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Among adult readers in Japan
Black Jack is Osamu Tezuka’s most popular achievement,
and perhaps the most close to the creator’s heart, as Tezuka
considered entering the medical field—majoring in medicine
in college—before devoting his life to comics. Black Jack
is a genius surgeon who never acquired his license due to his
clashes with the medical establishment. He is hired out by anyone
willing to pay his exorbitant rates and is perceived as a heartless
rogue because of his enigmatic nature and antisocial manner. But
as readers will soon discover, that is not the whole story.
Vertical, Inc. will release
the Black Jack episodes in the order that Tezuka indicated
for a hardcover “Deluxe Edition” planned before his
untimely death in 1989 at the age of 60. Two earlier volumes of
translations were released in 1998-99, but featured only 17 episodes
of the nearly 250 that Tezuka created.
Each 300-page volume of the
Vertical, Inc. series will feature a dozen-plus stories, most
published in English for the first time. The Vertical volumes
will also embody the high production standards that readers have
come to expect, not only from the publisher’s Tezuka output,
but also its line of Japanese pop fiction.
Click
here for a free preview of Volume 1.
Click
here for a free preview of Volume 2.
Click
here for a free preview of Volume 3.
RETAILERS ONLY:
Contact info@vertical-inc.com
for
information on how to obtain this
18" x 24" promotional poster.
BLACK
JACK LIMITED
EDITION HARDCOVERS!
The news of Osamu Tezuka’s Black
Jack finally coming to the States by virtue of Vertical,
Inc. just got better.
 Diamond
Comic Distributors has commissioned Exclusive Hardcover
Editions of the first three volumes of the series.
Each hardcover volume sports a unique cover different from those
of the regular paperback editions. The hardcover volumes also
include an additional story that will not be included in the
regular soft cover series. These stories have been locked away
at Tezuka Productions for decades by request of Tezuka himself,
and have only recently been re-released in Japan.
Most importantly, each Exclusive
Hardcover Edition will be limited in number.
Volume 1: Limited to only 1,500 copies!
Volumes 2 and 3: Limited to a mere 1,200 copies each!
These special editions are only available
through specialty comic shops.
To find comic-book shops near you, call
1-888-comic book (1-888-266-4226), or visit the comic shop locator
service at www.comicshoplocator.com.
The site supports residents of the U.S.
and Canada, as well as the United
Kingdom and Ireland.
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“What makes
Black Jack so great, in addition to Tezuka’s artwork
and whirlwind narrative velocity (you can either breeze through
these volumes or linger on the details), is his bottomless bag
of stories. Tezuka effortlessly integrates scores of different
surgical procedures into short, sharp tales that eviscerate the
codified vicissitudes (especially reticence and duty) of Japanese
society with, yes, surgical precision.”
—Richard Gehr,
The Village Voice
“Manga
master Osamu Tezuka may be best known for Astro Boy,
but this installment of Black Jack continues the adventures
of a far superior character… With his shock of white hair and
rock-star demeanour, Black Jack transfers well to the manga
version of the operating room. The book is peppered with enough
knowledge to hint at Tezuka’s fascination with the frailty of
the human body. [I]t means he can avoid the clichés of most
manga storylines.”
—The Guardian
(U.K.)
“Surely
there’s nothing in this series more continually striking
than the artist’s relentless, guaranteed depictions of surgery
itself, happy rubber skin always peeled away to show realist meat
and bone, minutely detailed organs mended or transplanted, then
covered up again in the stuff of effortless napkin doodles…
I found even the least of [these stories] fascinating examples
of an artist casting his net especially far, secure in his talented
hands and firm in his fame—ready to confront any malady,
striving to cut away any harm, instrument tips sharp
for making flesh whole.”
—Jog –The Blog
“‘Iconic’
doesn't begin to sum up Black Jack's importance in the
world of manga… I see a lot of Tezuka fans reaching for
their wallets—not just for this volume alone, but for the
whole of Black Jack as it's finally being re-released
in the English-language edition it has always deserved. It was,
and will be, more than worth the wait. Platinum Award.”
—Advanced Media Network
“Totally
fun, totally engrossing. Black Jack is a page-turner
of the highest order, and I blew through 280+ pages and I'm hungry
for more.”
—Comics212.net
“Great
material—classic crazy Tezuka with a bloody medical heartbeat
tuning out the sound of man's inhumanity to man.”
—Newsrama
“While
Astro Boy is more iconic and Phoenix is more
epic in scope, Black Jack is arguably Tezuka’s
best and most enjoyable work… [It] hits Tezuka's sweet spot
where his heart, his head and his sense of humor
meet in perfect company.”
—About.com
“To
match the beautiful outside, Camellia Nieh did a fantastic job
with the translation. The entire book was a fantastic read cover-to-cover
that I refused to put down. Whether you're just getting into manga,
or have been a fan for decades, it would be a shame not to
own this seminal title.”
—Japanator
“Black
Jack is a dramatic, nearly Byronic figure… With genre-spanning
stories—horror, sci-fi, romance—and Tezuka's signature
blend of drama, bathos and extreme broad comedy jammed together
on every page, Black Jack is a wild but extravagantly
entertaining ride that’s far more accessible than the author’s
novel-length epics.”
—Publishers
Weekly (starred review)
“The
stories are a unique mix of an Isaac Bashevis Singer morality
tale, and outstanding creative medicine. Though Black Jack
is aimed at a young audience, it has maturity not found in adult
works. It's a piece of comic art that excels in form, and message.”
—Ain’t
It Cool News
“Vertical,
Inc. has promised 17 volumes of Black Jack to be released every other month over the next three years.
That seems like a bold commitment, until you start reading the stories… From sores that look like faces (and talk, too) to eyes that see ghosts,
the busy doctors on ‘E.R.’ never had to deal with any of these unique patients. Osamu Tezuka’s
attention to detail on close-ups for surgeries and strange growths makes for some rubber-necking horror hard to turn away from. Black Jack is a 10.”
—Comics Village
“Black
Jack was Tezuka at his best; moving beyond his comfort zone,
away from licensable children’s robot characters (for him)
uncharted gekiga manga territory… You don’t
need a doctor’s prescription and there’s no complicated
follow-up medication or painful physical therapy—just some
serious entertainment from the pen of one of the world’s
masters of comics.”
—Let’s
Anime
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