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Mar 31, 2009
Say hello to Black Jack is one of the most overlooked manga on MAL due to its lack of English scans and publications (I read it in French). However, it is one of the few manga that left a strong impression on me.
Story: 10/10
The story focuses on a young intern in Eiroku (University famous for medicine) and the chronicles of his experience as an intern in different departments of the hospital. Each story arc is a 3-4 months internship in one of the major departments of medicine and Saito (protagonist) is always left in charge of one particular case/patient. However, his naive ideals and stubbornness
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makes him rebellious and doubtful about the ethics of medicine in Japan. From, neonatal care to cancer/chemotherapy to psychiatry, each department provides an unique view on the difficulties and challenges of society. Wonderful storyline, dealing with an extremely mature critical and hard subject with a very strong emotional and psychological impact on the readers.
Art: 9/10
Some characters' face are exaggerated in a serious and realistic fashion. The artwork can be categorized as realistic seinen, sometimes bordering on the same category as Vagabond in terms of details.
Character: 10/10
The characters are truly multi-dimensional. Many of the "antagonists", i.e. the senior doctors in each department first appears to be insensible and corrupted. However, as the story progresses, we discover that there is no right or wrong between Saito's ideology and that of his seniors. At the end of each arc, not only Saito grows by understanding that his initial thoughts about patient-doctor relationship is too naive, some of the senior doctors also get influenced by Saito. Some regain things from their youth that they have lost after spending too many years in the corrupted system.
Enjoyement and Overall: 10/10
This manga is a SHOCK manga, revealing some of the most obscure aspects of the medical system in Japan. While being pessimistic and dark, it still portrays with confidence the presence of hope both for the patient and the doctor...even when there are none....Some of the story arcs, especially the last two ones, very really emotional. I personally shed tears on the cancer story arc and found it to be one of the most deep and well developed emotional and psychological episode of all the manga I have read. I truly recommend this to anyone who is willing to read a realistic manga that criticizes the social system (of Japan) but also add a "human" side to all things. One of the masterpieces.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Dec 25, 2008
Story - 8/10
Ok. This series started on the "monster-of-the-week" formula, so it may be very misleading. Even the sypnosis that a Shikabane Hime must kill 108 corpses to go to Heaven is misleading. The real plot and story has really nothing to do with it. The truth is, this series does provide a reasonable and interesting plot development in the SECOND half of the season only. And the last four episodes or so does have enough plot to build up decent cliffhangers that forced me to watch the raws and chinese subs (instead of waiting for the english subs because of my impatience). But keep
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in mind that there is a second season that follows up directly, so this whole first season gave me the feeling of PREQUEL to the actual story (which turned out decent)
Art - 7/10
Sometimes, the actions are animated in a pretty sloppy way. The characters' design are sometimes too simplistic.But you may argue that it was done intentionally as a more "stylish" way of animation. The colors are all in the range of grey, dark red, black and deep blue, blending into a nice gloomy atmosphere befit of a horror action series.
Sound - 9/10
Nice fighting music and nice insert songs, opening songs and ending song by angela. The music is very catchy and the voice acting is not bad. Ouri (main protagonist)'s voice sound pretty unique and has a good touch of innocence and tonelessness, befitting his strange attitude towards death (a key element in the plot)
Characters - 8/10
I would say the characters are decently developped for an anime series. Ouri's evolution is clearly portrayed throughout the series. Makina's realtionship with Keisei is revealed bits by bits in a very good rythmn. At the same time, Makina and Ouri's relationship also evolves with each episode in the SECOND half of this series.
Enjoyment and Overall - 8/10
The first half was pretty random and generically boring. The second half really redeemed itself. This is series is underrated because the first 6-7 episodes didn't have enough to keep the audience from labelling this as "another generic action series". Although it is far from being a breakthrough, the second half really made good progress in terms of plot and character development. It does deserve the slightly above average rating of 7.5 to 8 out of 10.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Jun 6, 2008
Don't be discriminatory towards the strange title of this manga. Don't worry, this is not yaoi, nor yuri, nor ecchi or hentai. In fact, this is one of the most touching and most mature shoujo/josei manga I have read. Of course, the main characters are intersexuals.
Story: the first bolume is composed of short storis while the rest is Haru's story. Although you will not encounter very deep plot (remember, this is a shoujo manga), the different chain of events that are changing the characters' life and personalities are very original and refreshing. The narration is very interesting as it swtiches POV back and forth
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from the main character and her/his friends, relatives and even strangers that met him/her.
Art: classical shoujo manga art. Very modest artwork (nothing flashy) with its own touch of cuteness when needed.
Character: the strongest point of this series. The characterization of Haru is just awesome. Combining both mal and female personalities together has created one of the most original character I have ever seen in shoujo manga. On top of that, we get to see the evolution and change of the main character and more importantly, the ones close to him/her and their perception of IS (intersexuals).
Enjoyment: I was actually in a manga "dead-period" when I started reading this series. It means that I have temporarily reduced my manga readings dramatically for a few months. However, this series was so good it drew me out of this dark period. So that tells you all.
Overall, this manga is really impressive and touching. At certain point, I was on the verge of tears. This is the first review I wrote because too few have read this manga (and didn't give high ratings) and I feel an obligation to promote such amazing works.
However, if you feel unconfortable reading this manga, then you are not open-minded enough yet. After all, intersexuals have a prevalency of up to 0.1% or 0.01% depending on the definition. This means one in 1000 to on in 10000 are intersexuals at birth. It is very wrong to discriminate against intersexuals just as it is wrong to discriminate against males or females.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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