Black Jack vol. 17

After seventeen volumes, Osamu Tezuka’s best long-form series comes to an end.  There have been over a hundred stories involving the title character’s miraculous medical prowess and the majority of them have been good, if not excellent.  It’s certainly entertaining to see him break the laws of medical reality on a near-regular basis, but it’s the unexpected ways in which Tezuka’s moral and cautionary tales play out that give this series a lasting appeal.  In this volume alone, we see what happens when Black Jack gives a paralyzed girl the gift of flight with bird wings, performs a sex change on the unwilling heir of a Japanese railway company, patches up a captain ferrying in illegal immigrants, and performs a most unusual brain transplant.  The outlandishness of some of these setups may be off putting to some, but Tezuka always makes sure that the stories are never about the surgical procedures themselves, but the human emotions and actions that serve as their need in the first place.

Now, I wasn’t really expecting any kind of closure with this volume.  With the exception of a very few stories that harken back to earlier tales, some recurring characters, and the fact that the “last” “Black Jack” story was featured back in vol. 11, there’s not really anything to wrap up or give a final summation of.  That said, the last few stories collected here make the end quite memorable.  One is a near-crossover with Tezuka’s “Phoenix” series as the surgeon is called on to treat a 200-year-old man who supposedly drank the firebird’s blood.  The next involves the return of someone with strong ties to Pinoko’s past, while the final tale has Black Jack operating to save a young, pregnant, idol’s life during a hurricane while his assistant tries to hold down their rickety house.  It’s pretty straightforward as these stories go, but the last page is a fitting note to end the series on.

Vertical has my thanks for taking the time to bring this great series into English, and with their usual strong production values as well.  All of the Tezuka series they’ve published have had distinct, eye-catching covers and designs and this is no exception.  Designed by Peter Mendelsund, the standard trade dress for the series (excluding the hardcover editions of vols. 1-3) had four quadrants of different colors focusing your attention on the bit of surgical business at the center.  It gives the impression that you’re seeing the of an actual operation on the cover, which conveys the subject matter quite well.  Though each of the preceding volumes are simply chromatic variations on this theme, Mendelsund broke with tradition to give us a cover that lets us know in no uncertain terms that we’ve reached the end of the line while focusing our attention on the title character himself.  It’s a memorable end for a series that has consistently offered more proof as to why its author is known as the “God of Manga.”