Review: MONSTER

Of course, perhaps the most unnerving sort of manga are those about people whose minds and hearts become twisted enough to kill their fellow men, the sort of person worth of the moniker "monster."

MONSTER, by Naoki Urasawa.  First published in 1994 and first published in North America in 2006.

    

PLOT:

Dr. Tenma was a skilled neurosurgeon with a promising career.  He was working with some of the best surgeons in Germany, as well as a promising engagement to the daughter of the director.  Everything was looking up for him...until Tenma defies his superior’s orders and operates on a gravely injured young boy instead of the mayor of the town.  

This single decision costs him his cushy position and his fiancée, and the former is only saved because his superiors die from poisoning.  Years later, Dr. Tenma is the head surgeon, but he suspects that the recent chain of murdered childless couples may be tied to the young boy he saved so long ago.

STORY:

Monster is a masterpiece, one of the best written mysteries to be found in manga.

That said, it's just as much a tragedy as it is a mystery, if simply because Dr. Tenma spends so much time suffering early on.  He’s a modest, intelligent, and generally moral man, but he is surrounded and exploited by his comically wicked superiors and shallow fiancée Eva.  Seriously, if they all had mustaches, they would be twirling them constantly while laughing at the poor people around them.  This is admittedly the weakest part of the volume– in his attempts to establish Tenma as the moral center of this story, Urasawa goes a little too far in making his most immediate opponents obviously evil. 

In less talented hands, Tenma would have been an unrealistic saint of a man.  Instead you feel his frustration and despair at the realization that his dedication to serving others had consequences he could have never expected.  While the cast is big, most of of them are mere bit players, with only a few notable figures standing out thus far.  There’s the friendly colleague who sympathizes with Tenma but is more interested in the material perks of the job than its politics.  There’s also the police inspector who begins trailing Tenma once he notices that a lot of the circumstantial evidence around the murders seems to point back to him. So far the biggest mystery is Johan himself, the serial killer at the heart of it all and the object of Tenma's obsession.

The pacing of Monster is taut, with every moment used to build backstory, motivation, or tension – not a panel is wasted.  It’s also interesting (but not uncharacteristic for Urasawa) in that the setting is in Germany, although Tenma himself is Japanese (with a name that is a reference to Astro Boy, years before he would create Pluto after this).   Specifically, he picks West Germany in the years leading up to and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a setting that explains both the bureaucracy and the casual corruption among public figures in this story.  Despite this, there's something about this story that feels timeless.  In the past, I’ve found Urasawa’s work to be a slow burn, the sort of manga that needed two or three volumes to truly get going, but Monster had my full attention from the start.  

ART:

The art is typical Urasawa: lovingly detailed backgrounds, a lot of nuanced emotion, and lots of guys with big jowls and wide, hawkish noses.  There's an almost cinematic quality to his paneling here, particularly with the back-and-forth shots during extended conversations.  It's not Urasawa's flashiest book, but it's a very elegantly put-together one.

RATING:

Monster is a masterful, well-drawn mystery, and it's pretty much a toss-up between this and Pluto as what I would recommend to anyone curious about Naoki Urasawa.

This manga is published by Viz.  This series is complete in Japan with 18 volumes available.  All 18 volumes have been released; the single volumes are out of print, but the 9 3-in-1 omnibuses are currently in print.