Black Jack (manga)
:
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.
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 (" '"
Hazama Kuroo). A bomb destroyed his home when he was a child, killing his mother and giving him a lust for revenge. Kurō's body was nearly torn to shreds, but he was rescued thanks to miraculous surgery by a Dr. Jotaro Honma (本"丈太郎
Honma Jōtarō). Marked by this experience, Kuro 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 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, like transplanting organs and even limbs without any risk of
rejection.
Pinoko: Pinoko ("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 one of Black Jack's patients' bodies for eighteen years until Black Jack extracted her and gave her a real body, and since then started to live with him in his house. She always helps the doctor by doing housechores 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 to him.
This causes a great deal of confusion for non fans of Black Jack who may view Pinoko's affection for the doctor and the general housework she does to be both of questionable nature.
Pinoko's main form of comic relief is proclaiming "Oh my goodness!" whilst pressing her cheeks together with her hands (Sometimes, this is translated as "OHMIGEWDNESS" to fit the phrase being distorted by the action) when something surprising happens.
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.
; 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 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.
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).
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 BJ's family beyond his dead mother.
Around the same time, another series,
Ray the Animation 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).
*There is widespread confusion as to how Black Jack got his nickname, and/or, what it means. Usual assumptions include::*Because parts of his skin are dark. (In some episodes, it is revealed that some of skin grafts came from a friend who was Black.):*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, assuming name Pinoko comes from
Pinochle, another card game.):*As a reference to the Jack rank in the deck of cards. (This answers reason why Black Jack holds Black Jack of
Spades during TV Episode's cutscene.)):*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".:*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.
*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 nemisis, and heals her as Astro defeats the sorcerer, showing him to be the man that the futureistic 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.:*He also makes appearance as Himself at anime called
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.:*The character of Black Jack was so beloved by general public and manga artists, many manga artistis created their own versions of Black Jack series. ::*A character 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 surgeon named
B.J.. In the anime version produced by Tezuka Productions Black Jack appears fully and is referred to by his original 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".
*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
Japanese Earthquake. According to
Fansubber Froth-Bite's
Forum, it was
sympathy for the dead, equivilant to having removed after
9/11 in the movies, because places in the episode featured the places that had most casualties.This episode was aired in Japan at July 17, 2006, due to canceled
baseball game, but was not labeled as Karte 03. According to the same forum it also aired a different
unreleased episode same date, but it is unclear how it's related to the show at the moment.
Official websites:
* 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
; Selected fansites ressources:
* Black Jack Shrine
* Large Black Jack index @ Tezuka in English.com
* (Japanese) Map of 241 chapters and where they are collected (in each of the four successive editions)
