Story and Art by Urasawa Naoki
Copyright © 1995-1998 Urasawa Naoki
Published by Big Comics
Item Number
Volumes: 1-8, continuing
¥485 per volume

Urasawa Naoki has been around the manga scene as a well established author for quite some time. His fame was set with the series YAWARA!, which was made into a very popular TV series. After that, Urasawa seemed to fade a bit from the limelight, but he has been busy writing a number of stories since then. None of them though seem to capture the dark power in humanity as well as his current series MONSTER. If YAWARA! served to define Urasawa as an accomplished artist and storyteller then MONSTER may very well be the work that actually marks him as a master of the art.
Each of the volumes has a subtitle, and two paragraphs of English text (one on the front and one on the back) that set the mood for that volume. For an English reader they may, perhaps, give too much away, but the reader discovers many delicious and different ways to read these introductory paragraphs as you enter the story. The first volume starts with the subtitle "Herr Doktor Tenma." The text on the cover reads:

Dusseldorf, West Germany in 1986. One day Dr. Kenzo Tenma ignored his boss's order and executed a humanitarian rescue of a man's child. That's how this horrible story begins!!

Everybody feels uneasiness in everyday life. Even promising Dr. Kenzo Tenma is not an exception. But how could he know his returning to his duty as a doctor to save people's life rather than success would trigger a birth of an incredible creature? What is justice and what is evil? This is a question for you.

The story begins with several surgeons leaving the operation room after a six hour long operation. The other surgeons congratulate Dr. Kenzo Tenma on a job masterfully done. As they walk down the halls of the hospital Tenma notices a mother and her child beside some other man. The mother is weeping uncontrollably and her son is asking her over and over again where their father is, and what is wrong with him. Tenma asks a nurse what the problem is and she tells him that the patient, whom Dr. Baker operated on, did not live. Tenma, already numb from the long operation he worked on can only look on with sadness.
Later, Tenma is sound asleep in his apartment but is awakened by a kiss from his fiancee Eva. She chides him for forgetting his promise to take her out. He claims that he did not forget it. On the news there is a brief clip about the Ribert family coming to Dusseldorf with their two young children. After this news clip is one that makes Eva exclaim and shake him awake again claiming that it is about him. The head of the hospital talks about how the operation on a Mr. Rosenbahha was successful and that he assured all of his fans that he would sing again. This is the patient that Tenma had operated on. He tells her that the news is not about him, but more about her father, the owner of the hospital and she agrees. But she says that it was his team that did the work and that reflects on the hospital, so any news about the hospital in some ways is news about him.
After another difficult operation, Tenma meets Dr. Baker in the hallway of the hospital. Dr. Baker talks to him about the political trickiness of his position, being chief surgeon that he has to choose his patients carefully. He is dumbfounded by Dr. Baker's cautioning remarks.
As Dr. Tenma consults with a nurse about a patient's condition he is accosted by the woman and her son who lost her husband earlier. He sends the nurse on saying he will be with her shortly. She demands her husband back. He is startled and tries to explain that he did not operate on her husband. She lashes out saying that he is the best doctor in the hospital, why was he operating on an opera singer instead of her husband? Why was the singer more important? He only now recalls that he was supposed to operate on the woman's husband, but as he was getting changed at the hospital he had been pulled aside and told that he was supposed to work on the opera singer instead.