...after the spoiled-rotten son of one of the world's richest men crashes his car and lies near death, the oligarch hires the greatest surgeon in the world, Black Jack, to save the kid's life.
However, the kid needs numerous replacements for damaged organs and limbs.
So the oligarch arranges for an innocent to be convicted and sentenced to death, so his limbs and organs can be harvested!
Note: to understand this Japanese comic, you must read right-to-left instead of the usual left-to-right (like the way you're reading this text)!
Besides being a talented writer/artist, Black Jack creator Osamu Tezuka was also a licensed physician, though he stopped practicing after he became a full-time manga creator.
Black Jack has been called Tezuka's alter ego, the kind of doctor he wished he could have been.
Since this premiere appearance in Weekly Shonen Champion (Nov. 19, 1973), he's appeared in hundreds of manga tales, and (in animated form) in several TV series and feature films, plus one direct-to-video mini-series.
Unlike most other manga characters, he's never appeared in live-action form.
However, the iconoclastic sawbones did appear (in animated form) in 2010 opposite Hugh Laurie's live-action Dr House (as it's called in Japan) in magazine ads and a commercial on Japanese TV to promote the release of the 4th season of the House M.D. TV series on DVD in Japan...while plugging his own OVA mini-series!
(Both series were distributed in Japan by the same company, Geneon/Universal!)
To paraphrase the phrase used at the end of the James Bond films...
Black Jack Will Return!
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