An End to Orphan Dominance

Review: Monster
Updated: 01/17/07

Manga/Anime/Fandom

Reviewed by: Bad Jew

Title rating: PG-16/R for lots of murder and scary orphans.

-18 volumes of manga (1994-2001), complete, currently being released in English through Viz
-74 episodes of anime (2004-2005), complete

Ever since I was a wee lad, I've hated orphans with the passion of a thousand hot Latin suns. Until I read Naoki Urasawa's Monster, I didn't know the reason for this hatred; I used to think that the origin lay in the banned episode of the Canadian masterpiece You Can't Do That on Television, which mocked orphans until they cried and that I vaguely recall seeing as an impressionable child. Or maybe it was because I wanted an easy target to mock--it's not like the parents of orphans are in any position to stand up for their children. But Monster shows us the true reason to hate and fear orphans: they're inhuman killing machines created by communists to destroy capitalism and our precious traditional system of marriage.* Those monsters!

Of course, Urasawa couldn't just come out with an expose on this clear and present danger--the orphans who control the world media and their allies are far too powerful to let that happen. No, he had to hide this message in a detailed, 18-volume murder mystery in order to get it published by the pro-orphan media.

Manga

To be more specific, Monster is a medical murder mystery. Like Quincy M.D., a bad Robin Cook novel, or that one episode of House where some guy got killed and House thought it was cancer but it was really some sort of amoeba or something, Monster focuses on a doctor who solves crimes. Herr Doctor Kenzo Tenma, a brilliant Japanese neurosurgeon working in the late 80s and early 90s of Western Germany, is this series' MD (Medical Detective). Unfortunately, his boss is taking all the credit for his work, and Tenma is denied a promotion when he operates on a child with a bullet in the brain instead of the mayor. The hospital director, in an attempt to reverse the negative PR of leaving the beloved mayor bleeding to death in the ER, tries to take pictures of the kids, much to the consternation of Tenma who's all like, "Oh no, we can't take pictures of people in comas, the flash might give them sunburns" or something. The hospital director and his lieutenants then turn up dead the next morning after having eaten poison candy. While Tenma doesn't have the best alibi in the word--"I keep telling you, I was too drunk and alone to kill anyone"--the police let him go, and during the investigatory commotion the two kids escape. Tenma takes his dead boss' job and does pretty well for himself over the next several years, but then saves the life of a criminal who has ties to a new serial killer. Through this cancerous felon, Tenma comes face to face with this murderer, this madman, this...monster?

I suppose you've already figured out that the serial killer is the boy (Johan) whom Tenma saved all those years ago. And if you haven't, well, retroactive spoiler alert for Volume 1. Johan may kill people, but he's not the title monster--the point of the entire series is about the transformation of Tenma from a doctor to a murderer. After realizing that he saved a young boy who's turned into a killer beyond reform, Tenma takes it upon himself to remove this threat. The change from a doctor who has vowed to the ancient and wise Hippocrates never to harm anyone is the real point of the comic; Johan and everything else is just filler.

My main problem with Monster is the cast of side characters, who are often created to be paper-thin stereotypes (the ambition- and glory-hogging hospital director, the reformable and sympathetic thief, etc.). One of the plot features that is highly toted by Viz is the cutthroat hospital politicking that surrounds the early volumes, but I find the sub-plot simple minded and predictable: people who play office politics are evil and Tenma, who is above politics, is good. Say what you want about the state of healthcare in the western world, this comic is in no way "a stunning indictment of hospital politics" (as Viz calls it).

This is Viz's cool sideways cover for their English version of the manga. Now you can find it at the bookstore without asking for help.

Still, not all the minor characters and sub-plots are bad--in general, when Urasawa gives more than a few pages of time to his side characters, they break out of the evil/good/innocent/oldlady mold. And the majority of the side stories actually add more sheen to an already-excellent manga. Take, for example, the side-story that revolves around the relationship between Tenma and the German Federal Police Investigator Lunge--Lunge is one of those archetypical obsessive police investigators, like Detective Zenigata from Lupin, who's portrayed as a computer-like humorless automation who's blind to all but justice. His single-minded determination to blame the murders on Tenma leads to his wife and daughter leaving him and his workplace rejecting him. His affectation of remembering information by 'typing' it in through flailing his fingers around sounds stupid but doesn't distract from the seriousness of the character.

Thanks to the same magic of the interweb which allows you to view this site, Viz can show you a demo issue of the manga at http://www.viz.com/monster/monster.php. Now you can see how right I am…as if you needed confirmation.

Dr. Tenma looks sadly down at the MOUNTAIN OF CORPSES he's had to produce for the good of society.

Anime

I'll be honest--I've decided not to watch the entirety of the 74 episode anime. From what I can tell from the first 10 episodes, the anime is word for word, shot for shot an exact replica of the manga. I suppose if page turning is a real problem for you--perhaps you lost your hands as a result of some industrial accident and your helper monkey can change DVDs--the anime can help you where the manga can't. So, for my review, re-read the proceeding section.

And although it's purely a matter of taste, I prefer the pacing of the manga over the anime. The TV show tends to match one chapter of the manga to one episode of the anime; each chapter of the manga can be read in about 10-15 minutes, while the anime takes 30 minutes to cover the same amount of story. I find the issues of the manga taking exactly as long as they need to take, and hence the anime feels drawn-out. Unless you have some particular joy to not consume your media as efficiently as possible, choose the manga over the anime.

Fandom

Monster isn't going to be a series that attracts much of a non-critic fandom, since it doesn't have a plot or characters that lend themselves to fanfiction and no hot women/men for painful doujinshi. There are a few blogs that review the episodes as they come, steaming hot, from the fansubbers, and MangaScreeners has translated a supplementary novel that reviews the story from the perspective of a reporter. I've avoided reading this, as a text file just can't compare to the masterful art and panel layout of Urasawa.

I think the best page on Monster is on the blog Polite Dissent, written by a comic fan/doctor who reviews the medical accuracy of the manga. Apparently, through the work of both the author and Viz's excellent translator and editors, Monster is fairly medically accurate. They even account for the differences in medical terms (such as generic pharmacological terms) between modern English and the twenty-year-old German.

Overview

Monster is good, maybe even great. It's certainly one of the best manga to hit the shelves this year. It has some good ideas, and it does the suspense thing really well. But it does hit you over the head with a few too many archetypes--like the doctor who can only do good (even when doing bad) and the detective who will stop at nothing to catch his man. A good author uses archetypes, but great author makes them. Urasawa is somewhere in-between.

4 out of 5 stars.

*Orphans aren't actually responsible for all those things in Monster, but I still wouldn't put it past them.