I once theorized that the difference between Japanese and American comics is that the former are about characters and stories while the latter are about franchises. I’m in the process of being proven wrong about this — or maybe it’s just the scope of the theory’s in need of revision. Case in point: the Blood: the Last Vampire continuity. It started with a short animated film, and then was rebooted into the Blood+ continuity: a long animated TV series (two seasons), a set of novels based on the TV series, a manga based rather loosely on the TV series, and now a new prequel manga series.

And yet, through all of these variations and offshoots, certain things remain consistent — much as they do, I suppose, in American franchise comics. The Hulk is always green and angry, Tony Stark is a genius playboy alcoholic, and Saya of Blood+ is always a mixture of girlish naïveté and deadly precision. Case in point once again: Blood+ Adagio, the newest installment in the franchise. It’s a prequel series, set in the early years of the Russian revolution, and purports to fill in backstory as to what happened to Saya and her compatriots during that time.

About halfway through volume five of Black Lagoon comes a realization about who and what has been driving this story. We know it’s been about the hapless Japanese ex-salaryman Rock and his newfound life as a member of the mercenary crew of the Black Lagoon, but how it is about Rock and his new life is also crucial. You can’t live a criminal life without being a criminal, and up until now Rock has bent over backwards to avoid getting his hands too dirty. Given that throughout volume five he’s bracketed on one side by Revy (gun-toting madwoman) and by Balalaika on the other (ex-Russian special forces power broker and death merchant), his odds of keeping either his hands or his nose clean asymptotically approach zero the further you go.

It had to happen at some point. As of the last volume, Rock and Revy had arrived in Japan to take care of business, only to get embroiled in a local war between rival yakuza factions and Hotel Moscow. Worse, the war centers around Yukio, the teenage girl who’s the heir to the Washimine gangster family, and who fully intends to take over the center seat and steer her clan back to something like honor. Her rivals find this laughable, and the first half or so of the book is taken up with a massive brawl wherein Revy, Yukio’s personal bodyguard Ginji, and Rock all descend on a bowling alley where Yukio’s being held hostage. (Revy’s usual badassery is on display here, but Rock isn’t exactly useless here: to bring down a fleeing bad guy, he soaps up a stretch of floor and wields a bowling pin.)

Private Keiji Kiriya lives in a nightmare. Literally. Every day he wakes up, works out, dons his suit of powered super-armor, dives into combat to defend Earth from invasion by the alien “Mimics”, gets killed — and wakes up back in his bunk to do it all over again. By his own count he has been doing this over one hundred and fifty times. Some days he manages to live another few minutes longer on the battlefield. Some days he never makes it out of his barracks. And occasionally, very occasionally, he discovers another permutation — another wrinkle in the fabric of his temporal pocket, another way to not just push the envelope but make it bend to his will.

This probably makes All You Need Is Kill sound like a mixture of Starship Troopers and Groundhog Day. Yes, I do mean the Bill Murray movie, which has over time stood up as a quiet little classic. Kill has something of the same premise — you only truly move into the future by learning to change — but applies it in ways that make it leapfrog over its source material and turn into something genuinely different. It starts as a war story, introduces time travel and causality, then touches on determinism and free will, planetary ecology, exobiology, terraforming, the intra-species barrier, and then finally shoots for the moon and ends up in love-story territory. This should not all work, but it does.

There are moments when volume 5 of Black Jack is unbelievably disappointing. There are also as many moments, if not more so, when it is elating and exciting and challenging. In short, when it is the Black Jack — and the Osamu Tezuka — that we have come to expect and savor. It’s just that this time your mileage will vary. A lot.

It’s moments like this when I see why the original Viz edition of Black Jack — even if it was only two volumes — opted for the greatest-hits-anthology approach. Not everything from a person’s lifetime output is going to be equally good, and that applied to Tezuka as well. But Vertical, Inc. has pledged to stick with the warts-and-all approach to publishing Black Jack in English, all seventeen-something volumes of it. Still, one of the benefits of that level of completism is seeing how even Tezuka’s worst material was still at least interesting

Here is your analogy for the day: Gestalt is like a really good hamburger. The ingredients come as no surprise, and neither is the form they come in — but is there anyone here who doesn’t like a really good hamburger? (Apologies to the vegetarians in the audience.)

The book amounts to a generic Fantasy Adventure Quest template: it not only breaks no new ground, but goes back and puts parking stripes on the old ground. And yet the whole thing is fun, in big part because of the attitude. It doesn’t take itself seriously and it doesn’t try to, either. It’s leavened with cheek and good humor, and so more than makes up for being unoriginal by having high spirits. It also sports a major selling point in that it’s an early creation from Yun Kouga, she of Loveless fame, a series I haven’t yet read but which has been next to impossible not to know about.

The more I read of Pluto, the less averse I am to the idea of remakes. Or, rather, of an artist of high caliber having his work revisited by another artist in the same stratosphere. Osamu Tezuka is about as up-there as manga artists get, and Naoki Urasawa has been racing up the rungs of the same ladder for some time now. Pluto is Urasawa’s reworking of one of Tezuka’s best-loved stories from Astro-Boy (aka Tetsuwan Atomu), and the best thing I can say about it is that it does not for one moment feel like a “remake”. It stands alone.

The third volume is a frenzy of twofold plotting and character development, with a fair amount of page time occupied by Uran, Atom’s sister. Just as Atom himself stepped into the picture at the end of volume 1, Uran (short for Uranium, mayhaps?) popped in at the end of volume 2 — just in time to calm down a batch of escaped zoo animals. She’s as cheerfully blithe as Atom is focused and serious, but maybe that’s just her way of dealing with her peculiar sensitivity towards things around her. She’s the sonar to Atom’s radar: he can sniff out a robot that looks like a human, and she can sense disturbances in the Force, sorta-kinda, that bespeak of bad tidings for both machines and men.

At the tender age of ten, Johannes Krauser II picked up a boning knife and slashed the throats of his hapless parents, leaving their lifeless corpses bathing in pools of gore. Prison’s puny walls couldn’t hold a specimen of pure evil like him forever, though … and while locked in his cell, he realized the only music that could keep him from killing again was the violent sound of DEATH METAL. And so after his release, he formed blood bonds with two other madmen (Jagi, bass; Camus, drums) and created the most terrifying onslaught of evil-core death metal ever to sweep the face of this undeserving earth … DETROIT METAL CITY!

Except that his real name is Soichi Negishi and he’s really a demure young man who loves his mom, folksy pop ballads, and a nice comfy sweater (not in that order). But put him on stage and wrap him in a costume that Gene Simmons would find gaudy, and lo’n’behold he turns into an earsplitting underground devil of blood-sucking sonic blasphemy. “I am a terrorist from hell!” he bellows in Detroit Metal City’s opening panels. (The rest of the lyrics to that song sound like what you’d hear from the mother-rapers and father-stabbers [and father-rapers, and mother-stabbers] that shared the lockup with Arlo Guthrie when he got picked up for littering and creating a public nuisance.)

If there’s a difference between a cliché and a trope, it’s that a trope can be the start of something great, but a cliché is where things end up, often being not-so-great. Nightmare Inspector has its own internal set of tropes, but they never bottom out into cliché. We have Hiruko the baku, an intriguing narrator with motives of his own, with an instinct for things being askew. Said instinct leads him into the ugly spaces in people’s lives that are never what they seem like at first (or even second) glance. Think of Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret, turning over rocks in Paris’s darker corners and finding human monsters. Here, it’s 1920s Tokyo, and it’s every bit as decadent and seamy if not more so.

It’s either great or terrible that the first chapter of volume 7 is the best thing in the whole book — possibly even the series as a whole. Great, because right from the start you get a sense of just what sort of heights this series can rise to. Terrible, because while the rest of the adventures in the book are still inspired, they come in a distant second. Put this episode last and it would have had even more impact. Said episode gives us a manga-ka who’s come to the Silver Star to have one of his dreams investigated — a dream which is itself in the form of a four-panel manga. The whole way this is depicted is nothing short of brilliant; it’s as much a commentary on manga as an art form as it is a clever use of the medium for the sake of the story.

Dogs: Prelude is exactly that — a teaser for the main attraction to come, which explains why it’s numbered “0” and is entertaining without actually adding up to much. I suspect that’s not entirely the book’s fault, though: if you walk in knowing this is going to be all setup and introduction, it’s pretty enjoyable. That said, it’s still only a stage-setter: the real opening act comes in August, when volume 1 proper of Dogs hits the shelves. I have to be fair, though, and review what I’ve read and not what I hope to read.

Set in some unnamed European city, Dogs 0 compiles four stories about the intersecting lives of a whole slew of low- and no-lifes: gun- and knife-toting assassins, camera-snapping “information dealers”, doe-eyed mutant maidens in distress, and a couple of warring Cosa Nostra gangs for good measure. It’s got a fair dose of the absurdly over-the-top action spectacle of Black Lagoon (another fine Viz presentation), plus some of the noir grit and tough-guy moralism of Frank Miller’s Sin City. I wouldn’t yet put it up there with the former, let alone the latter, but my curiosity’s been piqued.

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.