20th Century Boys Review

For roughly fifteen volumes this is as gripping as serialised fiction gets. Urasawa cuts between a 1969 childhood, a 1997 present and a later ruined future, and every jump recontextualises something a reader thought was settled, so a detail as small as which boy was allowed into a grass hut becomes the hinge of a global catastrophe. The nostalgia is doing real work rather than decorating, because the point is that a group of adults cannot remember their own childhood accurately enough to identify the person destroying the world.

Kenji is a wonderfully unheroic lead, a convenience store manager with a niece and a guitar, and the supporting cast is the deepest Urasawa has drawn. Then the reveal arrives. The identity of Friend has to explain a mythology built for twenty volumes, and no name could, so the book produces one anyway, follows it with a second reveal to patch the first, and closes on a coda so unsatisfying that a two volume sequel exists to soften it. The award record is the strongest of anything here. The failure is at the exact point that matters most.