Books: 20th Century Boys Vol. #2

Every once in a while I have what I think of as an out-of-the-body experience at a movie … the events in the movie seem real, and I seem to be a part of them. [Such films] engage me so immediately and powerfully that I lose my detachment, my analytical reserve. The movie’s happening, and it’s happening to me. — Roger Ebert, in his 1977 review of Star Wars

Four times in a row I sat down and tried to put into words how I felt about 20th Century Boys. And in the end I’ve resorted to quoting Ebert, because, damn it all, he said it best. The best manga make you forget you’re reading a manga. You are simply having an experience, one that stands off the page the way the best 3-D movies couldn’t ever stand off the screen.

The first volume of Boys dropped you right into both the story and Urasawa’s way of telling the story. Like his monster Monster before it, this one spans decades, continents, and whole families of characters, so just parking us at one end of the timeline and pushing us headfirst through the whole thing in chronological order wasn’t going to cut it. It’s told in timestreams as fragmented and cross-weaved as the plotlines for movies like Traffic or Syriana. After those so-called Hyperlink Films, where a word in one scene leads us to a major discovery in another, here’s Hyperlink Manga. In Boys, a single half-seen image can cut loose avalanches of memory and plotlines worthy of whole books unto themselves.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.