Age Rating: Older Teen
Genre: Mystery/Thiller
Price: $12.99
Urasawa has been the poster child for great manga, and 20th Century Boys has consistently been a great example of what the man can do when he puts his mind to a project. Contrasting adult versions of child characters in various timelines is the hallmark of the series, and he performs intricate time jumps in a way that allows you to see the late past, recent past, and present that is not overly confusing. Throughout the volume, Urasawa develops a very organic progression of events as we get to see more of the Shogun character and various flashbacks that start to explain exactly what happened on Bloody New Years Eve.
For those of the non-initiated, imagine that your greatest childhood imaginative stories had been turned into sick reality. What if you had planned for a group of your friends to save the world from a terrible evil, only to grow up and realize that evil was doing exactly what you had scripted for it to do 20 years prior? This is the fate of Kenji Endo, a regular guy with an extraordinary imagination. His childhood dreams have been converted into terror by an organization/cult called the Friends, and now, he, as the “prophet” of the actions of the Friends, must gather his grade school friends to stop them.
Seven volumes into the series, we see Urasawa start to come back to the original characters of the series (for a time, the story has been focusing on Kana Endo, the niece of Kenji, and a manga illustrator imprisoned for drawing manga). This is good for the strength of the series, because some of the extraneous characters are little one-dimensional. The manga artist is a bit of a doof, but he helps reveal some of the flashback plot that most fans have been dying for. In this sense, he’s a great addition, and his development as a character has been better than I could have hoped for, but I feel he’s going to be leaving shortly only a little more 3-D than who he was when he arrived.
Urasawa takes normal suspense tropes and really spins them around the table, showing everyone that it’s not the size of the plot device, but how you use it that counts. His excellent pacing and paneling make even the most cliché moments interesting. He also takes character dialog to the next level. Explaining Kenji’s situation as a hopeless long shot game of bowling is a perfect example of how Urasawa uses new ways to introduce information and keep it fresh.
20th Century Boys is part of the Viz Signature line, which means a higher price point, but a larger book with dust jacket style pages. This sort of treatment is something I’m willing to pay extra for, and it looks good. The paper quality is still a little lower than I’d prefer, but the price on these bigger books is only a little more expensive than your average cost for books from other publishers. Overall, the packaging is excellent, and the cover is magnificent, compared to the Japanese version of the same volume.
With half of the story of Bloody New Years Eve out of the way, and the other half to be released in volume eight, it’s no surprise that I’ll be anxiously waiting for the next volume. Volume seven of this Urasawa series proves that some things just get better with time. I highly recommend 20th Century Boys, and the seventh volume keeps up with the excitement and suspense of the entire series.
8.5