appearance, they seem fully realized, and their long history as Tezuka characters lends weight to their history together.  It's pretty impressive that Tezuka could make this work, and it's a technique that he used incredibly well, something that few others have even attempted.  The story itself ends up being pretty good too, with Mustachio injured and Lamp blackmailing Black Jack into healing him so he can go on to pick pockets another day.  Ah, bromance.

Continuity creeps in - These chapters are all stand-alone, functioning as single units that don't flow together as a serial story.  But it's interesting to see the continuing elements that show up from time to time, like recurring characters or mentions of past cases.  Notable examples here include a sailor who shows up having fallen for Black Jack's lost love, a woman whose reproductive system he removed due to cancer, taking away her femininity.  And a man carrying a valuable package in the subway gets bumped by a familiar face:

Of course, the way these stories are presented out of the order in which they are published does have the opposite effect at times.  Pinoko's status is kind of in constant flux; at one point she'll show up as Black Jack's capable assistant (he even says she's a doctor herself at one point), then a couple chapters later she'll be a child attending elementary school.  It's an odd consequence of the presentation, but it's certainly no dealbreaker.

Tezuka guest stars - Tezuka inserted himself in his comics pretty regularly, usually as a gag or cameo, but there's one story in volume 3 that sees him show up as a regular character, a doctor that Black Jack encounters:



It's another case in which the Star System works, since Tezuka was a doctor himself, and he had developed a sort of persona as a kind person, so he works perfectly in the story.  It also gives him a chance to do something funny with the pimples he would always draw on his nose:

It's yet another fun use of his regular techniques.

Metafiction is fun - And speaking of enjoyable techniques, the fourth wall-breaking gags that Tezuka often used are another thing he did really well, whether it's characters commenting on how many pages are left in the story, people smashing through panel borders:

Or the occasional wacky joke/self-insertion:



Those always crack me up.

Car crash watch - There isn't a huge amount of vehicular damage in these two volumes, with the automotive wreckage limited to a standard pedestrian run-down:



And a car chase that includes another moment of tossed-off silliness:



So in lieu of automotive damage, how about an awesome plane crash?



Awesome art: still in effect - As great an artist at Tezuka was, his techniques could begin to feel almost rote simply through sheer volume.  So it's always great to see something new that makes you realize all over again how incredible he was.  For just two examples here is a scene of an earthquake interrupting an operation that's startling in its jostling intensity:



And a description of the circulation problems caused by gigantism that's demonstrated by a remarkably effective image of a tiny heart in a big body:

That's the mark of an amazing artist there, and there's always something to grab onto with Tezuka, some astonishing flourish that makes you excited to be reading his comics.

The smaller, sweeter stories are often the best - As much fun as it is to see all the goofy jokes, gruesome surgeries, and awesome ideas that Tezuka would throw into the series, the stories that really stick in the memory are the ones that establish well-drawn characters and situations that tug at the heartstrings, which is yet another thing Tezuka did so well.  A girl with a beautiful voice nearly loses it, but Black Jack manages to cure her after insisting that she remain completely silent for a full year.  A mother makes a connection with her disowned son, who cares for her more than the other children she is so proud of.  A young boy who once helped nurse a bird back to help is in turn saved when the bird keeps delivering money to Black Jack for his medical treatment.  A cancer-stricken medical student strives to save just one fellow cancer patient while he has the strength.  Every story has something fascinating about it, but these tales where Tezuka put together simple situations and characters that feel like real people struggling to survive are the ones that really stand out, and make me want to keep coming back for more.

Manga Mania Month: Tezuka likes his twisted metal

Maybe it's just me, but it sure seems like Osamu Tezuka took every chance he could get to include car crashes in Black Jack.  Maybe they're a good source of mangled bodies to operate on, or maybe it's the opportunity to partake in some of the loud action that stands in opposition to the careful, precise work of surgery.  Whatever the case, it's as awesome as one would expect to see Tezuka unleash his dynamic sensibilities on the subject, starting with the very first pages of the first story:

Just look at those coursing streams of speed lines, and their resulting explosion.  That's how you start a goddamn comic book!  It certainly doesn't end there though.  People get wrecked, giving Black Jack the opportunity to reattach limbs:

Children get run over:

A guy gets vaporized by a train:

Even the doctor himself gets in on the action, using his car to take out some punks:

And sometimes we don't even see the crash, but just get to witness the gruesome results:

It's pretty crazy, a great example of Tezuka's ability to work cool stuff to draw into stories and make them exciting.  It will certainly be something to watch for in future volumes.

Manga Mania Month: Black Jack provides more expertise and cynicism

Elsewhere: I reviewed the final episode of Dollhouse over at The Factual Opinion.  I'll miss that show, as flawed as it was.

Link: Graphic NYC is doing a Kirby-themed week this week, and so far, Mike Cavallaro has a nice post about they way his style basically became subconscious.  Nice.

On a personal note, I would have had this up this past weekend, but my scanner died.  I'll hopefully have a solution soon, but this goes up now thanks to the help of Tucker Stone, who generously offered to do the work for me.  What a stand-up guy.


Black Jack, volume 2
By Osamu Tezuka

With this second volume of the series-spanning collection of one of Osamu Tezuka's most famous works, it becomes obvious that it's going to be a bit spotty, sometimes brilliant and sometimes kind of rote.  With chapters that jump around in the series chronology (as it were), it's not really possible to witness any sort of thematic development, but one can tease out ideas that Tezuka would return to, such as the need for human interaction and empathy when treating patients, and Black Jack's code of honor that compels him to do everything he can to save a patient once he's started treating them, or keep his word no matter the cost.  There's a bit of loneliness caused by lack of human interaction as well, along with a forced misanthropy that comes with it.  He's certainly an interesting character, and while Tezuka doesn't really develop him as the series progresses, he does reveal depths and layers, allowing us to see the man underneath the scarred surface.

Those character pieces are probably when the series is at its best, with a pair of chapters standing out here in the way they demonstrate an aspect of Mr. Jack's personality.  The loneliness and longing for understanding come to the fore in a flashback story that sees him befriending a killer whale that keeps showing up in a cove near his seaside house.  It always seems to get injured, so Black Jack nurses it back to health, sometimes performing surgery, accepting pearls as payment.  But it turns out that the whale is a menace to the local fishermen, always disrupting their business, and eventually overturning a boat and killing somebody, so even though it comes to him and begs, Black Jack is forced to refuse to treat it, making for a surprisingly emotional scene:

It's a good look at the nicer aspects of Black Jack's character, the softness that hides underneath the tough exterior.  But he can still reveal depth through his scary facade, as in a story that sees him chance upon a family on the road and give them a ride, then meet the man's mother, an old woman who compares him to another famous talented (and high-priced) surgeon.  The mother constantly badgers her son and his wife for money, and it turns out that she was paying off a lifelong debt to that other doctor, who saved her son as a child and charged her an exorbitant fee.  In a tidy bit of dramatic irony, right after finally paying off the debt, she suffers a stroke, and the son begs Black Jack to save her.  He agrees to do so, although the son will end up with a similarly hefty debt.  Or will he?  Maybe Black Jack was just testing him to make sure he loved and cherished his mother as much as she did him.  The chapter ends without revealing whether Black Jack will hold him to his debt; our hero might actually be as mean as he seems, you never know.

This chapter also sees a nice bit of artistic work on Tezuka's part, as he originally depicts the old woman as cranky and cantankerous, with a hunched demeanor and pinched face, not a very likeable person:

But when the reasons behind her money-grubbing are revealed, we see a series of flashbacks that suddenly soften her, depicting her at earlier points in her life in which she is obviously the same person, but younger and more sympathetic:

It's a nice reversal, perfectly executed by Tezuka.  He does a nice job on the layout too, with the panels looking like memories splashing and dripping across the page.  That's the kind of thing he seems to toss out effortlessly; it's as though had an almost instinctive flair for storytelling.

Some other regular themes pop up here: the mysteries and wonder of the human body (Black Jack is unable to retrieve a broken needle from a patient's body, but it flows through his veins and miraculously comes back out the original injection point), the need for human caring in medical care (a hospital which operates on an assembly-line-like system nearly breaks down when the head doctor's daughter needs treatment and he tries to give her priority), Black Jack's sense of honor (he goes to great lengths and spends ridiculous amounts of money to save the life of a man who saved his own life), his combative nature when it comes to rivals who seek glory (a skilled acupuncturist who roams the countryside treating patients for free gets brushed off with "I can't abide showy do-gooders!"), and, of course, his general awesomeness (he performs dozens of surgeries at the same time in order to relieve the burden of the aforementioned assembly line hospital, he memorizes the layout of a boy's intestines while being held hostage so he can operate on him in the dark).

There's plenty of other good material here, as in the story in which we see the origin of the patch of differently-colored skin on Black Jack's face.  It came from a fellow student of his who was of mixed race, and the story sees Doc Jack try to locate him as an adult, following clues across the globe before coming up short, although Tezuka does get to work in an environmental message.  It's always interesting to see our hero fail, which happens in this story (although it's not a surgical failure) and other places, or get shown up, which happens in the story with the acupuncturist (who is blind, by the way, making for a cute reference).  And another striking thing Tezuka does is unflinchingly depict the injury and even deaths of children:

Threats to children can be notoriously empty in fiction, but when it comes to medicine, it's a fact that not everybody can be saved, and what better way to make that hit home than to depict it happening to the most innocent?  It certainly works, in a way that leaves the images lingering in the mind.

That's a testament to Tezuka's artistic skill, as are the dynamic bit of action that he throws in.  Most arresting might be this two-page spread of a tunnel collapsing on top of a school bus:

I love the plunging speed lines, falling rocks, and chunky sound effects crashing across the page.  It's a pretty incredible image, and only one of the many that Tezuka pulls off with aplomb.  I'm still finding this to be a lesser example of his work, but it's sure enjoyable, full of interesting ideas and weird Tezuka flourishes.  Maybe my opinion will change upon experiencing more of this series, but at the moment, it's simply quite good, rather than great.
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Recurring character watch:

More of the regulars show up here, but putting aside the ones already spotlighted in the first volume, we also see Dr. Tenma:

Astro Boy's Inspector Tawashi:

Melmo (as both an adult and a child):

And Hyoutan-Tsugi is always worth pointing out, as in this whack-a-mole bit:

Or when he plays a newscaster:

That Tezuka, he rarely passed up a joke, did he?

Manga Mania Month: Black Jack knows his shit

Elsewhere: I wrote about a one-shot called Wolverine: Savage for Comics Bulletin.  That sort of thing wouldn't necessarily be worth mentioning, but this one is written by Ryan Dunlavey, and it's kind of funny.

Kicking off the monthly manga focus, here's the first of many volumes of classic manga:

Black Jack, volume 1
By Osamu Tezuka

For somebody as prolific as Osamu Tezuka, who created thousands of pages of comics over the course of his career, and who jumped from genre to genre (pioneering most of them while he was at it), it's notable to get to read the series that he stayed with the longest, and is also arguably his most popular.  Maybe it was because, being a medical doctor himself, the subject matter was close to his heart, or maybe the "rogue surgeon" character provided a great "storytelling engine" that allowed him to follow his muse in a variety of interesting directions, but whatever the case, he stuck with the series for ten years and nearly 250 different stories.  There's definitely something there, but while it might not be obvious as of this first volume of a projected seventeen (Vertical's release of the series emulates the order which Tezuka put them in for a deluxe release in the 1980s, with chapters appearing out of the order in which they were originally published, but this doesn't matter, since the series is episodic rather than a serialized narrative), it still makes for some arresting reading, and a great example of Tezuka's storytelling skill, adeptness with visuals, and crazy imagination.

Not to say that this isn't a great series; as the volumes accumulate, it will probably become even more hefty as a body of work, but this first volume doesn't really match the heights that Tezuka reached with series like Phoenix, Buddha, Ode to Kirihito, and probably many others.  Still, it's as good one would expect anything with Tezuka's name on the cover would be, full of the sort of wackiness that he did so well, mixed with bizarre concepts and his usual dynamic artwork, which is impressive when depicting a painstaking, methodical  processes of surgery.  He obviously enjoys the character as well, and he's an interesting one, a sort of misanthropic-on-the-surface outsider who shuns the rules and restrictions of society and claims to only want money, but reveals a soft, humanistic side when given the chance.  In fact, he seems to practice his own awesome brand of medicine mostly to stick it to the man, favoring the underdogs and downtrodden and charging exorbitantly (but not undeservedly) when working for the rich and powerful.  But he's not without blame; his rough exterior does seem to conceal ambiguities and flaws, and while he's eminently capable, he can certainly make mistakes.  It should be fascinating to see him develop (or be revealed, since we're not reading the stories chronologically) over the volumes to come.

But, as for the here and now, this first volume makes for a nice introduction to the character and the escapades to which he can aspire.  The first story (which actually was the first story in the series) sees him recruited to heal the no-good son of a rich industrialist.  The brat was horribly injured in a car accident (which gives Tezuka the chance to start the series off with a bang, the car whizzing across the first page in a torrent of speed lines before crashing to a stop on the second), and the only way to save him is to sacrifice an innocent boy that the father railroads through the justice system and schedules for execution so Black Jack can scavenge the necessary replacement parts for his body.  Ah, but our crafty hero won't let the mean guy get away with that; instead, he changes the good kid's appearance to look like the bad son's, and lets him get away with the money.  Take that, the upper class!

As an early story, the moral on that first one might be a bit simplistic; later pieces get more nuanced, and Tezuka explores several other themes which seem to come to the fore, a major one that will probably continue being that man can never fully understand the mysteries of nature.  Actually, that seems to be a major theme of Japanese art in general, along with an exploration (but not necessarily a condemnation) of man's role in the world and the way he shapes it with technology.  Black Jack comes across that dilemma more than once here, most notably in one story that hints at his origin and the reason for his scarred appearance.  He was in a terrible accident as a child, and while the surgeon who pieced him back together was a personal hero and provided an inspiration for his own excellence in the field, he reveals as an old man that he made a terrible mistake that could have killed young BJ, and worse, he covered it up to avoid losing face.  But he found that the human body should not be underestimated, and as smart as man thinks he is, he's still far from full understanding:

Tezuka also explores the nature of humanity, as in one story that sees a high-tech computerized hospital (in the United States, rather than Japan, naturally) go haywire when it gains enough sentience to consider itself a living being and thus wants a doctor to fix it rather than a technician.  Is it an attempt to show that there is a need for human interaction in the act of healing?  Or just a chance for Black Jack to once again aid the powerless (that being the computer, in this case, which would have been dismantled and replaced by an unempathetic tech support staff)?  Whatever the case, it's a fun change.

Not that Tezuka really needs to mix things up, when he's capable of coming up with crazier and more outlandish feats for his hero to accomplish.  In just this first volume, he repairs destroyed limbs, transplants a brain, and, possibly most famously, builds a body for a fetus that never fully developed.  It's totally nuts, and often quite grotesque:

There's also plenty of the classic angled panels and dynamic, in-your-face movement, as when Black Jack gets to use some of his non-surgical physical prowess:

And as always, Tezuka comes up with one striking image after another, like this depiction of an atomic explosion:

That comes from what might be the most interesting story here, and one that touches on one of Tezuka's favorite subjects (although that's probably not the right way to put it): war.  He's gone to that well again and again, but here it's specifically the devastation of the atomic bomb.  This story sees an artist working in solitude on a Pacific island get radiation sickness from nearby testing, but Tezuka is obviously referencing the attacks on Japan in World War II.  Even though he is supposedly alone on the island, the artist stumbles into a pile of twisted bodies, a horror that must have been all too memorable for Tezuka.  The story sees the artist wanting to create a painting to depict what he experienced in order to show the world the evils of the bomb, but his body is wracked by radiation sickness.  Black Jack's solution is to transplant his brain into a new body, and while that works, the artist loses his drive to create now that he's not dying.  But once his brain starts succumbing to radiation too, he's able to finish the work.  It's a fascinating rumination on the power of art to capture emotional experience, and also how only those affected by horror can truly relate it to others.  That's the kind of thing that Tezuka does so well, and it's obvious that this series gave him a chance to touch on it and a myriad of other subjects that suited his fancy.  It should be a delight to see what he'll be able to cover in future volumes.
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Bonus: recurring character watch!

Tezuka went all out using members of his regular cast here, especially in the introductory chapter, which sees Duke Red as the rich father:



And Acetylene Lamp and Ham Egg as thugs:

Along with a few other cameos.  A bunch of others show up later, like Rock:

Professor Ochanomizu/Dr. Elefun:

Saruta/Big Nose (probably most memorable in Phoenix) as Black Jack's mentor:

Mr. Mustachio shows up as a patient in the robot hospital:

As does Tezuka himself, with an amusing diagnosis:

And, of course, Hyoutan-Tsugi appears throughout, in the usual comic reaction spots.  Here are a couple of my favorites:

There are probably plenty of others of note (the kid with the X bandage on his head, the police inspector from Astro Boy, possibly Dr. Tenma), but that's more than enough for the moment.  We'll see who else shows up next volume.