Review: MASTER KEATON

Let's wrap up this year's Old School Month with an old-school adventure from one of manga's most notable creators.

MASTER KEATON (Masuta Kiton), written by Naoki Urasawa, Hokusei Katsushika, and Takashi Nagasaki, with art by Naoki Urasawa.  First published in 1988 and first published in North America in 2014.

PLOT:

Taichi Hiraga-Keaton is a man of many talents.  He's an insurance investigator for the auction house Lloyd's, he's an archaeology lecturer who travels the world, and he's a former high-ranking SAS member with a particular knack for survival skills.  His jobs take him all over the world, from seaside Grecian villages to the middle of the western Chinese deserts, and along the way he solves everything from murder mysteries to his own family woes with his father and daughter.

STORY:

It's hard to believe that I even have reason to talk about this series.  The manga of Naoki Urasawa are frequently critically praised, but once you get past works like Pluto or Monster they can get a lot trickier to sell to the younger folk who tend to read manga, and Master Keaton might be one of the hardest sells in his library of works.  It's not quite an adventures series, it's not quite a mystery series, and it's not quite a character drama, but somehow manages to be all three at once.

I've often described the titular Keaton as a combination of Indiana Jones, MacGuyver, and your dad, and I've yet to find a pithier summary of him.  He's very unassuming and congenial, but that belies his intelligence, his keen observational skills, and his resourcefulness.  He can fashion a tool or weapon out of just about anything he can find (or shove in his pockets) and he's just as comfortable grappling as he is with a knife or a sword.  When you phrase it like that he sounds almost too perfect, like some sort of proto-Da Vinci Code story.

Luckily, the writers do bring Keaton down to earth once he starts interacting with his family.  His family life is rather strained, as he's a divorcee who lives with his womanizing dad and teenage daughter while pining for his ex-wife (who left to focus more on her career as a mathematician).  There's a lot of good character building in these moments, but it still comes off as a bit idealized in how everyone is so willing to forgive Keaton for his faults.  He may not be able to maintain a romantic relationship and his daughter is more of a parent than he is, but look at all the awesome stuff he can do!  It seems just about every chapter has a point where the story stops dead to talk about Keaton's mad skills or stories from the SAS days that have prepared him for literally anything, and it starts to get a little ridiculous.

You do at least have to give the writers credit for the sheer variety of stories on display here.  There are epic tales where Keaton has to survive in the desert, but there are also more low-key chapters such as the one where Keaton gets dragged across the German-Swiss border by an old woman with a tragic past.  Most of them wrap up in a single chapter, but they're all so well-paced and well-written that they feel like they could go on even longer.  There's also a genuine appreciation for the many places and cultures that Keaton encounters and it's clear that a lot of research went into this series.  It's not the easiest series to categorize, but Master Keaton has enough going for it that even people who aren't as old as the protagonist can get something out of it.

ART:

While the authorship of this manga has a rather troubled history, the artwork is unmistakably Urasawa's, right down to Keaton's big ol' hawkish schnozz.  The backgrounds clearly draw on a lot of real-world references and are drawn (or traced) beautifully.  Urasawa keeps the panels rather compact, but he knows how to lay them out and frame his images in a way that makes the best of his space and keeps the action easy to follow.  There's even a bit of color art, although it's mostly done in the muted orange and reds typically seen in Viz omnibuses.

RATING:

Master Keaton's thrills might be kind of muted and more targeted to adults than shonen-reading teens, but it's interesting, nuanced, and just all around marvelous.

This series is published by Viz.  This series is complete in Japan with 18 volumes.  All 18 volumes were published over 12 omnibuses, and are currently in print.