MONSTER

Doctor Tenma Kenzou is one of the best brain surgeons in the world. But one day he decides to perform surgery on a 10 year old over the City’s Mayor. After saving the boy, the Director of the Hospital and the Doctors that worked in the Mayor show up dead in the hospital, and the boy who Dr. Tenma saved is missing, along with his twin sister. 9 years later a patient of Dr. Tenma is murder and the cops place him as the main suspect, but Dr. Tenma knows who did it; the boy he saved 9 years ago, he revived a Monster then and he must kill the Monster now, before more murders occur. - summary by Dtortot.

Breathtakingly magnificent. I have never seen such a laborious work in a thriller. And a good one at that, as your eyes work up the words and your mind glues them together resulting in a dialog and script beyond anything I have read before where twists spring forward with out notice and take you completely unguarded, you will end up riding the emotional and nerve breaking thriller that Monster is.

I love my stories with many characters and if these characters have a past to tell, well, I want to hear it. Monster satisfies this necessity of mine by giving me more characters that I could count and not only their pasts, but their futures. You end up knowing and loving all the characters in the story, even the sickest of them will leave an impression in you. Sadly, I ended up liking more the secondary characters and I was more interested in them than in the main character; Dr. Tenma. Don’t get me wrong, Dr. Tenma is a wonderful character, but he is no match when compared to some of the secondary characters.

The art isn’t as good as the story, but with such story you could care less about the art. Although some female designs are distracting, not because they are good, the opposite actually, they are ugly. Yet the male characters and the backgrounds are decent. But you will spend most of your time reading rather than obsessing over the art. After all, Monster is one of the best examples of substance over matter.

With a cast as good as this one and a plot as good as this one there is no reason why you shouldn’t read this manga. Naoki Urasawa has successfully made me one of his fans, and you can be sure I’ll be on the look out for some of his other works, you will too, once you finish Monster.