Monster: The Face of Evil

[punishermax]

Monster is the story of the brillant brain surgeon Dr. Tenma. Heis the rising star of a hospital in Germany after he saves the life of an opera singer. The director of the hospital dotes on him, the director's daughter is engaged to him and his peers adore him. Yet he feels regret, a poor man died while he wroked on the singer, despite the poor man coming to him first.

The director asks him to forget a young boy who had just been shot, in order to save the mayor of the town who had promised big donations to the hospital. Despite that, Tenma goes with his heart and saves the boy who came first.

The boy is saved, but the mayor dies....






Tenma loses his position as head of his department and is forced to a lower position. His fiance throws his ring back at him and he suffers a drunken breakdown. But...




Despite this tragic murder spree, a silver lining appears. Tenma is taken by the board and made the Chief of Surgery for his good works. Everything is wonderful, he is adored by his patients and all is well.

Nine years later....

A killing spree ends with a suspect in the hospital. Tenma saves him.


The man is terrified. He admits to Tenma that all his partners were murdered by the man who hired them. One night, a guard is murdered and the suspect escapes. Tenma chases him all the way to an abamdoned parking garage.

Where he meets, the monster.

The boy he lost everything for.



Johan reminds Tenma of a promise he made by the sleeping Johan's bedside. A wish that all those people who valued profit over lives, the people who had stopped Tenma's career were dead.



Johan murders the man in cold blood and begins to leave, as Tenma stares in shock.

Johan tells Tenma that he had died, that he was going to leave the world and be gone forever but...






So, how do you deal with the fact that you sacrificed everything, you fiance, your job, everything to save someone, and that person is the pure evil?

Monster is one of the best manga ever. Its totally finished so you can get through it all.

And best of all? Monster is one of those rare manga where the anime is just as good, if not better than the source material. Oh and get this, if you have Netflix?

The entire anime is on Instant right now.

Go and watch it for the love of god.

Medium: manga Title: Monster Creator: Naoki Urasawa



 

Comments

[flash_fan]

Wow, I despise manga and anime with a couple exceptions but this is AMAZING. Maybe I'm only exposed to mainstream anime and shoujo manga.

[glimmung]

Just like western comics there is a lot a variation. Most is garbage though.

[punishermax]

The list I usually give for good manga and anime is as follows:

One Piece
Monster
Panty and Stocking (this is probably the most controversial but fuck it, It owns)
Anything by Jungi Ito
Evangelion
Studio Ghibli stuff
Yotsuba
Azumaga Daio
Full Metal Alchemist

[theredhood]

How's rebuild turning out? I kicked the anime bug years ago and I'm hesitant to rebuy EVA yet again. Is Shinji less of an emo non-protagonist this time around?

RE: your list; They're all fine and well, but not really stuff I'd recommend to people who aren't fans of the medium. Monster, Junji Ito and the Ghibli stuff kinda transcend tastes...

Yotsuba took me by surprise since I'd written it off as "Country with weird ten year old girl fetish writes yet another book about a ten year old girl! Shock!" and instead it's totally brilliant slice of life stuff akin to Calvin and Hobbes.

One Piece, Panty and Stocking and FMA though are pretty much the kind of things non fans have in mind when they rally against the medium.

[biod]

"Is Shinji less of an emo non-protagonist this time around".
Oh, you have no idea. Rebuild is what Eva would have been like if it had stayed on its meds; still nightmare inducing at times but a lot more stable.

[silvercatmon]

Manga I would recommend:
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (A humanoid robot in post-apocalyptic Japan. A whole lot of interesting nothing happens. I don't think it's been officially translated.)
Yotsuba&! (As someone else said it has got a Calvin and Hobbes feel.)
Pluto (Retelling of a Astro Boy story "The Greatest Robot on Earth", I'm still reading and love it)
Monster (Of course)
Death Note (This is really good, but is longer than it should have been. It was so popular the creator extended the story. Now there is some really good stuff in the extended part, but you will know when it should have ended. Try the live action version, a good retelling of the story)
Fruits Basket (Shoujo, comedy romance at it's best. You will see all the tropes, but it's still good.)
Fullmetal Alchemist (Read a couple of volumes and what I seen is good. FMA is over hyped and could be considered overrated, but that doesn't mean it's not good)
Barefoot Gen (Set right after bombing of Hiroshima. Very serious with shocking comedy. I couldn't keep reading.)
Kodocha - Sana's Stage (Comedy with some romance. I love this series. You watch Sana grow up and part of her never does.)
20th Century Boys (Haven't read it yet, but heard it is really good)
Akira (Heard great things about it. What you see in the anime is just a very small story)

[nezchan]

Ohgod, I am SUCH a fan of YKK! It's one of the most beautiful, lyrical comics I've ever read. If I could come up with something a fraction that good, I'd be overjoyed.

[shanejayell]

GREAT series. *nods* It was just... SO good. :D

[shanejayell]

Oooh, I loved YKK too. I even have a Cafe Alpha jacket a friend made for me. :D

[captain_ziggy]

The genres and options tend to get a great deal broader when you move out of shojo and shonen and take a look at seinen. (It's possible that I could say that for josei too, but that would require someone to actually bother to translate more than, like, three josei titles.) With shonen, most of the stuff is dominated with "headstrong, book-dumb hero teams up with his pals and fights an array of increasingly powerful foes" thing because everyone remembers how DBZ made a shitton of money.

Seinen, on the other hand, doesn't appear to have one dominating narrative (unless you count the whole moe slice of life trend, but it's best not to get into that can of worms. The point is they haven't been doing that for 10+ years like with shonen action series.) and turns out things like:

Pulp Fiction homages about immortal 1930s gangsters

Tokugawa-era meditations on the nature and consequences of revenge

Tokugawa-era meditations on holding on to or letting go of the past

Dark comedies about psychopomps-for-hire

Badass viking sagas

Gory tales about a boy and his sociopath alien parasite of a left hand

Diametrically opposed buddy-cop superheroes developing Seriously Intense Feelings towards each other

And then some.

Not to say that seinen is inherently better -- just that you might not find some of them quite as off-puttingly samey as what you've read before

[espanolbot]

Eeee! Baccano! :D Baccano! is love!

[captain_ziggy]

Yes it is, though I'm a bit sad that we didn't get to see Drugs & the Dominoes fully adapted because of time and cultural hangups about drugs. Luck Gandor basically gets to be Awesomeness Incarnate in that book ("Oh, don't mind me. I'll just be over here, tearing out the throat of a guy three times my size with the jagged bones of my own severed hand. Also, I just single-handedly -quite literally- saved you from falling into the same sort of life that kinda fucked me up. You doin' okay?"), and it is the GREATEST THING EVER.

AND IT DIDN'T GET ANIMATED. Boo.

[biod]

All we can do is pray for a second season.

[espanolbot]

Apparently it wasn't that popular back in its home country, so it wasn't renewed for another season (not that it mattered, the point of the show is that a story doesn't really have a start or beginning, so things happening after the action stops, like the cameo of Maria the Mexican Samurai early in the series, imply that the characters kept having adventures beyond what was shown on screen).

Another season'd be nice though. Like 92 year old Claire and his extensive clan of kids, grandkids and great grandkids would have been interesting to see.

[grazzt]

Oh man, I love Kurosagi. It's such a great concept, especially with the overuse of "psychic detectives" on TV nowadays.