Monster (Naoki Urasawa’s…)

    (Viz, 2006)
™ and ©1995 Naoki Urasawa/Shogakukan, Inc.
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Climbing the ladder in a German hospital shouldn’t be easy for a Japanese doctor, but Kenzo Tenma is engaged to director Heinemann’s daughter Eva and is a gifted and conscientious surgeon. However, when he operates on a boy instead of the ill mayor, he saves the boy but loses his budding career. Later, when Johan [the boy] and his traumatized twin sister Anna disappear and the staff bureaucrats are mysteriously killed, Tenma becomes Chief of Surgery and a prime suspect.

Almost a decade later, Inspector Runge returns to tell Tenma to save the life of a potential witness to a string of unsolved murders. Soon thereafter, the doctor discovers his patient, who fears that his former employer is after him, has fled. Then, Tenma confronts an adult Johan, now a heartless “monster.”

Paralleling the BTK strangler case, this manga blends the drama of television’s ER and CSI. Unlike Osamu Tezuka’s iconic Black Jack, Tenma seems more victim than hero in this introduction. But, like his dead ringer Master Keaton, this doctor has only begun the fight.

— Oliver Chin

From the Publisher:

An ice-cold killer is on the loose, and brilliant Dr. Kenzo Tenma is the only one who can stop him! Conspiracies, serial murders, and a scathing indictment of hospital politics are all masterfully woven together in this compelling manga thriller. Tenma risks his promising medical career to save the life of a critically wounded young boy. Unbeknownst to him, this child is destined for a terrible fate. Who could have known that Tenma would create a monster!
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