One of my favorite comic creators right now is manga creator Naoki Urasawa, though I don�t think even a single page of Urasawa� work has ever been published in this country to date. now let star it.

• Born in 2nd Jan. 1960, Osaka-Metropolis
• Graduate of Economy in Meisei University
• New Manga Artist Award of Shogakukan in 1982
• Début ; Return(1981) with beta!!
  
• The 35th Shogakukan Manga Award in 1990(by Yawara!)
• The 3rd TEZUKA Osamu Award in 1999 by Asahi Newspaper, Grand Prix(by Monster)
• Work list ; Master Keaton, Keaton's Zoology, The Dancing Policeman, Jigoro!, N.A.S.A., Pineapple Army, Yawara!, Happy!, Monster, The 20th century boys, and pluto
  

Maybe there are almost no manga fans that do not agree Urasawa is one of the representative manga artists in his comtemporaries(1980~90s). Neat and good-looking dessin, well-considered mise-en-scène, and well-balanced story(by author himself or not) are very high level even in most of all mangas. By accident he went to Shogakukan after graduating university, to which manga fans have to thank much.

Of course, his works don't have as high quality as now. The beginning of his first serious hit work Yawara! is clearly inferior to Master Keaton or Monster in drawings. His real style can be found at late three works - Master Keaton, Happy!, and Monster. His characteristics such as realistic depiction, developing story with tension, and precise knowledge of background is complete in these. Somewhat thick lines in Keaton, were changed to thinner and delicate one. His recent mangas are always in Top 5 ranks in the point of drawings and details.
His drawing of the characters is very sincere and to the details, and he is one of the rare mangakas that continuously try to avoid the problem 'similar looks of the characters' together with ISSHIKI Makoto. If you see the various faces in Yawara and Keaton, you will be aware of his endeavors. His ambidexterity is not confined to not only drawing level but also to his manga contents that invokes the humanistic and universal sympathy so effectively. Master Keaton is the most successful work in this point, and Yawara! were not more than a trite sport manga without it.

He streniously endeavors to make his character and theme various ; Judo[Yawara!], tennis[Happy!], mercenary[Pineapple Army], operative[Master Keaton], ripper and medical doctor[Monster] etc. To say nothing of the popular manga genre(sports and detective), he succeeded at the theme such as Monster strange to himself from then on. The dancing policeman and Yawara! are much optimistic, but the later works are darker and enlightening the base of human minds. The factor is not eminent in Keaton, but clear in Happy! and Monster, which has to be viewed as a drama describing mental phenomena with horror. The 20th century boys is surely dark mystery(not light). I want to know what will be the next work. ^^
His selection of manga backgrounds are toward Western-European taste ; Pineapple Army[USA-Europe], Master Keaton[Europe, mainly England], Monster[Germany & eastern Europe]. And other works backgrounded in Japan shows little Japanese color, too. Is there any reason he likes Europe in special? ^^

TWENTIETH CENTURY BOYS is yet to be completely translated, but after 17 volumes of scanlations, I feel confidant in describing it as Naoki Urasawa�s masterpiece and an essential slab of manga.

MONSTER had an ensemble cast, but it never seemed that Urasawa knew what to do with the ensemble � most characters ended up standing around at the finale, having never found their place in the plot.

TWENTIETH CENTURY BOYS fixes that. TWENTIETH CENTURY BOYS has an ensemble where each character has an opportunity to shine.

MONSTER lost me in the labyrinth of its plot. By the end, there were large chunks of plot I found myself struggling to explain to myself as to how they fit in.

TWENTIETH CENTURY BOYS fixes that even as it grows more ambitious�there are unexplained mysteries, but the larger sweep of the plot has clarity despite the fact it takes place during no less than three separate points in time. TWENTIETH CENTURY BOYS follows its main characters through their childhood (roughly between 1973 to 1977 or so), their �present� of 1997 to 2000, and their �future� (2012 to ?), all nearly simultaneously, never once confusingly so.

In MONSTER, there is a thick atmosphere of death and murder, but by the end, too few members of the cast had truly met any sort of end and I believe the work suffered for it as a result. TWENTIETH CENTURY BOYS fixes that�cast members die but each death has meaning long afterwards. While MONSTER merely hinted at tragic childhoods, TWENTIETH CENTURY BOYS takes the opposite route, making sure the reader experiences the loss of Urasawa�s beloved childhood summers without ever losing sight of the dark moments, the sad moments childhood can have � mired in nostalgia without becoming too mired in sentiment (well, it�s a little mired in sentiment, but my guard goes down with manga and sentiment, I think because of the foreign-ness factor).

MONSTER is thousands of pages long, but by the end it feels like little was ever truly at stake, an interesting neo-Nazi subplot aside. TWENTIETH CENTURY BOYS fixes that�the stakes are global, and eventually the cast is global.

Seventeen volumes of TWENTIETH CENTURY BOYS are available currently online; after five of those, I became convinced that AKIRA was happening, LONE WOLF and CUB was happening, just no one had goddamn noticed yet. An overreaction? Probably. But that is ultimately the frustrating thing about mainstream comic fans�s reaction to manga � manga becomes this thing for �Year in Review� specials where various people who apparently don�t read manga feel free to pronounce �Manga means Marvel�s wrong about teenage girls!� But what I still don�t feel is any sense that if a work like AKIRA were being created�not high art, but a real eye-opening slab of entertainment� that we�d be aware of it. That anyone would give a damn.

2004 wasn�t so much a bad year for comics�great comics came out same as every year�as it was an awful year for the discussion and context of comics. What I mean: the Big Two seemed especially effective in capturing the discussion and defining the context in 2004 through massive hype, a series of increasingly awful, creatively bankrupt works, and staggeringly idiotic publishing decisions (variant covers? Seriously?). Its frustrating in a year like that to think the following: �AKIRA could be coming out regularly in Japan and we�d have no idea, and instead all I�m hearing about is whether or not the Green Goblin hired a French hooker to sleep with Gwen Stacy while he watched in the closet� (or whatever J. Michael Stracynski innovation is the Hot Topic du Jour). It is even more frustrating to think that it could be available, a mouse-click away, and still no one would notice, no one would care except maybe, possibly come December when its time to say �Well, at least there�s manga.�

Naoki Urasawa saved 2004 for me, and that�s why I�m writing this essay � his work was a big reminder that pictures in boxes next to each other could be really fucking fun, arena-rock fun goddammit, during a time in comics when �fun� seems increasingly defined (again, in the conversation and context moreso than the reality) by either awful pap from the mainstream or really tiny, insubstantial, �please don�t sneeze or we�ll turn to dust� indie comics with no real ambitions. So for that I am thankful to Urasawa.

Anyway, back to TWENTIETH CENTURY BOYS:

Look: I don�t think it is AKIRA or LONE WOLF. But the thing about TWENTIETH CENTURY BOYS is its momentum is so propulsive, the cliffhangers so relentless, and Urasawa so skilled at pacing, leaping between three different time periods in Greatest Hits fashion, that within its current, even moreso than MONSTER, the reader can�t help but be swept up in it. But in taking a step back from it� its actually a little silly, in its own ways (and all entertainment is a little silly in its own way, so take that as you will).

I�ve never read a LEFT BEHIND novel, but TWENTIETH CENTURY BOYS is likely similar to one of those (without the overt religious content). Its concerns are nothing less than flat-out batshit apocalyptic � the end of the world is always around the corner in the series, and 17 volumes in, I believe I have read about 3 separate apocalypses so far. There�s something inherently ridiculous about the apocalypse to me, something inherently corny, I think � the apocalypse is for spastics and people going door to door. TWENTIETH CENTURY BOYS earns some points with me over LEFT BEHIND in that the apocalypse it envisions takes as a starting point the Japanese cult obsession, the Sarin attacks, etc., material from current events, rather than religious hysteria. But the connotation lingers.

I think TWENTIETH CENTURY BOYS triumphs when it defines the apocalypse not as the end of the world, but as the end of childhood.

Seeing how much I�ve written, I should probably mention the premise? Yeah, that�s not a bad idea: in 1973-1977, a group of childhood friends plays various games in which they imagine they�re saving the world, having the kind of mystery-laden childhood that calls to mind Stephen King. In 1997, one of them calling himself �Friend� has started a doomsday cult and set into motion nefarious plans involving biological warfare, etc. which are identical to those imagined in 1973-1977. The other friends unite and struggle to remember their childhoods in order to defeat �Friend� in a struggle to take place on the New Years of 2000. And in 2012, the survivors and others deal with the repercussions of that struggle. And all three of those time periods are presented nearly simultaneously.

There are supernatural elements, science fiction elements, horror elements, even a damn giant robot-- but they all connect back to the main characters� lost childhood. To ruin one of the book�s greatest pleasures, the giant robot is imagined in the 1970s by the children as the sort of VOLTRON-ish design common to manga. The adults in 2000 find instead nothing more than a sorry approximation of what those children thought a giant robot should be like�the book even acknowledges that giant robots could never work, that the robot�s legs could never be built in a way to support the weight. So when the robot appears, it slowly becomes more sad than scary, all compromises and no wonder�a 20-story metaphor perhaps for the adulthoods the main characters have been forced to awaken to over the course of the series.

Again and again, the characters are forced to reexamine their memories, travel back literally or figuratively to 1970�s Japan and try to understand who they were then and who they are in their adulthood. In the present and the future, apocalypses mount and mount and mount until they slowly begin to start to lose their power, but that link to the character�s childhood charges the book�s atmosphere enough to overcome those problems, even as the plot spirals out of control and the book begins to randomly follow post-apocalyptic bikers (well post-one of the books� apocalypses, anyway).

Again, each character�s motivation is thoroughly defined, their past carefully splayed out and examined. Again, Urasawa drops perfectly paced action sequences, but now an added flavor: pop culture references. A series named specifically after a T-Rex song is only the start of a slew of references: a Robert Crumb homage even appears for a single page (when was the last time you saw an American creator bother to do that for a Japanese creator, let alone Crumb?), the Japanese 1970s bowling fad is a major plot point, old manga series that the main characters would have read in 1977 like the very cool Ashita No Joe, old toys, etc. Not so many as to overwhelm the series, but absolutely a background noise to the proceedings. I won�t spoil the origin of Friend�s symbol, but that alone is a source of no small joy.

TWENTIETH CENTURY BOYS takes a 20th century boyhood as omens, and ends up feeling millennial in a way almost no English-speaking creator was capable of (well, the INVISIBLES, aside, but I�m trying to be hyperbolic). Only Warren Ellis�s PLANETARY maybe looks at the stuff of childhood in a similar way, but from a distance, detached, untouched and clean from it; in TWENTIETH CENTURY BOYS, the characters are more infected by it, they lived through it�they�re not coroners; they�re survivors. But look: that pleasure is more on the edges and less the point than it is in PLANETARY, say.

The point of TWENTIETH CENTURY BOYS is the page-turner feel of it. As I said, the grocery-store blockbuster paperback feel. For many of you, that is not something you would likely be interested in. As much as I�d like to expound on how it looks at childhood, TWENTIETH CENTURY BOYS is more about the vulgarity of its plot, and that stuff is just the stuff on the sides that gets me excited. More time is spent trying to save the Pope from Assassin #13 or on a riveting jailbreak sequence, say, than on, you know, �Characters infected by childhood apocalypses� or whatever the shit I was going on about a paragraph ago. But its that emotion underneath the plot, the fact that its there at all, that to me makes TWENTIETH CENTURY BOYS so much more thrilling than it already is in entertainment terms.

In purely entertainment terms, its what I imagine watching microscopic organism societies in a petri dish is like. TWENTIETH CENTURY BOYS mutates constantly over the life of the series from cult horror to crime thriller to science fiction piece to religious epic to post-apocalyptic action nonsense to�on and on and on, always at 200 mph, daring you to keep up. Again, it is the cliffhanger to cliffhanger excitement of Urasawa that I would define as the hallmark of his work.

But I think there are themes underneath TWENTIETH CENTURY BOYS and its surface pleasure is so considerable that I can strongly recommend it (I just hope he ends this one better than he did MONSTER).

Awards

• New Manga Artist Award of Shogakukan in 1982.
• Début ; Return(1981).
• The 35th Shogakukan Manga Award in 1990(by Yawara!).
• The 1997 (1st) Media Arts Festival award for Excellence. (For Monster).
• The 3rd TEZUKA Osamu Award in 1999 by Asahi Newspaper, Grand Prix. (For Monster).
• The 2002 (6th) Media Arts Festival award for Excellence. (For 20th Century Boys).

Sophie's World is a curious book. It is, at its core, a much-simplified but well-written exposition of the history of Western philosophy, covering many of the major thinkers and providing capsule summaries of their major thoughts. But such a description fails to capture all the tricks that Gaarder pulls with this book, for Sophie's World is also a book within a book within a book, a meditation on the free will of fictional characters, a mystery, and a political manifesto. Unfortunately, I can't really say that I liked Gaarder's tricks too much; however, the strength of the "philosophy lectures" deservedly earned my respect.

The book begins with some pretty vapid observations, a disappointing start for a novel that is supposed to seriously chart the progress of philosophy. At one point early in the book Gaarder writes:

The book really starts picking up when it starts discussing Descartes. Gaarder presents an excellent overview of Descartes's major thoughts, including his "Cogito ergo sum" and his epistemology (both of which I've studied). Naturally there's nothing particularly deep here, but Gaarder gives us enough to understand the core of Descartes's basic beliefs.

The philosophy just keeps getting better from this point onward. Gaarder does an amazing job with Kant, although my familiarity with some of his thoughts probably helped me navigate through the many, many points that Gaarder brings up about that amazing man. He also explicates well the central concepts of empiricism and Marxism. The sections that I thought were weaker involved Romanticism and Existentialism. Finally, Gaarder unleashes a truly delicious attack on the New Age phenomena that also doubles as a defense of Western philosophy as an appropriate field of study (despite being written by dead white males).

The chief strength of Gaarder's presentation of philosophy is his ability to draw connections between the different philosophers. So, for instance, Gaarder will trace a line of thought that begins with Aristotle and journeys through Aquinas and many of the more modern philosophers, or he will show that the Existentialists are concerned with issues that the early Christian theologists were also concerned with. In doing so, Gaarder showcases philosophy as a process, one that builds off previous ideas and presents new ones on top of them. Suddenly Marx begins to make sense against his Hegelian background, Simon de Beauvoir starts sounding reasonable against her Existentialist background, and Aquinas's project becomes clear, especially in relation to the Church's relationship to history at the time. Gaarder also provides ample space for Eastern philosophy, pointing out, for example, the parallels between the Buddha and (of all people) David Hume.

One problem that I had with Gaarder's presentation of philosophy, however, is the inordinate amount of time he spends talking about women, women's issues, and women's place in philosophy. While I agree with everything he writes, he spends entirely too much of the book having Sophie object violently to some anti-femininist philosopher, and he takes pains to point out what each philosopher thinks about women. Rather than going off about women, I would rather have had Gaarder spend a little more time exploring an interesting aspect of the philosopher's thinking.

What about the book's non-philosophical sections? Too be honest, I thought the narrative in which Gaarder's lessons are given was pretty dumb. For most of the book I just breezed through the narrative, looking for the next chapter heading that would let me know that some real philosophy was about to take place. I think I understand the point that Gaarder is making with the narrative--it's hard not to, after all--but spending upwards of a quarter of the book on it is really a waste of time. And the point he's making, with all of its meta-implications, is not that exciting anyway. I suppose tastes will differ, but for my part I thought the only parts of Sophie's World worth reading were the philosophy bits.

I do have this to say in favor of the narrative, however: although the style of the book is deceptively simple, almost like a children's book, Gaarder intentionally puts in little disturbing details that make it clear that Sophie is not living in a perfect world. Sophie's father is away several months a year and her mother may have a boyfriend; Joanna's father is a greedy capitalist and her mother a trophy wife; and Sophie doesn't exactly have the best relationship with her own mother. Aside from the philosophy, I thought these blemishes were the most interesting parts of Sophie's world, but ultimately I felt that they served only as distractions to the real meat of this otherwise engrossing book.

Copyright © 2002 Steven Wu