Black Jack (manga)

Black Jack (Japanese: ブラック・ジャック, Hepburn: Burakku Jakku) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Osamu Tezuka in the 1970s, dealing with the medical adventures of the title character, doctor Black Jack.

Black Jack consists of hundreds of short, self-contained stories that are typically about 20 pages long. Black Jack has also been animated into an OVA, two television series (directed by Satoshi Kuwahara and Tezuka’s son Makoto Tezuka) and two films. Black Jack is Tezuka’s second most famous manga, after Astro Boy. In 1977, it won the 1st Kodansha Manga Award for shōnen.[2] About.com’s Deb Aoki lists Black Jack as the best “re-issue of previously released material” of 2008.[3] Osamu Dezaki’s anime film adaptation, Black Jack: The Movie, won Best Animation Film at the 1996 Mainichi Film Awards. It has since then became Tezuka’s best selling manga with over 176 million copies in circulation which makes it the sixth best-selling manga series in history.

Most of the stories involve Black Jack doing some good deed, for which he rarely gets recognition—often curing the poor and destitute for free, or teaching the arrogant a lesson in humility. They sometimes end with a good, humane person enduring hardship, often unavoidable death, to save others.