| Black Jack | |
|---|---|
| ブラック・ジャック (Black Jack) |
|
| Genre | Medical, Drama |
| Manga | |
| Author | Osamu Tezuka |
| Publisher |  Akita Shoten |
| Serialized in | Shonen Champion |
| Original run | 19 November 1973 – 14 October 1983 |
| Volumes | 17 [1] |
| Manga: Black Jack - the Dark Surgeon | |
| Author | Osamu Tezuka |
| Publisher | Akita Shoten |
| Serialized in | Shonen Champion |
| OVA | |
| Director | Osamu Dezaki |
| Episodes | 10[2] |
| Released | 21 December 1993- |
| TV anime: Black Jack TV | |
| Director | Makoto Tezuka |
| Studio | Tezuka Productions |
| Network | Animax, Yomiuri Telecasting Corporation |
| Original run | 11 October 2004 – 2006 |
| Episodes | 61 |
| Movie: Black Jack: Futari no Kuroi Isha | |
| Director | Makoto Tezuka |
| Producer | Tomoyuki Saitō Sumio Udagawa |
| Composer | Isao Tomita |
| Studio | Tezuka Productions |
| Released | 17 December 2005 |
| Runtime | 97m[3] |
| TV anime: Black Jack 21 | |
| Director | Makoto Tezuka, Satoshi Kuwabara |
| Studio | Tezuka Productions |
| Network |  Animax, Yomiuri Telecasting Corporation |
| Original run | 10 April 2006 – 4 September 2006 |
| Episodes | 17 |
| Related anime | |
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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 into an OVA, two television series (directed by Tezuka's son Makoto Tezuka) and two movies. Black Jack is Tezuka's third most famous manga, after Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion. In 1977, it won the 1st Kodansha Manga Award for shōnen.[4]
Contents |
Summary
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 a capitalist fat cat 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. (However, rejection is accounted for in some anime episodes.)
Secondary characters
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 parasitic 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 アッチョンブリケ(acchonburike), 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.
Biwamaru
Biwamaru is an acupuncture doctor who specializes in needle techniques. He made his first appearance in episode 51. He is blind and goes wandering everywhere where his sensitive nose takes him. He has a sensitive nose that is able to smell out the whereabouts of people who are sick. He cures his patients without accepting any money in return, making him homeless. He carries a walking stick and a huge purse-like bag with his medical equipment. Although he is blind, he can walk on his own to many places. He dislikes operations, saying that humans are not suppose to be operated too many times. He believes that his needle techniques are the perfect solution to any medical problem. He often cures Black Jack's patients causing Black Jack to feel unhappy and annoyed. One day he found a small kid (who was also Black Jack's patient), but he made a terrible mistake. He had thought that his needle techniques were perfect, but what he didn't know was that the small child had a fear of needles. Her condition became worse. Black Jack was furious and intended to show the proud Biwamaru about his mistake. Biwamaru was grateful when Black Jack saved the child's life. Later on that night, Biwamaru cured Black Jack's large intestine, which Black Jack has attempted to treat through surgery, by piercing a needle into his foot to return his kindness.
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.
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.
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 Macau, China with his new wife, Renka, abandoning 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.
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. Though arch-rivals, they have been in situations where they had to cooperate in order to survive or to accomplish a task, and manage to do so with good results. 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.
Media
Manga
The manga series was first serialized from 1973 to 1983. The first episode was called "I Need a Doctor!", and the last episode was called "A Question of Priority". Most of the manga was never made into an anime until very recently when a Black Jack Special was aired in 2003, thus initiating the Black Jack anime series in 2004, and the Black Jack 21 series in 2006.
Anime
Perhaps the first televised appearance of Black Jack was in the 1980 remake of Tetsuwan Atom. Episode 26 of Astro Boy brought together three separate Tezuka creations, as Astro, Uran, Doctor Roget (Black Jack) and Penny (Pinoko) travel back through time to 15th Century Molavia (Silverland). In this storyline, Black Jack performs a life-saving operation on a critically injured Princess Sapphire (from Ribbon no Kishi), while Astro and Uran fend off Gor, a malevolent magician bent on usurping the throne. Characteristically, Roget/Black Jack refuses to operate until he is offered the key to the treasury vault, but later takes only one commemorative coin from the grateful court (which turns out to be worth $20,000 when he returns to his own time). Presumably, the name changes were due to Western audiences being unfamiliar with the Black Jack franchise at the time. 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 film entitled Black Jack: The Two Doctors of Darkness was released in December 2005. While the television series is an adaptation of Tezuka's original manga, the film's storyline is wholly original. The film describes Black Jack's attempts to prevent a group known as the Ghost of Icarus from starting a wide-spread, biological war which could wipe out humanity, while working alongside the infamous Dr. Kiriko. In late April of 2006, a seventeen-episodes series entitled Black Jack 21 premiered. Adapted from standalone manga chapters, Black Jack 21 features an all-new overarching storyline.
Trivia
- 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 [1], 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.
- Kimba the White Lion appears quite frequently as a cameo, especially in episode 7 of 2004 TV as the main animal saved (in this episode he is renamed "Luna-luna").
- TV Asahi releases a Top 100 Anime of All Time list at the end of each year. In 2005, Black Jack was rated 35th. In 2006, Black Jack is listed 54th, while the character itself has been listed as 52nd.[2][3].
- Black Queen is another Tezuka character whose real name is Zephyrus.
- Sharaku and Wato from Three-Eyed One first appear as siblings in the Black Jack series in "The Missing Needle".
- Famous Japanese singer Utada Hikaru voiced Pinoko in the anime's online version.
- Argentine writer Pablo Nieto published an article that analyzes one of Black Jack's stories from the standpoint of lacanian psychoanalysis, Lo siniestro en el noveno arte.
- A Black Jack cosplayer appeared in an anime/manga convention in volume 6 of the Midori Days manga.
- The voice actor of Black Jack, Akio Otsuka, also voiced characters with strong charisma such as Anavel Gato from Gundam 0083 as well as Solid Snake and Big Boss from the Metal Gear series.
References
- ^ "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.
- ^ a b Black Jack (manga) (anime) at Anime News Network's Encyclopedia. Accessed 2006-12-05.
- ^ Black Jack (manga) (anime) at Anime News Network's Encyclopedia. Accessed 2006-12-05.
- ^ Joel Hahn. Kodansha Manga Awards. Comic Book Awards Almanac. Retrieved on 2007-08-21.
External links
- Official Black Jack TV Site (Japanese)
- Official Black Jack Manga/TV Site (Japanese); Has Officially all the Black Jack + Spinoffs chapter/volume lists
- Official list of Black Jack collected editions in Japan (partially out-of-date: 17th bunko was published in 2003)
- Official list of all 242 Black Jack chapters
- Black Jack manga at TezukaOsamu@World
- Black Jack OAV at TezukaOsamu@World
- Black Jack Movie at TezukaOsamu@World
- Black Jack: Capital Transfer to Heian at TezukaOsamu@World
