Row, Row, Dororo...



Dororo: Volume 1
by Osamu Tezuka

Sometime almost as telling as the "best of" lists that are released by reviewers at the end of the year are the "looking forward to" lists that are harder to find, but are common among the bloggers. One title that I have seen, and included on my own "looking forward to" in 2008 is Osamu Tezuka's three-volume Dororo series.

It's not like it's a bold bet. Vertical, Inc. has released a handful of Tezuka titles over the past few years, and have picked up the pace in 2006 and 2007 with the trifecta of Ode to Kirihito, Apollo's Song and MW. This year we'll see the complete Dororo series and the start of the even-more anticipated Blackjack. Each volume (going back to the Buddha series) has been treated as not a simple manga release, but as a archival quality release on high-quality paper with masterful translations and stunning but respectful cover-art.

Dororo: Volume 1 is no exception.

Daigo offers 48 body parts of his unborn son to the 48 Demon Gods in exchange for rule over Japan. As a result, in awesome Tezuka guro-kawaii (modern Japanese slang for "grotesque-cute"), Hyakkimaru is born, a limbless pupa with holes where is facial features should be. He must be a stronger-than-average baby, as who could survive with 48 body parts missing? Rejected by his family, baby Moses, I mean baby Hyakkimaru is sent floating in a basket down a reedy river. Discovered by a kind doctor, Hyakkimaru grows up training how to make up for his deficiencies, while his adopted father constructs artificial limbs. Think a R-rated Inspector Gadget set 500 years ago in feudal Japan...and possibly the inspiration for Rose McGowen's amputated heroine in "Planet Terror".

For some reason the demons that stole his body parts find it necessary to haunt the poor boy, and he is sadly banished from his adopted home. This is where Hyakkimaru's quest begins: to kill the 48 demons and recover his body parts. But it isn't a solo journey for long. Soon Hyakkimaru comes across Dororo, the self-proclaimed greatest child thief in the world. What follows is a unusual and not always comfortable partnership between Hyakkimaru and Dororo which also includes flashbacks to Dororo's life story, which is arguably sadder than Hyakkimaru's own.

Unlike some recent Tezuka releases in English, Dororo is a journey in the time of the samurai with many fantasy elements. Tezuka's Demon Gods appear "as anything from sandals to dogs to that pile of garbage...", reminding me of traditional yokai, bizarre Japanese ghouls. In a monster movie, it doesn't matter who plays the hero, as everyone will be looking at the monster, and in the very well-framed action sequences, this is true. Between Hyakkimaru's and Dororo's background stories we have a few individual stories of fantasy and horror splattered with no shortage of severed heads and buckets of blood.

All three volumes of Dororo will be out by the end of the summer, a perfect pace for a series you will surely see jump from those "looking forward to" lists to the "best of 2008" lists at the end of the year.