| Comics
god Osamu Tezuka’s darkest work, MW is a chilling
picaresque of evil. Steering clear of the supernatural as well
as the cuddly designs and slapstick humor that enliven many of
Tezuka’s better-known works, MW explores a stark
modern reality where neither divine nor secular justice seems
to prevail. This willfully “anti-Tezuka” achievement
from the master’s own pen nevertheless pulsates with his
unique genius.
Michio Yuki has it all: looks,
intelligence, a pedigree as the scion of a famous Kabuki family,
a promising career at a major bank, legions of female admirers.
But underneath the sheen of perfection lurks a secret with the
power to shake the world to its foundations.
During a boyhood excursion to
one of the southern archipelagos near Okinawa, Yuki barely survived
exposure to a poison gas stored at a foreign military facility.
The leakage annihilated all of the island’s inhabitants
but was promptly covered up by the authorities, leaving Yuki as
an unacknowledged witness—one whose sense of right and wrong,
however, the potent nerve agent managed to obliterate.
Now, fifteen years later, Yuki
is a social climber of Balzacian proportions, infiltrating the
worlds of finance and politics by day while brutally murdering
children and women by night—perversely using his Kabuki-honed
skills as a female impersonator to pass himself off as the women
he’s killed. His drive, however, will not be satiated with
a promotion here and a rape there. Michio Yuki has a far more
ominous objective: obtaining MW, the ultimate weapon that spared
his life but robbed him of all conscience.
There are only two men with
any hope of stopping him: one, a brilliant public prosecutor who
struggles to build a case against the psychopath; the other, a
tormented Catholic priest, Iwao Garai, who shares Yuki’s
past—and frequently his bed.
Serialized beginning in 1976
in Big Comic magazine, where Tezuka’s trailblazing medical
thriller Ode to Kirihito had appeared a few years earlier,
MW probes the complexities of homoeroticism as well as
the reality of extensive U.S. military presence in Japan. The
result is as bracing today as it was thirty years ago.
 Osamu
Tezuka (1928-89) is the godfather of Japanese manga comics. He
originally intended to become a doctor and earned his degree before
turning to what was still then considered a frivolous medium.
His many early masterpieces include the series known in the U.S.
as Astro Boy. With his sweeping vision, deftly intertwined
plots, and indefatigable commitment to human dignity, Tezuka elevated
manga to an art form. Other works available from Vertical include
Apollo's Song, Ode to Kirihito, and the eight-volume
epic Buddha, winner of the Eisner and Harvey Awards.
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PRAISE
FOR MW
“Darker
than you think – than you want to think [...]
MW took on the stuff of today's headlines some thirty
years ago.”
– The Agony
Column
“MW
is the newest of those masterpieces to be translated into English,
and like everything else with [Tezuka's] name on it, you are cheating
yourself out of one of the best graphic novels out right now if
you don’t read it.”
– Advanced
Media Network
“Tezuka
spins an entertaining, slightly preposterous yarn, serving up
more plot twists, car chases, and gender-bending costume changes
than Dressed to Kill and The Manchurian Candidate
combined.”
– popcultureshock
“You’ll
stare at the page, eyes popping and muttering,
"I cannot believe I just read that." But you did, and
it worked, and you turn the page.”
– David Welsh,
Comic World News
PRAISE
FOR OSAMU TEZUKA
“It’s
a mark of his artistic singularity that almost 20 years after
his death, we are still playing catch up with his achievements.”
– Newsweek
“Tezuka
was like a god for me. He created a world of comics that didn’t
exist before.”
– Yoshihiro
Tatsumi, author of The Push Man and Abandon the Old
in Tokyo
“I
have been, and continue to be an ardent admirer of Osamu Tezuka,
so I am especially pleased to have a chance to study his brilliant
storytelling and narrative art that rises above the casual style
of Tezuka’s imitators.”
– The late
Will Eisner, author of A Contract With God
“His
works deal with the most profound questions of human existence.”
– Publishers
Weekly
“Osamu
Tezuka invented a whole new grammar of comics storytelling and
his place in the history of Japanese comics is about as central
as Siddartha's place in the history of Buddhism.”
– Art Spiegelman,
author of Maus
“Paging
through Buddha by Osamu Tezuka is revelatory, like hearing the
Beatles for the first time.”
– Rochester
City Newspaper
“In
Tezuka's world, the exquisite collapses into the goofy in a New
York minute, the goofy into the melodramatic, the melodramatic
into the brutal, and the brutal into the sincerely touching. The
surprising result is a work wholly unique and downright fun.”
– Time Out
New York
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