Oh man I need tv when I got T Rex– a review of Naoki Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys

I wonder if we’ve somehow become desensitized to the end of the world.  As we go about our daily lives, we’re bombarded with so many smaller, little crises that I wonder if we’d even know a big one if it was happening right before our eyes.  We’ve seen so many television shows, movie and comic books about the destruction of the world that it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.  Quickly as kids we adapt to the idea of everything ending by relegating it to the realm of the imagination where superheroes can fight the bad guys and, in the end, everyone survives, the bad guys go to jail and the heroes ride off into the sunset.  We live in an imaginary world where anything is possible but where the good guys always win.  Maybe it’s a coping mechanism or maybe it’s just that life takes over but at some point, the end of the world becomes a little less important each day as we try to figure how are we going to pay our bills, raise our own kids or even do something as little and insignificant as give a toast at a wedding.  Life takes over and we forget that everything has to end sometime.  That’s what happened to Kenji, Keroyon, Mon-chan and the rest of group of friends in Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys.

This is one that I’ve been waiting on for a while, Naoki Urasawa’s story about childhood and how it effects and changes us when we’re supposedly adults.  After a friend dies, supposedly by suicide, a group of friends begin remembering details of their childhoods, trying to figure out how their young dreams in the late 1960s are being used to destroy the world just before the end of the 20th century.

In some ways, 20th Century Boys is a pure boy’s story.  That may seem like a redundant statement to make based off of the title of the series but Urasawa is 10 years older than me and grew up on the other side of the world from me but I know the guys who are in his book.  More than in Monster or Pluto, I know the people in 20th Century Boys because they’re the guys I grew up with.  I spent summers biking around town, going where I wasn’t supposed to go and even coming up with childish plans on how to save the world.  The 10 year Kenji and his friends are no different than my friends and myself at 10 years old.

In this book, Urasawa perfectly blends our boyish dreams and whimsies into a compelling mystery– who is the “Friend” and exactly what are his goals?  This “Friend,” a cult leader who inspired murder in his followers, knows details of Kenji’s childhood that Kenji and his friends barely do.  How could he know these things because he isn’t their friend, is he?  The Friend remains in shadows but can do amazing things in front of his followers, like levitate for their amazement.

This is just the beginning of Urasawa’s ambitious 20th Century Boys and it’s a blazing beginning, creating great and relatable normal characters who just happen to have to face the end of the world on their own.

Viz’s Naoki Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys page
Naoki Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys V1 on Amazon

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Tags: 20th Century Boys, Naoki Urasawa