MW

Note: This score is 60/100 because that divides out to 3/5, which more accurately captures how I feel about the work.

Tezuka's influence can't be overstated. The "grandfather of manga" helped inspire or all but directly created half of today's popular genres and a number of less popular, more experimental ones. He so directly influenced Naoki Urusawa's work in particular that his estate should probably be asking Urusawa for royalties (Urusawa, if you're reading this, I do love your work). The trouble is that going back to his work now, it becomes clear that the reason he was so influential is because his works were intriguing but flawed. You can see how, for instance, Princess Knight eventually morphed into shows like Revolutionary Girl Utena, but actually reading it you can see that Tezuka couldn't quite capture the psychology that made the discussion of gender roles work there. Like I Am Legend or the E. E. Doc Smith stories that birthed the space opera genre, his provided a lot of intriguing threads that other authors picked up on. Case in point: If you've read or watched Naoki Urusawa's Monster, you've mostly read MW, which follows a man with a moral code which explicitly forbids killing as he struggles against a charismatic and seemingly unstoppable man who seems to delight in violence and death. Many of the more specific story beats line up too, though going into detail there would be spoiling both series.

For all that, I actually did enjoy MW on its own merits, and it captures what makes Tezuka interesting: The sheer variety of themes he was willing to tackle. His cartooney art style (which for the record I quite like) gets him pegged, rather unfairly, as an mangaka who wrote for kids. In reality he wrote many different stories for many audiences, with MW being one of his adult stories. It's about murder, imperialism, religion, corruption, sin and gay love (his treatment of it here, incidentally, is remarkably progressive for the time), and juggling this many balls at once makes the story varied. There are a lot of twists and turns here, even if a few of them are a bit more contrived than I would have liked. The downside, of course, is that it's relatively unfocused, which is a bit of a problem because the short length means that the story doesn't really have room to sprawl.

The bottom line is that it's a fun enough thriller, and it worked for me in a way that the other Tezuka stories I've read didn't. It can't match Monster in character psychology, atmosphere, or tension, but that almost feels like cheating given that Urusawa was writing the same story four decades later. In a way, perhaps the more remarkable thing is that the sheer variety of themes here allow MW to have an identity of its own, despite being rewritten forty years later.

Again, Urusawa: Love your work.