#asadora!

So without further adieu, let's get into it!

Urasawa works read this month:

Asadora! (2018 - present with 37 english translated chapters):

A young girl named Asa has her home town destroyed by a Kaiju that only she saw. For those unfamiliar with the term Kaiju, it's basically the genre of film centered around giant monsters, think Godzilla. Anyways, years later, after training to be a pilot so she can track the monster down as she's its only living witness, she's approached by a certain organization that's been tracking the beast, so she can be trained to defend the country.

Not really a first time read but the first time I checked it out in 2020 there was only like 15/20 chapters out so with there being like twice that now I figured I could put it as new + bite me

Not much to say as again there's not that many chapters but it was my first time seeing a female lead from urasawa and I thought it was cool that the first page of the first chapter set the time frame for this world threatening disaster as 2020, which was when I picked it up and around the time COVID kicked off, even though that chapter itself came out in 2018.

Yawara! (1986 - 1993) 331 chapters total but only 92 in English:

Trained by her 8 time national judo champion grandad to get an Olympic gold, Yawara has been doing judo since she could walk. But as she enters the springtime of her youth, she just wants to be a regular, cute and fashionable girl.

Now I figure some of you may be wondering "What's the problem? Why can't she have both?". Well firstly, you know fiction, there's no story without conflict no matter how ridiculous. But as the mc would put it, judo just isn't cute!

She thinks she'll be unapproachable if she becomes known for grappling and throwing people around which tbh is fair but if you know anything about training to be an athlete, especially an Olympic level athlete, the time dedicated to training is no small thing. In the manga her grandad makes her train every day starting at 6am before she goes to school then after school they train again at 6pm.

Again not the very first time I read it, basically I started like a year ago but only read like 5 chapters then got upset that it wasn't fully translated. Cause I figured if it's been complete since 1993 and in 2022 there's only 92 chapters translated I'd be blue balling myself to hell with what I assumed would be another urasawa great (side note, more reason for learning Japanese so I can be a translator)

And I'm feeling bittersweet in being correct in my thinking because I really really dug it. Very neat aesthetic I've gotta say as urasawa plays up yawara trying to be cute and dressing up and so forth. It was also my first time seeing urasawa not doing mystery, as Yawara is a fun light-hearted slice of life but it still has a great cast of distinctive characters with brilliant dynamics just as I've come to expect from all of urasawa's works.

Master Keaton (1988 - 1994) 144ch:

I'm just gonna go with the final volume's description here as it's pretty spot on

When the wall that separated the East and West falls, the twentieth century comes to an end and brings radical changes to the world. During this turbulent time, Taichi Hiraga Keaton has difficulty finding a job in archaeology even though his long line of cases as an insurance investigator doesn't seem to end. As he navigates through dangerous adventures, Keaton encounters some bittersweet lives…

If you glazed over for a minute there, basically the mc loves archeology, wants to be a professor and have his own dig sites and such but because of skills he picked up in the army, he has much better luck being an investigator.

Great scenery, neat characters but pretty episodic to the point where I'd want to call it an anthology as characters don't really carry forward much. There's a lot of nitty gritty details about wars, factions and etc. around the world in that time period which can be a bit overbearing at times but that's what give the characters and situations the impact they would have gotten if they stuck around longer.

Also gotta say it's pretty educational, not just in the mc basically being macgyver and building self defense weapons out of whatever is on hand kinda way, but it takes a good look at Europe and how fucked it was during that cold war period as it indirectly and directly references many real world events. Maybe it's just my lack of exposure but I haven't seen that much media outside of documentaries really pinpoint Europe and the effects of war there and not on a large high level country scale, I mean like really looking at the lives of civilians and how they lived and died during that time.

Lots of variety, as I said it's very episodic as almost every chapter has a different subject ranging from finding a lost animal to settling spats between holocaust survivors or proving a statue is fake

I also have to mention something I've always appreciated about Urasawa's works that really stood out in Master Keaton for me and that's the diverse and well done racial representation. There's people from everywhere and it doesn't have that feel manga tends to have of like a Japanese person drawing what they think other people look like or something, it just looks like a person drawing other people, feel like I'm wording that weirdly but that's how I'm wording it.

Happy! (1993 - 1999) 254ch:

One day a high school girl, Miyuki Umino that takes care of her 3 younger siblings on her own, is approached by Yakuza who tell her that her older brother ran out on loans amounting to 250mill yen, approx. 1.8M USD) and now she needs to pay up or be sold into prostitution.

While wondering what to do she sees on the news a tennis player earned that amount in winnings so she decides that despite the difficulty she has to try.

Pretty dark premise and I'm telling you she goes through some dark shit but it's a great story, brilliant characters as usual, loveable idiots abound, antagonists that you can really really hate. You don't have to be a fan of tennis at all to appreciate the heartwarming n heart wrenching ups and downs. Teared up at least twice.

This was my favourite Naoki Urasawa work I read for the first time this month, this manga really showed me Urasawa really has THAT range fr.

Older Urasawa reads:

Monster (1994 - 2001) 162 chapters, this was my 3rd read:

A promising young doctor, Kenzo Tenma, ignores his superiors orders to operate on their mayor and instead operates on a young boy called Johan, that came in first, as he firmly believes all lives are equal. The mayor dies and the boy is saved but this leads to unfair treatment by his superiors and being left by his fiance. Soon after, not only does the young boy disappear but his superiors die from poisoning, leaving him, staff and ofc the police baffled.

10 years later during a string of serial killings, a key witness ends up being a patient of Tenma's but is killed for trying to reveal this by Johan, the real killer, now a young man who reappears in front of the doctor. Even more shockingly, he reveals himself as the one who killed Tenma's superiors all those years ago. Because of similarities in the murderers then and now, police pin it all on Tenma so he goes on the run across Europe to find the young man and clear his name.

Undeniably engaging from the jump, the ever building draw being who the fuck is this Johan dude? where'd he come from? why the fuck is he killing all these people? etc. etc.

Great side characters as usual with interactions that I can only call truly genuine whether they were sweet or sour.

There's a lot of nice interplay on the meanings of life and death, the notions of fear and hope, humanity and the inhumane, all weaved into every intricate thread of this story.

Not to be a hater but personally its relative popularity, as in relative to his other works, is a little upsetting. I get that it was his first critically acclaimed banger but he's done so much since then that isn't talked about enough for me. His later stuff not having anime adaptations doesn't help but if you've read and watched enough media adaptations in general you know that tends to mean diddly squat in terms of the quality of the source material . The industry unfortunately runs more and more on fan service every day.

Pluto (2003 - 2009) 65 chapters, read 3x:

The destruction of one of Earth's greatest robots and the murder of a leading figure in international robot rights seem unrelated at first, but both bodies were made into some bizarre collage with the central motif/pattern being a pair of horns placed by their heads, making them obviously related. The confusing thing is that the only thing that could destroy one of Earth's greatest robots is an even stronger robot, but could a robot really be related to the murder a human? Gesicht, a robot detective is put on the case and eventually comes to realize that all of Earth's greatest robots, himself included are being targeted.

As you can expect with any futuristic robot media there's an exploration of the concept of humanity vs the artificial but it's done so tenderly for lack of a better word and I'm not sure how often it's done that way in these noir type beats. Especially from the viewpoint of a robot mc.

I've probably said this for all his works so far but there's brilliant cast, great dialogue, great art that the context pretty much demanded and even though it's based on an arc in Osamu Tezuka's tetsuwan atom, better known as astro boy in the west, the greatest robot on earth arc to be specific, Urasawa really rose to and in my mind completely surpassed the challenge of adapting the work of he who is called the God of manga.

Also like man it's so crazy good for how short it is, please read this.

20th century boys (1999 - 2006) 249 chapters + 16 in the wrapup sequel 21st century boys, I've read both 2x:

The story follows a group of childhood friends, now adults who are trying to patch together their memories in an effort to uncover a conspiracy that seems to be based on games they used to play about saving the world from destruction.

It's pretty difficult to describe the events of the story further but it definitely stands out in my mind as the grandest scale of anything Naoki Urasawa has ever done though I wouldn't put it past him to go further.

As I said the story follows friends trying to patch together memories so the time period goes back and forth quite a bit. It can be pretty jarring trying to follow it strictly by year so I'd recommend just thinking about it in three tone periods, namely; childhood, present day and miscellaneous flashbacks. Separating childhood from miscellaneous flashbacks as their childhood remains within a constant range but as the story moves forward and present day changes so does the range of flashbacks they have.

That should hint a bit at the scale of this whole thing but outside of the breadth, there's a depth of characterization and dynamic that I haven't seen elsewhere.

Side note, if the length is frightening it's the type of read I'd recommend savouring anyways.

Billy Bat (2008 - 2016) 165chapters, this is my 4th time reading this:

A Japanese American mangaka/cartoonist, Kevin Yamagata, suddenly has his workspace taken over by police claiming they're investigating one of his neighbours for being a Soviet spy. In the middle of protesting this, one of the officers sees the comic he's working on, Billy Bat. He says he's seen it before in Japan, basically calling Kevin's work a copy. Kevin takes offence but admits he was stationed in Japan for some time and may have seen it and subconsciously copied it. As one of the lasting lessons his father taught him was that you can't steal people's stuff, he goes to Japan to seek out this potential original creator.

The story unfolds as he meets an artist that tells him the bat is actually something passed down throughout history, throwing him right into the middle of several conspiracies concerning real key incidents throughout modern history.

On top of everything, the bat starts talking to him, urging him to find a supposedly important and immensely powerful scroll.

My favourite piece from urasawa, brilliant in every respect, please please please please read this.

That's it for this first part, if you're still here, thanks for listening, please please read these, urasawa is a goat, a legend a phenomenon.

Just to share some resources before I go into the part 2 bit which may have spoilers irdk yet, there were two YouTube videos I really liked that I highly recommend.

The first was 'The greatest mangaka of all time' by the masked man and second was 'A guide to manga's greatest master' by the omnibus collector.

The first video is about 10 minutes long and uses the quality of Monster, 20th century boys, Pluto and Billy Bat as their rationale for why Naoki Urasawa is the greatest mangaka of all time.

The second is 20 minutes and pretty much covers Naoki's entire career and body of work, giving pretty rad descriptions of all his pieces, inspirations for them and a bunch of other really neat info. Bonus For those of you who are int that sort of thing, they also show the physicals they own off all the manga they talked about. really appreciated that. thank you omnibus collector.

Really appreciated these videos as most animanga fans and discussions focus on monster, sometimes 20th century boys and rarely anything past that unless they're ranking which I'm really not interested in.

There's also a third video I mention in part 2 of the episode I'll link here as well.