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 Waiting For Master Keaton or Someone Like Him: Or, Viz Spawned a Monster: Or, Don’t Mess with the Johan
Written by Barb Lien-Cooper
I’m almost completely burnt out on writing reviews. After almost seven years at Sequential Tart, being all but forced to review some of the worst comics on the face of the earth (which tells you the sorry state the American comics industry has descended to), even writing manga reviews, even when I like a manga (which is more often than not), is like pulling teeth for me. And yet. And yet. I feel almost compelled to write about Monster.
In a way, why bother? The series has already been published and lauded to almost a ridiculous degree. And while it’s a good series, it’s a flawed one, no matter what most critics say. Too often, the plot verges on the wildly implausible. Too often, one wonders why some victims of the “monster” are even dead (one victim could have easily hit the little creep with a bottle!), let alone why the “monster” isn’t sighted by witnesses, killed by his would-be victims, or someone else. Too often, the stories repeat themselves. Too often, the going is slow and sometimes even frustrating. And yet. And yet.
I have to read the damned thing. Don't get me wrong. It’s not exactly an addictive with me. Now Death Note, that was an addiction. The anime of Fruits Basket, that was also an addiction. Don't even get me started on GTO, Trigun, or Bebop! With Monster, I glide through a volume with various degrees of interest, sometimes wondering why I’m still reading it, only to have a cliffhanger or a revelation reel me in again. The series constantly promises that it will move forward, only to leave one wanting yet again. And yet. And yet. I keep reading. I’m on volume 8 now. I tell myself I can stop now, or that I can skip ahead, or even look up what happens through Wiki (if indeed someone has bothered summarizing the series), yet I don’t. Instead, I wait around for awhile, then when the inner-library loan system I get Monster through spits out another volume, I read it. I keep saying that I can’t imagine myself waiting on the eleven or whatever number volumes I still have left, yet I still wait. And I still read.
The story, and a dubious one it is too, goes something like this: The almost preposterously noble but great looking Dr. Tenma once saved a little boy’s life. Only, the boy is (let’s call a spade a spade) evil incarnate. The child grows up and becomes a serial killer of sorts. More often, the now grown up Johan uses psychological persuasion to do make others do his dirty work for him (I’m still not sure how that works). Dr. Tenma decides that he has no choice but to kill the little bastard, only (to an almost infuriating point), Tenma is the Hamlet of assassins: the good doctor simply cannot make up his mind to stop this pariah, no matter how many good, decent, innocent people Johan kills and manipulates in his wake. Why? Because Dr. Tenma is GOOD. No other reason, just that, from what I can see. Further, Johan seems to have some pretty big plans of a vague nature. Thank God no shinigami threw a Death Note down at his feet! Then again, if a Death God had, maybe the series might have progressed a little more rapidly. Throw in an almost outrageously big and shadowy conspiracy involving Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall and Neo-Nazis and Bob’s your uncle, plot-wise.
Too often the stories read like this: Tenma has been framed for Johan’s crimes, so he’s constantly on the run, although he always seems to have money to burn. And while one would think that a classically handsome Japanese doctor wouldn’t be hard to spot in the more Teutonic parts of Europe, he seems to be almost as hard as Johan to catch. Well, just as someone or another finds out his secret, that person sees Dr. Tenma do something righteous and that person decides that Tenma can’t be guilty, so that person lets him go, never once thinking that it wasn’t up to them but the authorities to judge innocence or guilt or, if they’re wrong, that they just helped a serial killer.
As I said, it’s easy to get mad at this series!
And yet. And yet.
Confession time: What makes this series great is that it’s written by the co-creator of one of my all-time favorite anime series, Master Keaton. What especially frustrates me about Monster is that Keaton is such a superior series (from the anime and the few online scans I can find), yet we may never, ever, ever see it over here because there’s a huge dispute about whether the artist of Keaton co-wrote the series. Monster makes a rather ambiguous claim in favor of the answer of Yes. The best moments of Monster share Master Keaton’s moments of humanism, the worst ones suffer from being overly ambitious. The small stories in Monster, such as the one about Tenma’s ex-girlfriend almost finding a nice guy to care about, only to be done in by cruel fate, are fantastic. It’s those small stories, with characters that I feel real empathy for, that keep me reading the series. Those Keaton-esque moments make me scream for a series that I know probably isn’t going to be collected here any time soon. It’s also probably just a bit too old to be a hot topic for scanners.
Yet I live in hope. If people think that Monster is such a treasure, maybe, just maybe, someone will remember that before the noble Dr. Tenma, there was once a splendid predecessor named Keaton. I’m not into scans because I believe that those who create manga deserve to be paid for their efforts (although I certainly don’t look down on those who find value in scans, so please don’t think that), but I’ll make an exception for series in copyright limbo. And Keaton’s so far in limbo, from what Wiki tells me, it’s practically in hell.
I only hope that those who follow Monster will eventually clamor for Keaton the way I do.
But until then, all I can do is read its overly ambitious counterpart, swear that I don’t have to read another volume, then wait.
Just as I wait for Keaton. Only in the case of the good Master of Life, in Keaton’s case, unless I learn kanji, I may be waiting in vain.
Monster Series Grade, so far: a very, very low B Plus
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