(Note from the future: I found this post in my drafts, it was never published for any reason that I can see.)
The (Chinese) New Year is almost upon us! I'm irrationally excited because this is the Year of the Dragon, and I'm a dragon. (This also means that my age this year will be a multiple of 12.)
I discovered that the Today newspaper publishes a Sudoku puzzle almost daily. Sudoku puzzles are fun! I've even gotten the hang of the 5-star difficulty ones, and no longer have to slave for 3 hours over them.
I recently had some Kinokuniya vouchers to spare, so I got hold of Black Jack volumes 16 and 17. Black Jack is a manga series about a renegade surgeon with incredible skills and a tendency to be involved in the most bizarre of medical situations. (Building a little girl out of a teratoid cystoma? Surgery on a computer? Surgery on himself while suffering from a parasitic disease and being attacked by wild dingoes in the Australian outback? All in a day's work for Dr. Black Jack.) The stories are well-written with a balance of humour, seriousness and poignancy. In spite of Dr. Black Jack's almost godlike skills, he cannot save everyone, and his personal life is beset with tragedy. Yet there are the moments of fourth-wall breaking silliness, triumph and sheer awesomeness. (Self-surgery! Dingoes, I'm telling you!)
Also, the art is excellent. Poo to all those people who think art has to be realistic to be good. Black Jack is unashamedly cartoony, and yet there's a brilliance about the composition of each panel, even the panel layout as a whole. (In one story, a ship is rocking badly in a storm, tossing its passengers back and forth. The panels angle diagonally and even crisscross to reflect the movement.)
tl;dr Black Jack is an awesome manga about an awesome doctor, definitely a series I recommend.
No comments:
Post a Comment