Black Jack

""Osamu Tezuka was educated as a doctor, so the stories are rich in medical knowledge and experience. Except, of course, when Tezuka decides that it would be more fun to just make crazy shit up. Which is pretty much constantly.""

- Overlooked Manga Festival on Black Jack.

A manga series about an unlicensed physician who charges immense fees to use his miraculous healing skills.

Created by Osamu Tezuka, the original manga series ran from 1973 to 1983. Since Tezuka was himself a qualified medical doctor, the series often had a strong sense of verisimilitude, but the creator was not above exaggeration for Rule of Cool and Mundane Made Awesome moments, or even just making up new diseases and medical conditions. The series has had several animated adaptations.

Black Jack himself is a mysterious but distinctive figure, with a scarred, discolored face and a white shock in his black hair. He lives alone in an isolated beach house at the beginning of the series, before taking in Pinoko. Black Jack is a brilliant surgeon, but has no license (the reasons for this vary a bit between adaptations.) He charges enormous fees to wealthy clients, but often helps the needy for just as much as they can pay, or even for free, and if his operations fail generally refunds the money paid. His behavior is often abrupt to the point of rudeness, and he has a rather dark sense of humor. Often, he will arrange circumstances to teach An Aesop to the guest character of the story.

Other manga series have featured an Captain Ersatz or Lawyer-Friendly Cameo of Black Jack when the script calls for a doctor.

Not to be confused with comedian Jack Black. Or the card game. Or Say Hello to Black Jack, which is also a manga about doctors who must work within the Japanese medical system, unlike their childhood hero.

"Inspector: So you won't confess your crimes of murder, smuggling, drug-dealing, gambling fraud, forgery, battery, bribery, human trafficking, pimping, and public urination? Makube: I'll cop to public urination."
 * Action Girl: Watou, who aside of being a Kendo Team Captain can defend herself well when unarmed.
 * Maria in the OAV episode "Decoration of Maria and Her Comrades". She's second-in-command of La Résistance (and )
 * Adaptation Dye Job: Kiriko's white hair gets a blue tinge in the OAVs. Pinoko's red hair gets changed to dark brown in the OAVs, then back to red in the TV anime.
 * Anyone Can Die: Other than Black Jack himself, the average character has roughly a 20% chance of making it to the end of the story.
 * Artificial Human: Pinoko, but see below...
 * Art Major Biology: Black Jack makes biology his bitch on a regular basis.
 * Author Appeal: Tezuka was a licensed doctor himself.
 * Author Avatar: Tezuka appears as a character, but really toes the line between this and Creator Cameo. He is a doctor even in the manga, and he's not just in the background. However he's not an omniscient/omnipotent figure like most avatars are.
 * Author Tract: Mostly against abuses in the medical establishment, but usually saved by good characterization & Blackjack's sheer awesome. One example that really sticks out, though is Dingoes, a Green Aesop about the dangers of pesticides & introduced species that erroneously attributes the arrival of the titular beasts in Australia & subsequent damage they caused to the ecosystem to European colonists, when they actually predate Europe's colonial age & are believed to have been brought by an earlier wave of humans in prehistoric times. Whether this was intentional on Tezuka's part in order to shoehorn in an anti-colonialist message, or if it was a simple mistake is unclear. At any rate, considering this episode also features Blackjack extracting a parasite from his own intestines while the Dingoes are trying to eat him, it's hard to bear a grudge.
 * Incidentally, though dingoes predate European colonists, many of the other placental mammals currently living there do not.
 * Awesomeness By Analysis: Presumably how Black Jack can kick your ass as well as he can save it.
 * He once spent the time held hostage in an operating room memorizing the patient's internal anatomy so that when the lights went out he'd be able to operate in complete darkness.
 * Back-Alley Doctor: Black Jack himself. He's usually careful not to use the word "doctor" to describe himself.
 * Badass Bookworm: One of the few doctors capable of using scalpels to deflect bullets.
 * Badass Longcoat: Black Jack.
 * Batman Gambit: Black Jack often pulls these to teach his Aesops or favor his patients.
 * Belated Backstory: It's not until much later in the manga (and several episodes in the anime) that we learn Black Jack's birth name, why he became a physician, why he's estranged from the medical establishment, or how he got those scars.
 * Berserk Button: Any semblance of composure Black Jack has will instantly dissolve once Dr. Kiriko is so much as mentioned.
 * Or if someone badmouths his mentor, Dr. Honma.
 * And God FORBID you harm a hair on Pinoko's head.
 * And if Black Jack even insinuates interest in another woman, Pinoko will not be happy.
 * Never claim he can't perform a given operation in his earshot, either. He won't just do it, he'll do it in a way that ruins your life.
 * Lay not a hand on a friend of Watou. She'll go Mama Bear on you. And since she's a Badass Normal Action Girl...
 * Betty and Veronica: In the TV anime; Sharaku is the Betty, Black Jack's the Veronica, and Pinoko's the Archie.
 * Beyond the Impossible: From operating at lighting speed to operating on a dozen patients at once to fingerprint transplants. Like Reality Unless Otherwise Noted has runaway screaming.
 * Black Jack built little Pinoko from a teratogenous cystoma living as a parasitic twin and a plastic exoskeleton to replace the body parts she'd never developed. While drunk.
 * That's nothing compared to one of the surgeries he's done on himself. In the middle of the Australian Outback. While fighting dingos. WITH A BOX OF SCRA-... sorry, got confused there for a second.
 * Pretty much every step Black Jack takes is Serial Escalation.
 * Bifauxnen:
 * Blind Idiot Translation: The official subtitled release of the 1st OAV gives us this: "As a last resort, they made me sample my pee".
 * Body Horror: Oodles, but "The Face Sore" runs on it.
 * Breaking the Fourth Wall: from people complaining it's too late and there's not enough panels left, to guys jumping and bonking their head on the panel border.
 * Broken Pedestal: An elementary class reunion prompts Black Jack to find his old teacher, whom everyone thought was fired for trying to expose corruption within the school. Black Jack eventually finds him, but is horrified to discover the man was a drug addict who was just pretending to be a teacher but discovered it was a lot of fun anyway and really was trying to rob the school (the money was corrupt, but that didn't matter). Ashamed at the man who had been such an inspiration for his classmates was a fraud, he
 * Bunny Ears Lawyer: Black Jack again; anyone who wants his services has to put up with his many eccentricities.
 * However, a special mention goes to the man's prices!
 * In many cases, those prices are just walls to make sure the patient is willing to do anything for recovery. But if you have the money, he will make sure you pay...
 * Butterfly of Death and Rebirth: At the end of the chapter where Doctor Kiriko is introduced, after Jack saves the patient he was set on euthanizing. At mild provocation from Jack, he illustrates that his philosophy hasn't changed one bit; picking up a wounded butterfly from the steps they were conversing on... and crushing it. He then starts to leave, insinuating Jack is a fool for spending time saving lives.
 * Canon Discontinuity: The "Sealed Chapters", which Tezuka chose to withdraw from the official collections for various reasons (too controversial, overreliance on shock images, plot recycled into a better story, just plain not very good.) Most of them have been reprinted in special collections, but at least one has never done so.
 * Canon Immigrant: Sharaku and Watou, who had appeared in other Tezuka works (originally in The Three-Eyed One) before they became regulars (sorta) in the new series. Sharaku was even a more or less recurrent villain in some Astro Boy continuities, with Watou as his ward and Morality Pet.
 * Sharaku and Wato are frequent Canon Immigrants, so much that many don't seem to realize (or remember) that Sharaku was the villain (and the hero) in his own series.
 * Car Fu: Black Jack seems fond of this.
 * Catch Phrase: Pinoko's trademark cry of shock and/or frustration, "Acchon burike!" It doesn't actually mean anything, even in Japanese.
 * It's Anglicanized in the fan-dubs of the TV series as "Omigewdness!" The manga translations by Vertical leave it as it is.
 * The episode "A Teacher and a Pupil" begins with a bored Pinoko idly watching kiddy TV -- starring two goofballs who introduce themselves as Acchon and Burike. "Together, we're ACCHON-BURIKE!!" And then she turns the TV off. In the manga there was never any attempt at explaining this or any of her other nonsense exclamations.
 * Celibate Hero: Black Jack is usually of the "Love is a Distraction" variety, but sometimes brings up the "I'm a Danger Magnet" argument. However, see Jerkass Facade.
 * Chick Magnet: Kuwata, Megumi, Yuri...Black Jack gets around, 'kay?
 * Clingy Jealous Girl: Pinoko, who sees herself as Black Jack's wife (or at least fiance?), while he thinks of her more as a daughter. It doesn't help that she's technically 18 years old, but her stunted growth makes her look like a little girl, and Precocious Crush aside she doesn't really act eighteen either.
 * Compulsory School Age: Pinoko tried to go to high school, but the entrance exam alone was too stressful for her to handle (it didn't help that she didn't study). Black Jack then enrolled her in a class with other kids her apparent age, but due to her headstrong nature, that didn't work out either.
 * Corrupt Corporate Executive: Frequently. There are also several corrupt doctors, as well.
 * Cool Big Sis: Jo Carol to Pinoko in the first movie.
 * Covered with Scars: Black Jack is this from stepping on a landmine as a small child.
 * Crazy Prepared: When held at gunpoint and told to reach for the sky, Black Jack raises a pair of dummy arms concealed in his coat so his hands will be free to sling scalpels at the enemy. In fairness, it's not like he just wears those - he'd expected he would be attacked.
 * Crimefighting with Cash
 * Dark Action Girl: Benitokage in Black Jack 21.
 * Dark Is Not Evil: His face, wardrobe, car, and name pertain to blackness.
 * Darker and Edgier: The OAVs compared to the manga.
 * Deadly Upgrade: The first movie features  which enhances a person's physical, mental, or artistic abilities to superhuman levels. However, it causes physical and mental deterioration in its subjects. One man's heart frickin' explodes.
 * Deadpan Snarker: Black Jack, particularly in regards to Pinoko.
 * Diabolus Ex Machina: Supporting characters, and sometimes even the patient, have a tendency to die of some unrelated cause at the last minute. Tezuka's decent at justifying them, but when he doesn't... well, the real world works like that.
 * Dogged Nice Guy: Sharaku, in regards to Pinoko.
 * Doomed Moral Victor: Many of Black Jack's politically involved patients.
 * Dr. Jerk: Black Jack tends to the Jerk with a Heart of Gold version of this, but other doctors in the series do show a much stronger interest in their stock portfolio, reputation or advancement opportunities than the patients' well-being.
 * Driven to Suicide: A number of Black Jack's patients end up under his care out of suicidal tendencies. One of the sadder cases is
 * Eagle Land: The OVA series realistically portrayed the United States, but also created a fictional Eagleland country for an Author Tract episode.
 * Elmuh Fudd Syndwome: Pinoko has a bad case of this in pretty much every version of the series (yes, including the original Japanese manga).
 * Expy: Not in-series (but see Only Six Faces), but most surgeons in modern anime can trace their origins to the good doctor.
 * Mr. Fanservice: Go find one female fan of Black Jack that doesn't have even a little crush on him. I dare you.
 * Even Evil Has Standards: While Dr. Kiriko has no issues with ending a patient's life, seeing the U.S. government condemn men to death when they have a chance of recovery in "Terror Virus" sends him into a Tranquil Fury.
 * Hair Decorations: Pinoko.
 * The Faceless: Pinoko's sister, who wears a mask at all times when she appears. Apparently, she's quite famous and recognizable. Pinoko's face is no clue to hers, as that part of Pinoko was artificially created by Blackjack.
 * The Family for the Whole Family: The Reveal of - The Japanese Medical Association cracks down on Black Jack just as  asks BJ to cure his son of a condition that only BJ could possibly treat. He tries to pressure the Japanese government, only for the JMA chairman to declare that they will strike if BJ is permitted to operate. He finally caves in and lets them operate in desperation... And they botch it, killing the patient. Turns out that  The surgeon general offers to give BJ a blank check in exchange for treating his son. BJ tells the chairman exactly where he can stick it.
 * Fashion Dissonance: Dear God, the SIDEBURNS!
 * Fauxlosophic Narration
 * Fiery Redhead: Pinoko.
 * Gentle Giant: A huge schoolboy who actually is a giant (he has gigantism) was a champion sumo wrestler in school and now wants to be a professional koi breeder and dote on his fish, much to his parents' chagrin. Black Jack tries to tell them that the condition that made him great in school could overtax his heart and kill him, to no avail.
 * Good Scars, Evil Scars: Black Jack has a distinctive scar and a discolored patch of skin running across his face, not to mention countless other ones all over his body. These were the result of stepping on an undetonated landmine when he was a child, and the only kid willing to donate skin for a graft being black. He could easily fix it himself, but...
 * Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: All the average joes and doctors (What? It was the 70's) smoke cigarettes, Black Jack smokes cigarettes and a pipe. The bad guys, of course, smoke huge smelly cigars.
 * Go Out with a Smile: One of Black Jack's old school friends in the new TV series.
 * He Is Not My Boyfriend: Inverted. Everyone assumes Pinoko is Black Jack's daughter (and he usually presents her as his assistant), but she always insists she's his wife. No one seems to take her seriously on that, so the trope plays inverted till the end.
 * High-Pressure Blood: Particularly in the OAVs.
 * Lots of it too. The movie has people vomiting up buckets of blood every couple of hours as a symptom of a mysterious disease.
 * Hilarious Outtakes: The 2004 animated adaptation has some at the end of every episode, Pixar style.
 * Hot Springs Episode: The 10th OAV episode, "Sinking Woman". The same episode where little Pinoko ogles Black Jack's ass in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it sight gag.
 * Hysterical Woman: Especially in the manga.
 * Ill Girl: Apart from Pinoko and her sister, at least four patients from the newest series (Michiru, Souno, Rei and ).
 * Black Jack may or may not have been an Ill Boy himself; the series is inconsistent on whether he had the wheelchair before being blown up or not.
 * Incredibly Lame Pun: Tezuka seems quite fond of those, and actually manages to use them creatively to break the tension. No one usually groans in pain, at least in-work.
 * It Never Gets Any Easier: It certainly doesn't.
 * Jerkass Facade: Black Jack actively strives to look like a bad guy, especially when it's for the patient's own good.
 * Kendo Team Captain: Watou is a female example.
 * Kirk Thornton: Dr. Black Jack (in English dub).
 * Knight in Sour Armor: Black Jack.
 * Land Mine Goes Click: The incident where Black Jack was scarred and injured and then lost his mother.
 * In most versions, anyway, though in the original manga his house had been built on top of an unexploded bomb from WWII.
 * Lighter and Softer: The TV anime compared to the manga.
 * List of Transgressions In one story, Black Jack's school friend, Makube, is a criminal. He gets detained by the ICPO.
 * List of Transgressions In one story, Black Jack's school friend, Makube, is a criminal. He gets detained by the ICPO.


 * Living Emotional Crutch: Black Jack is Pinoko's, and vice versa to a lesser extent.
 * Locked Into Strangeness / Skunk Stripe
 * Magic Plastic Surgery: As might be expected, Black Jack can pull this off with no problem, though he's done some reasonable work on that front (removing a noticeable scar, etc.).
 * His area actually is external medicine, by the way.
 * Meaningful Name: Pinoko, which comes from "Pinocchio". Black Jack is even shown reading the book.
 * Medical Drama
 * Mood Whiplash: An otherwise serious story about a girl gangleader taking care of an abandoned infant who also is an Ill Boy has the characters doing hilarious wild takes. This apparently a Shout-Out to another manga-ka.
 * Morally-Ambiguous Doctorate: Black Jack is on the "good" side of this... usually.
 * Morality Pet: Pinoko to Black Jack.
 * The Movie: Two of 'em: Black Jack The Movie in 1992, and The Two Doctors of Darkness in 2005.
 * Multicolored Hair: Black Jack.
 * Murder the Hypotenuse: An odd and very tragic case involving a friend of Black Jack's, the friend's wife...
 * My Greatest Failure: Dr. Hounma confesses to Black Jack on his death bed that
 * Not Good with People: Black Jack is a case of Type II.
 * Not So Stoic: The mere sight of Dr. Kiriko will lead Black Jack to drop whatever he's doing just to bitch at him. Dr. Kiriko seems to find this amusing.
 * The Obi-Wan: Dr. Joutarou Hounma, also the man that saved Black Jack's life and pretty much raised him.
 * Oedipus Complex: Dr. Black Jack has some daddy issues. Serious daddy issues.
 * This trope was directly addressed in one story, where Black Jack was hired to operate on a pregnant woman. Because of an untreated condition, not only was the baby dead, but the woman would be left unable to have any more children. This does not sit well at all with her young son, who is completely devoted to his mother and is convinced that Black Jack is a monster who is trying to kill his mother. At the end of the story, Black Jack explains the complex to Pinoko as "Little boys love their mothers and little girls love their fathers." Pinoko, who has her own issues with that matter, gets embarrassed.
 * The Ojou: Michiru the manga artist, Souno the Ikebana expert, Rei the Idol Singer.
 * Older Than They Look: Pinoko is simultaneously both this and Younger Than She Looks, as she only recently received a proper body a short time ago.
 * Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Black Jack can operate on anything. People, animals, plants, aliens, robots, computers, ghosts, himself...
 * Amusingly, he once shouts at a man pestering him, "Doctors are not omnipotent!" Admittedly, he was asking him to treat injured grade-school students while they were trapped, with no supplies, in a collapsed tunnel...
 * Interestingly, he's probably yelling this at himself as much as anyone else. A number of the stories show him failing miserably despite his MADSKILZ - and one or two of those have his patient surviving anyway!
 * Only Six Faces: It's rather strange to see the same "actor" playing a degenerate gangster who's been sentenced to death one week and a heroic scientist a couple weeks later.
 * Open-Heart Dentistry
 * Patient of the Week: Justified in that Black Jack's patients hire him illegally, rather than seeing him in a hospital.
 * Parental Abandonment: Black Jack's mother was killed from wounds she sustained from a landmine blast while his father left both of them while she was still holding on. Also, when Black Jack got the crazy idea to turn a patient's removed teratoma into a cute little girl and introduce her as her sister, the first thing said cute girl did was violently call her older sister out since she wanted the teratoma to be killed; the woman naturally freaked out and refused to accept her as family, leaving the girl in Black Jack's custody.
 * Several of Black Jack's patients have also been abandoned or neglected by their parents.
 * Pastel-Chalked Freeze-Frame: The 90's anime version was directed by Osamu Dezaki, the trope inventor.
 * Peek-a-Bangs: Black Jack.
 * Pet Baby Wild Animal: One is surgically enhanced to increase its intelligence, no less. It ends in tears. And crack, but mostly tears.
 * The "Friendship With A Killer Whale" story has some elements of this too. Unsurprisingly it also ends in tears.
 * Phenotype Stereotype: Most of the American/European characters, but there are exceptions.
 * Plucky Girl: Pinoko.
 * Psychic Surgery
 * Revenge by Proxy
 * Rage Against the Heavens: "You, so-called God! You are cruel!"
 * Reused Character Design: A signature style of Tezuka. Black Jack is special for his work in that Black Jack and Pinoko are only reused when he specifically is trying to cameo them in other works. Dr. Hounma, who's also a rather unique design, is used again in nearly every major Tezuka work, and prominently in Phoenix, showing Hounma's continued Reincarnations all end up as the Woobie.
 * Ripped from the Headlines: A few of the chapters reflect various major stories in Japan at the time. The delinquent girl adopting a baby abandoned in a coin locker? Japan really was experiencing a bizarre rash of infants abandoned in coin lockers around the time the story was written.
 * Rule of Cool: Tezuka definitely did do the research (he was a doctor, after all), but he also knew that you didn't have to let pesky little things like "reality" and "medical facts" get in the way of psychic teratomas and the like.
 * Sadist Teacher: Subverted in the manga and last TV series, where the local sadist teacher is actually a good person who willingly puts on the "sadist" mask to toughen up his students... but ends up terrorizing one of them and almost causes a tragedy.
 * Scars Are Forever: Several of the scars (such as the iconic facial one) are justified, though, in that Black Jack had an emotional attachment to the skin donor and thus doesn't risk messing with them despite obviously being skilled enough to do so.
 * Second Place Is for Winners: The episode where Largo is introduced.
 * Single-Target Sexuality: Doubly subverted with Pinoko; she gets crushes on other guys a LOT, but always loses interest after realizing she's still in love with Black Jack. Also, possibly how Black Jack feels toward Megumi.
 * Shadow Archetype: Dr. Kiriko (aka "Mozart"). A doctor who served in wartime, he believes in helping patients die painlessly when there is no chance for recovery. He's not evil, as such, but where Black Jack will do anything possible to make a patient live, Dr. Kiriko will choose euthanasia rather than prolong the patient's suffering. Naturally, the physicians clash at times but must cooperate at others. To his credit, if he discovers that the patient has a chance of recovery, guess who he turns to?
 * Black Jack actually had three shadows, though Kiriko was the only one who stuck. An acupuncturist who disdained traditional medicine appeared a few times, and an idealistic doctor who worked within the system appeared exactly once.
 * Ship Tease: A lot of these with BJ and various one-shot female characters, as well as and, in the anime, Pinoko.
 * Shout-Out: Episode 7 has a white lion that's very similar to Kimba.
 * Sleazy Politician
 * Sliding Scale of Anti-Heroes: if you accept Black Jack as an Anti-Hero, he slides back and forth the whole scale.
 * Sliding Scale of Gender Inequality: The manga tends to stay between Levels 3 and 4, but the first movie and 3rd OAV are more like Level 5.
 * Spell My Name with an "S": Little Pinoko's name is also frequently spelled as "Pinoco" to make the meaning more apparent.
 * Split Personality: The ninth OAV deals with a patient who suffers from this - the personalities border on Super-Powered Evil Side levels of competence. An early manga chapter has BJ dealing with a man who has a "face sore" - a swelling with its own personality, based on an old Japanese tale, which happens to be on his face.
 * Steven Ulysses Perhero: Black Jack's real name is Kuroo Hazama. As he explains himself once, "Kuro" means "black" while the second "o" can be short for "otoko", meaning "man". Thus "Black Jack" is a loose English translation of his actual name.
 * Given Tezuka's fondness for using English puns for his character's names, it's interesting how "Kuroo" sounds an awful lot like "crow". Literary analysis goggles, on!
 * Straw Political: The manga is especially prone to this.
 * Super Doc: Black Jack.
 * Super Drowning Skills: Pinoko is too heavy to swim (except in water with an unhealthy level of salt)
 * Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist: Inspector Tomobiki (known as Takasugi in the OVAs, for no apparent reason).
 * Televisually-Transmitted Disease: Let's see... lionitus, poison-secreting parasites, body freezing super-coma, anorexia-inducing brain worm, psychosomatic bullet wounds, flesh-eating anthrax variant, psychic fetiform teratoma, deciduous plant becoming a human parasite...
 * Thinks Like a Romance Novel: Pinoko, no matter how many times reality bitch-slaps her for it.
 * Tomboy and Girly Girl: Watou and Kumiko.
 * Tragic Keepsake: The half of Black Jack's face that's darker is his last memory of a close friend.
 * Additionally, the TV series has a necklace that Black Jack's mother was wearing during the landmine incident. In the second season, this becomes an Orphan's Plot Trinket when it's revealed that.
 * Tsundere: Sharaku's older sister Watou is a Type A (tsuntsun). She's a rather rough and impulsive girl in almost every single interaction with others and an episode of the TV series has her in a borderline Slap Slap Kiss dynamic with Jou, the local Bad Boy of her school.
 * Additionally, Megumi claims that Black Jack was a type A tsundere towards her throughout medical school.
 * Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Inverted with Black Jack. Whenever there's whispers of conversation and Black Jack's on the scene, the only thing they talk about more than his heavy, black cape-jacket on a hot day is his patchwork face.
 * Well-Intentioned Extremist:
 * Wham! Episode: The story that reveals the complete backstory behind Black Jack's injury & his mother's death also reveals
 * What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?: Mecha pilots aside, medicine is probably the most epic profession ever.
 * White-Haired Pretty Boy: Dr. Kiriko. One might argue on the "pretty boy" status, but the point is that he's prematurely white-haired and morally ambiguous.
 * Dr. Kiriko's sister, however, is very much a White-Haired Pretty Girl.
 * Wholesome Crossdresser:
 * World of Ham: Oh yes.
 * Xenafication: Yuri in Black Jack 21.
 * You Fail Biology Forever: Averted. Tezuka was a doctor. And the crazy shit that happens otherwise has a good reason.