Black Jack, Volume 4 Book

Black Jack is a mysterious and charismatic young genius surgeon who travels the world performing amazing and impossible medical feats. Though a trained physician, he refuses to accept a medical license due to his hatred and mistrust of the medical community's hypocrisy and corruption. This leads Black Jack to occasional run-ins with the authorities, as well as from gangsters and criminals who approach him for illegal operations.

Black Jack charges exorbitant fees for his services, the proceeds from which he uses to fund environmental projects and to aid victims of crime and corrupt capitalists. But because Black Jack keeps his true motives secret, his ethics are perceived as questionable and he is considered a selfish, uncaring devil. The Black Jack series is told in short stories. Each volume will contain 16-20 stories, each running approximately 20-24 pages in length.

Black Jack is recognized as Osamu Tezuka's third most famous series, after Astro Boy and Kimba, the White Lion.

Library Journal

A mysterious, scarred surgeon charges outlandish fees for fantastic operations like body transplants, but he usually operates for free and also administers justice. Yet everything has a cost, psychic or financial, and both to patient and to doctor. Black Jack is no saint, and while he can deliver medical miracles, he cannot find peace himself. In Volume 4, Black Jack rehabilitates a beloved teacher gone on the skids, bullies a high school radio personality into silence to let her throat heal, and enlists residents of an apartment building to save the life of a militant who had tried to blow them up. Tezuka was known in Japan as the god of manga, and these quirky parables with twist endings show his mastery of cinematographic storytelling. VERDICT This could be his manga most resonant for Americans, with health-care reform on everyone's wish list. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a superdoctor like him? Maybe. The series ran to 17 Japanese volumes and won a Kodansha Manga Award, and this edition was just nominated for an Eisner. Older teens and up.—M.C.