Blackjack (manga)
- For other uses of the word Blackjack see Blackjack (disambiguation).
Black Jack (ブラック・ジャック) is a manga written by Osamu Tezuka in the 1970s, dealing with the medical adventures of a doctor named Black Jack.
Black Jack consists of hundreds of short, self-contained episodes, on the order of 20 pages of manga each. Some of it has been translated into English by Viz Communications. Black Jack is Tezuka's second most famous manga, after Astro Boy.
Summary
Black Jack is a medical mercenary, selling his skills to the highest bidder. He is a shadowy figure, with a black cloak, eerie black-and-white hair, a scar across his face and partially black skin. Black Jack cures patients indiscriminately, from common folk to presidents and yakuza leaders. To his VIP patients, he charges absurd sums. All this has given him a reputation for callousness and greed which he gleefully cultivates. However, to the reader it is clear that Black Jack actually is a good man: he is anti-wealth and anti-prestige, and believes he is actually doing rich people a favor by removing their material wealth. The opposition to wealth and power is a common theme in Tezuka's work: powerful men are almost always portrayed in a negative light.
Black Jack's real name is Kuroo Hazama (間 黒男). A bomb destroyed his home when he was a child, killing his mother and giving him a lust for revenge. Kuroo's body was nearly torn to shreds, but he was rescued thanks to miraculous surgery by a Dr. Jōtarō Honma (本間丈太郎). Marked by this experience, Kuroo decided to become a surgeon himself, taking the name of Black Jack. Despite his surgical genius, he has chosen never to obtain a surgical license, operating instead in the shadows. He scorns such things as licenses as a meaningless symbols of social status, preferring to live in anonymity. He is based in a secret private clinic far away from the city, but frequently travels to hospitals around the world to covertly assist terminally ill patients.
Most of the episodes involve Black Jack doing some good deed, for which he rarely gets recognition --- often curing the poor and destitute for free, or teaching capitalist fat cats and his pompous fellow doctors a lesson in humility. They frequently end with a good, humane person enduring hardship, often unavoidable death, to save others.
Osamu Tezuka drew on his knowledge as a physician in writing Black Jack, and the manga contains frequent medical details. However, Tezuka chose to generally eschew medical plausibility in his manga: Black Jack is superhuman, regularly performing spectacular and impossible feats of surgical virtuosity.
Secondary Characters
Pinoko
Pinoko (pinochle, ピノコ) is Black Jack's sidekick, a little girl constructed entirely by him from spare body parts. She was a rare type of Siamese twin, living in her twin's stomach for eighteen years until Black Jack extracted her and gave her a real body. She often acts as comic relief in Black Jack, physically and in many ways mentally appearing to be five years old, but claiming to be a girl of eighteen.
Kiriko
Dr. Kiriko (キリコ), the "death doctor", is another shadowy doctor, travelling the world like Black Jack. When Kiriko was a war doctor, he saw many patients in great pain, and got into the habit of using euthanasia. He often appears in the manga, attempting to kill terminally ill patients which Black Jack wants to save. He is so dedicated to euthanasia that he once attempted to kill himself when he got a rare infectious disease. Although he is not a villain, some have called him Black Jack's opposite: he leads patients to their deaths and Black Jack to their lives.
In 1992 Tezuka's protege Osamu Dezaki did the direction for an OVA series. Ten OVAs were made (six of which were originally only available in dub-only form in North America, but all 10 OVAs are now getting a bilingual DVD release), and a movie (also by Dezaki).
A new TV series is scheduled for release for the fall of 2004 .
