Black Jack (manga)

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Black Jack
Black Jack, in a scene from the series Black Jack 21.
ブラック・ジャック
(Black Jack)
Genre Medical, Drama
Manga
Authored by Osamu Tezuka
Publisher Akita Shoten
Serialized in Shonen Champion
Original run 19 November 1973 – 14 October 1983
No. of volumes 17 [1]
Manga: Black Jack - the Dark Surgeon
Authored by Osamu Tezuka
Publisher Akita Shoten
Serialized in Shonen Champion
Original run – 9 February 2006
No. of volumes
OVA
Directed by Osamu Dezaki
Studio
No. of episodes 10[2]
Released 21 December 1993-
TV anime : Black Jack TV
Directed by Makoto Tezuka, Satoshi Kuwabara
Studio Tezuka Productions
Network Japan Animax, Yomiuri Telecasting Corporation
Original run 11 October 2004 – 2006
No. of episodes 61
Movie: Black Jack: Futari no Kuroi Isha
ブラック・ジャック ふたりの黒い医者
(Black Jack: Two Black Doctors)
Directed by Makoto Tezuka, Satoshi Kuwabara
Studio Tezuka Productions
Released 17 December 2005
Runtime 97m[3]
TV anime : Black Jack 21
Directed by Makoto Tezuka, Satoshi Kuwabara
Studio Tezuka Productions
Network Japan Animax, Yomiuri Telecasting Corporation
Original run 10 April 2006 – 4 September 2006
No. of episodes 17
Related anime
  • Black Jack: Capital Transfer To Heian (Movie; Sidestory to 1993 version)
  • Black Jack the Movie (1996, adaptation of 1993/manga version)
  • Black Jack Special: the 4 Miracles of Life (Promotional special; Lead-on episodes of Black Jack TV)
  • Ray the Animation (TV)
For other uses of the word Blackjack see Black Jack.

Black Jack (ブラック・ジャック Burakku Jakku) 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" has also been animated a number of times, two of his animations available from Central Park Media and Manga Entertainment. Black Jack is Tezuka's third most famous manga, after Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion.

Contents

[edit] Summary

Black Jack is a medical mercenary, selling his skills to the highest bidder. He is a shadowy figure, with a black trench coat, eerie black-and-white hair and a scar across his face. 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.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Black Jack's real name is Kuro Hazama (間 黒男 Hazama Kuroo). His odd appearance comes from an incident during his childhood where both he and his mother were severely injured in an explosion . His mother lost all four limbs, later slipping into a coma, and dieing shortly afterward. Meanwhile, Kuro's own body was nearly torn to shreds, but he was rescued thanks to a miraculous operation by a Dr. Jotaro Honma (本間丈太郎 Honma Jōtarō). Marked by this experience, Kuro decided to become a surgeon himself, taking the name of Black Jack. Despite his medical genius, he has chosen never to obtain a surgical license, operating instead in the shadows. He scorns such things as licenses as meaningless symbols of social status, preferring to live in anonymity. Also, a license would mean he would have to follow certain rules, including not charging large fees for operations. An early episode of Black Jack 21 shows that he was once licensed, but it was revoked after he refused to obey orders from his superior. Ever since, he has been based in a private clinic on a sea cliff far away from civilization, 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 colleagues 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, such as operating in absolute darkness completely from memory, and transplanting body parts without any risk of rejection.

[edit] Secondary characters

[edit] Pinoko

Pinoko (ピノコ) is Black Jack's sidekick, a little girl constructed by him who is actually a Teratogenous Cystoma, a sort of tumor also known as a teratoma. As seen in Teratogenous Cystoma, she was a rare type of Siamese twin, living in one of Black Jack's patients' bodies for eighteen years until Black Jack extracted her and gave her a real body, a plastic exo-skeleton. After being rejected by her twin sister, she started to live with him in his house. She always helps the doctor by doing house-chores and even acting as an assistant to some of his operations. She often acts as comic relief in Black Jack, physically and in many ways mentally appearing to be around the age of five years, but claiming to be a girl of eighteen and engaged to him, despite that he only treats her as a daughter.

Pinoko's main form of comic relief is yelling アッチョンプリケ(acchonpurike), equivalent to "Oh my goodness!" in English, whilst pressing her cheeks together with her hands when something surprising happens. Sometimes, this is translated as "OHMIGEWDNESS" to fit the phrase being distorted by the action.
She appears to have been named after the fairy-tale character Pinocchio, due, perhaps, to her artificial parts and doll-like origins. Pinocchio is referenced in the Viz English translation of the manga (Pinoko sings a song about the character) and is referenced in original material as well. The card game of pinochle is suspected by some to be inspiration for her name, as black jack is also the name of a popular card game.

[edit] Black Queen

First making her appearance in Black Queen, Kuwata Konomi was a doctor specializing in amputations, thought to be heartless by many, earning her the nickname Black Queen in the medical world. She is engaged to Makube Rokuro, Rock Holmes, but her being infamous sends troubles for the couple. She met Black Jack, drunk, in the Tom, addressing herself as the Black Queen. The former is impressed by their similarities and falls in love. The end was bittersweet as he later discovered that Rock was actually her fiance.

[edit] Megumi Kisaragi

Black Jack's tragic love, they met during their internship. She stayed up late at work and cared more about the patients than everyone else. She discovers that Kuroo Hazama has been the one looking after her whenever she walks alone at night. Later, she reveals to have ovarian cancer, and is afraid to tell Black Jack because of her fear that having these parts removed will interfere with their relationship. Nevertheless, the couple confess their love before the operation.

Afterwards, Megumi changed her name to Kei, a male name, and started living her life as a man, treating sick patients as a ship's doctor.

[edit] Dr. Jotaro Honma

The reason why Black Jack pursued the career in medicine, mentor and life-saver, he played as the young boy's father-figure after the tragedy struck. Kagemitsu Hazama, Black Jack's father, flew to Macao, China with his new wife, Renka, abadoning his son and his first wife. The boy suffered from paralysis in all four limbs and spent many lonely years in a wheelchair until he regained the use of them. Dr. Honma wrote a book about the miracle, as seen in The Leg of an Ant.

Dr. Honma dies in the episode Sometimes Like Pearls after a failed surgical attempt by the man he inspired to revive him.

[edit] Dr. Kiriko

Dr. Kiriko (キリコ), the "death doctor", is another shadowy doctor, traveling 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 leads patients to their lives.

In the 'Clinical Chart' OVA series release in the US, Dr. Kiriko is introduced only as "Mozart", in homage to his affinity for classical music.

[edit] Anime version

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 VHS form in North America, but all 10 OVAs are now available on bilingual Region 1 DVD), and a movie (also by Dezaki).[2]

There is also a four episode TV special from 2003 called Black Jack: The 4 Miracles of Life.

A new TV series was released in fall of 2004 in Japan and a new movie is in the works [1].

In late April of 2006, the series' name was changed to "Black Jack 21" and is going to follow a more widespread arc, the first of which focuses on Black Jack's family beyond his dead mother.

Around the same time, another series, Ray the Animation -- a medical drama which takes on a more science fictional approach to operations, diseases, and the main character -- has Black Jack, who was alluded to in the manga (as B.J.) and stars as a full on character. In this series, Black Jack performs surgery on the titular character's eyes (replacing the ones that were taken as a form of farmed medical donation) that allows her to see through solid objects, which leads to the character herself becoming a doctor like Black Jack (albeit, a fully licensed one).

Also in U.S., AZN TV shows Black Jack OVA at late night weekly, whose license is held by Manga Entertainment, Inc.

[edit] Episodes

Main article: List of Black Jack episodes

[edit] Trivia

  • There is widespread confusion as to how and why Black Jack got his nickname. Usual assumptions include:
  • Because parts of his skin are dark. (In some episodes, it is revealed that some of skin grafts came from a childhood friend who was Black. He was the only person who able to donate skin to the mortally wounded Kuro, because he had no parents to forbid the operation.)
  • As a reference to the card game of the same name. (A game of chance, like difficult medical operations, and whose outcome is unsure, like the endings of Black Jack stories. This also fits with the idea that Pinoko's name comes from Pinochle, another card game.)
  • As a reference to the Jack rank in the deck of cards. (This explains why Black Jack holds a (black) Jack of Spades during a TV episode's cutscene. Also, in Black Jack 21, he is shot through card Ace of Spades, making the supposed hand Blackjack.)
  • Possibly as a reference to the weapon of the same name, a heavy club. (After WW2, during the US occupation of Japan, the Japanese learned to dread the "burakku jakku" of the US police and military.)
  • Possibly from the character's first name, "Kuro-o", which in Japanese is written with the characters for "black" and "man"; since a jack is also a term for a man, these two characters would translate to "Black Jack". This is suggested in the original manga issue "The Most Beautiful Woman in the World", and in the anime Black Jack 21.
  • Allegedly, Tezuka would have once said that because Black Jack operated illegitimately (i.e. outside the official medical system), he was like a pirate and that the name referred to the universally known "skull and crossbones" Jolly Roger pirate flag – which is also known as the Black Jack. Yet, Tezuka might have said this in response to comparisons to Captain Harlock who has a similar scarred facial appearance and is also a "by his own rules" outsider.[citation needed]
  • Black Jack starred as a side character along with Pinoko in episode 27 (Dr. Black Jack's Operation) of Tezuka's other, more famous work, Astro Boy (1980s). Both he and Astro were recruited by a detective from the distant future and were taken back to a medieval castle to catch a man who was messing up the timeline, where Black Jack was to heal a sick prince and Astro was to protect the castle from the evil sorcerer. While Astro attempts to fight the beasts sent by an evil sorcerer, Black Jack makes the startling discovery that the prince is actually a princess, and using some clever deception to outwit their nemesis, heals her as Astro defeats the sorcerer, showing him to be the man that the futuristic detective was looking for. In true Black Jack fashion, he tells the town to learn to accept that they would have a female ruler, and refuses payment, instead taking a commemorative coin which Astro later values to be worth several million dollars.
  • Black Jack makes a brief cameo appearance in many works.
  • In the 1980 movie Phoenix 2772 which was based on another Tezuka work. Here, he is seen as the foreman of the prison planet work camp, while Dr. Honma appears as the character named Saruta.
  • He also makes an appearance as himself in the anime Marine Express, along with several other characters created by Osamu Tezuka.
  • Black Jack also makes a cameo appearance in the 2004 game Astro Boy: Omega Factor created for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance, and is part of the game's "Rebirth" storyline.
  • The character of Black Jack was so beloved by general public and manga artists, many manga artists created their own versions of Black Jack series.
  • A character who resembles Black Jack appeared in Akihito Yoshitomi's manga, Ray, in volume 1 and 7 (beginning and the end). She claims that she had her eyes fixed by a surgeon named B.J.. In the anime version produced by Tezuka Productions Black Jack appears fully and is referred to by name.
  • Another version, named Dr. Norifumi Iwata, appears in the manga Excel Saga [a manga that often parodies pop-culture icons]. The reference is even brought up by the American editor; the notes at the back of the first volume refer to him as a "Black Jack looking quack".
  • Recent Nicktoons Network cartoon called Kappa Mikey's episode named Saving Face contained an slight humorous refearance; Dr. Takashi Katashi claims that he removed the Black Jack's scar to make him appear better, being his patient.
  • Since 2005, Black Jack is rewritten by Yamamoto Kenji under the control of Tezuka Production.
  • Black Jack TV did not run episode 03, or Karte 03, due to the Japanese Earthquake. According to Fansubber Froth-Bite's Forum [2], it was sympathy for the dead, equivalent to having the Twin Towers removed after 9/11 in the movies, because places in the episode featured the places that had most casualties.
This episode was later aired in Japan on July 17, 2006, due to a canceled baseball game, but was not labeled as Karte 03. According to the same forum it also aired a different unreleased episode on the same date, but it is unclear how it's related to the show at the moment.
  • TV Asahi releases Top 100 Anime of All Time around the end of the year. 2005, Black Jack has made to 35th. At year 2006, Black Jack is listed 54th, while the character itself celebrity rank has been listed as 52nd[3][4].
  • When Pinoko was finishing up a jigsaw puzzle in the movie, the puzzle featured a picture of Astro Boy.
  • Rock Holmes has his own manga by Tezuka. The most famous role he played in was in Metropolis.
  • Black Queen is another Tezuka character whose real name is Zephyrus.
  • Not only does Black Jack appear in Tezuka works, Tezuka also appears himself in his manga as either an author or a doctor. This is a single animation/manga series he appeared most on, appearing least once a volume of a manga, or every three episode as a cameo or comical relief.
  • Sharaku and Wato from Three-Eyed One first appear as siblings in the Black Jack series in The Missing Needle.
  • In Karte 22: Pinoko plans on Adulthood, the main character of Zelda, Link, appeared as a child named Tink.

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Definitive Edition" bunko (as of 2006, out of 18 intended to collect everything). Black Jack (manga) (manga) at Anime News Network's Encyclopedia. Accessed 2006-12-05.
  2. ^ a b Black Jack (manga) at Anime News Network's Encyclopedia. Accessed 2006-12-05.
  3. ^ Black Jack (manga) at Anime News Network's Encyclopedia. Accessed 2006-12-05.

[edit] External links

Official websites
Selected fansites resources
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