Black Jack (ブラック・ジャック, Burakku Jakku) is a fictional character created by Osamu Tezuka, introduced in Weekly Shōnen Champion on November 19, 1973.
Despite his medical genius, Black Jack has chosen not to obtain a surgical license, choosing instead to operate from the shadows, free from rules and the corrupt bureaucratic establishment.
Although he usually treats those he meets in chance encounters who have heard of his legendary skills, he occasionally travels to hospitals around the world to covertly assist terminally ill patients.
In Volume 10 Chapter 2: "The Mask Chosen," he explains to Pinoko that in Japanese, kuro means black and the second o represents a jack in a deck of cards.
He is a shadowy figure, with a black cape, eerie black-and-white hair, and surgical scars snaking all over his body, the most prominent of which being across his face.
Black Jack cures patients indiscriminately, from common folk, to presidents, to yakuza leaders, and even to supernatural beings, from the very poor to the very rich.
Black Jack gives much of the money he earns to charity, paying for other doctors' surgeries as well as his own, and buying up land to protect nature from commercial development.
When his patient is wealthy, he usually increases his fee substantially, and often will attach non-quantifiable conditions to his services, such as an agreement to leave erstwhile victims alone, or to protect the environment.
The manga explains that he lost his medical license when he went against his superiors orders and performed a surgery on his lover who had late stage ovarian cancer.
For his insubordination and out of pure jealousy toward Black Jack for outshining them and potentially taking away their positions in the future, his superiors took away his medical license.
[3] Later, when Black Jack is featured in a film, the World Medical Association objects to him being the star, and so his surgical skills are edited out of the final cut.
For long afterwards, when meeting a patient with similar pulmonary damage, Black Jack would involuntarily feel sympathetic agony, which developed into an acute phobia.
Although about to pass over the young Black Jack for his strange personality (she finds him sitting on a bench with his eyes closed, muttering and practicing surgery in thin air), she approaches him for help anyway out of desperation.
[11] Throughout the series, Pinoko (his adopted daughter) has expressed love towards Black Jack which even she herself admits is impossible due to her small body.
In Volume 1 chapter 9, there was a female surgeon named Konomi Kuwata (nicknamed Black Queen due to her ability to perform amputations without batting an eye) whom he became interested in because she seemed similar to him.
A teenage cancer patient named Michiru obsessed with marriage announces her desire to marry Black Jack, much to Pinoko's dismay.
The two get to know each other and it is revealed the father decided not to pay to cure his daughter's surgery and instead abandoned her but Black Jack still went to save her because she reminded him of himself.
Later, when Black Jack visits the grave of a fellow surgeon on a remote island to pay his respects, he meets his colleague's sister, Dr. Shimizu Ikuo.
However, she is killed saving a child from a rockslide; with her dying breath, she asks Black Jack to mimic his facial graft on her skin so that they can be together forever though he chooses not to as he believes she was too beautiful to carve a scar on and her body is buried with her brother's.
Originally her body development was severely hampered by being her sister's in utero twin, Black Jack was able to surgically extricated her alive.
Pinoko capably acts as housekeeper, cook and surgical assistant (especially in his home clinic and operating room), but more importantly provides moral support and human warmth to the otherwise emotionally distant doctor.
[16] Black Jack's single-floor cottage was designed and constructed by the somewhat vain carpenter Ushigoro in 1932, using the French colonial or Creole style.
It sits on a sheer cliff, with a rear porch topped by a châteauesque conical spire overlooking the sea, while a dirt road leads up the hill to the full-width veranda in the front.
[22][23] Black Jack's attitude and matter of dress are meant to remind readers of the archetypal pirate: rebellious and clever, a man who operates outside the restricting bureaucracy of modern life.
[22][23] His scar embodies the principle of the flawed hero: his half-black, half-white face foregoes any claim to "purity"—be it cultural or ideological—and betrays the complexity of the character.
Black Jack starred as a side character in episode 27, "The Time Machine," of the 1980 animated adaptation of Tezuka's Astro Boy.
In true Black Jack fashion, he tells the town to learn to accept that they have a female ruler, and refuses payment, instead taking a commemorative coin before returning to the future, which Astro values the mint condition artifact to today be worth several million dollars.
Black Jack is also ambiguously referenced in the manga Pluto, a remake of Astro Boy created by Naoki Urasawa with approval from Osamu Tezuka before his death.
The character of former police coroner and serial killer Shingo Zuhaku, whose design is based on Tezuka's Black Jack, appears in horror manga The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service by Eiji Ōtsuka and Housui Yamazaki.
Kamen Rider Den-O's Imagin Anime OVA parodized Black Jack by having Ryutaros cosplay as him in a doctor sketch.